Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Member for Lindsay! It's something I'm very proud of. My electorate of Dunkley, as many people have heard me say before, is named after a woman called Louisa Dunkley, so I'm even prouder to be the first woman to represent an electorate named after a woman—a woman who was a worker, who was a feminist and who was a unionist, and who, at the turn of the last century, campaigned for equal pay for men and women in the Victorian post and telegraph office and then took that campaign national when Australia became a country after Federation, and campaigned for women and men in the brand new Commonwealth post and telegraph office to receive the same pay for the same work. It seems almost obvious to most of us in 2023 that two people sitting next to each other doing the same work with the same qualifications at the same standard should be paid the same. But that wasn't the case for much of Australia's history, and it certainly wasn't the case when Louisa Dunkley worked in the post and telegraph office. She was almost single-handedly responsible for the fact that the Commonwealth Public Service Act 1902 had a provision in it for equal pay for men and women in the Commonwealth post and telegraph service.

But Louisa didn't see equal pay as just about women; she saw it as about something more. In one of the few pieces of her writing, which was renowned as brilliant and insightful and which changed many people's minds on the subject of work and women and equality—one of the few remaining pieces of her writing that made it through a fire at the union headquarters in the early 1900s—she said: 'Though at first we only ask for equal pay as an act of justice to those women who had been doing the same work as men, we now advocate it as the only solution as to how to keep up the value of work and provide fair opportunities for employment of both men and women in the future.' Closing the gender pay gap is about fairly remunerating women and valuing the work of women, and providing women fair opportunities in the workplace, but it is also about valuing the work because the work itself isn't gendered and the gender of the person doing the work shouldn't dictate the value of it and how much people are paid for doing it.

Like many of the women in this parliament who talk about the gender pay gap—perhaps some men, too, when they talk about the gender pay gap—I often get emails from constituents saying: 'What gender pay gap? That doesn't exist. It's unlawful to pay men and women differently in Australia.' They're right about one thing: it is unlawful to pay men and women differently in Australia based on their gender now. But they are very wrong when they say there is no gender pay gap.

It's currently a gap of about 13.3 per cent, as reported by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency in February of this year. It was stuck at about 20 per cent for quite some time, and there has been a reduction. That is in part because of a long period of stagnation of wages and suppression of men's wages, particularly in higher paid industries such as mining, which closed the gender pay gap without actually increasing pay for women, and it is in part because of some of the reforms brought in by successive governments over the last two decades or so. So it is now down to 13.3 per cent.

What that means in practice is that for every dollar a man earns a woman earns 87c. It's based on a calculation of average weekly ordinary earnings. Women's average weekly ordinary earnings, across all industries and occupations, is $1,653, and men's average ordinary full-time earnings across all industries is $1,907—a gap of $253.50 a week. That's the gender pay gap. That's women being valued less in the workplace, women getting fewer promotions, than men. What that calculation—average weekly ordinary full-time earnings—doesn't take into account is bonuses, overtime payments and superannuation. The Workplace Gender Equality Agency estimates that the gender pay gap is about five per cent worse if you take those things into account.

What the gender pay gap also doesn't take into account is what happens when you look at part-time and casual workers, who often work in the lowest paid industries and who are often women. The other thing we know is that feminised industries are the lowest paid industries in this country and are almost exclusively, but not exclusively, care industries, where people are engaged in work—like caring for children, the elderly, the sick who can't work and people with disabilities—that traditionally was done at home, was done by women and was underpaid and undervalued. Now that that work is done in a professional sense, it remains predominantly carried out by women, and it remains underpaid and undervalued.

This legislation is just one of the measures that are intended to encourage businesses to be conscious of the way they are paying their staff, the way they are deciding who gets a promotion and who doesn't, and the way bonuses and overtime are paid. Not all decisions which favour men over women are made consciously. Unconscious bias is something that we are all subjected to. It is human nature that people favour those who remind them of themselves, often subconsciously. In many workplaces, traditionally, and it remains the case today, when the upper executive are men, often men from one socioeconomic group—often white men, in this country—they choose to promote and to have join them in their ranks other men. They choose to employ men who remind them of themselves at a young age. They are not necessarily doing it in a conscious, sexist manner. Sometimes, probably, they are, and we've all lived through examples of that, but it's often because of this unconscious bias.

If you never take account of the pay gap between men and women in your organisation, if you never do an audit of men and women at senior ranks and extend that to talk about men and women from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, or people with disability, then you often don't know that actually your workplace reflects only one group of people. Legislation like this, which asks businesses to consciously audit their pay across genders and report it, is a way to overcome both the conscious and unconscious bias, the systemic discrimination which still exists in this country—a country where a man in his early 20s has more chance of being a CEO of an ASX listed company than a woman in her 50s. What it does is help to send a signal from that business and to that business that equality is important and that women's work is as valuable as men's and women are as valuable as men. I'd like to think, in the vein of Louisa Dunkley, that it also sends a signal about the value of work. It's about valuing the people that do the work and it's about valuing the work.

I want to finish by giving what I think is a very concrete example of the impact of the gender pay gap, feminised industries being lower paid and some of the structural barriers preventing women from being able to have children and continue to work, which we haven't yet quite worked out how to overcome with flexibility. Last week I was part of a forum held by Pink Hope, which is an organisation that provides support and assistance to women who have a high chance of having breast cancer and promotes assistance for women with rarer types of breast cancer. This forum was about women who have triple-negative breast cancer, which means that the type of cancer they have is not receptive to any type of hormone—it doesn't feed off a hormone—which makes it much harder to treat than hormone receptor-positive breast cancers.

It's a particularly diabolical type of breast cancer, triple-negative breast cancer. Not only is it harder to treat; it occurs most frequently in women under the age of 40. The mortality rate for women with triple-negative breast cancer is astronomically higher than for women with hormone receptor-positive breast cancers, and it's much more likely to be metastatic when it is found. The forum talked about treatment, because, with treatment for triple-negative breast cancer, we're at the stage where it needs to be very targeted. As I understand it—in my layperson's scientific understanding—the best targeted treatment at the moment hasn't been through our system in Australia and approved by PBAC, so it costs tens of thousands of dollars to be able to access it. It is being prescribed to women, particularly young women, with triple-negative breast cancers, and with some success, but they can only get it if they can afford to pay $20,000.

What this forum really took the lid off was the fact that the inequality of financial resources was also impacting these women. It's bad enough that, in a country like Australia, if you're from a certain suburb or wealthy then you can afford $20,000 for treatment, but, if you come from a more working-class area and don't have access to funds, then you can't afford it, and so one person's life will be longer and somewhat better than another person's. Add to that being a woman around 40 or under the age of 40. It's a peak time, when they're probably just taking time out of the workforce to have children and when they haven't had the promotions that get them the money that men often get. Often they work in feminised industries, which are lower paid and have less superannuation to draw on. Then this medical issue becomes a gendered issue because women can't afford to pay for the medicine. It's a terrible situation, but it's an example that shows why it is so crucial that we close the gender pay gap, lift the pay for women in feminised industries and lift the ability of women to work and have families, as well as making sure that people can access the care that they need through our health system.

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