Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Women's economic development is core business to the Albanese government—and why wouldn't it be? For the first time in Commonwealth history we have record representation of women in the government, at 52 per cent. We are highly invested in the needs of women throughout this country. I started with women's economic development because central to progress for women is them actually reclaiming the economic narrative in this country, which for too long has been dominated by male voices and men—in boardrooms, in chairs, all over this country. Women, we know, hold up half the sky. The problem is that sky is getting heavier and heavier to hold up. We know that the Global gender gap report 2022 ranked Australia 43rd out of 146 countries. To put that into context, New Zealand was number four. And it would only take 130 years to close that gender pay gap—130 years; it's a few lifetimes.

But it's not all bad news because, in Australia, WGEA put out their report, and it shows that it would only take 26 years to close the gender pay gap in Australia—26 years. The problem is that, with so many of the women on our side in government, we're pretty impatient, and we're not going to wait 26 years. We want to speed this whole process along, and this is why we are internally promoting structural reforms on multiple fronts: paid parental leave; child care; IR reform, to make workplaces safer and more fair for women; and promoting flexible workplaces.

But that's not all. We need to shine a light on this dark, dirty secret in Australian workplaces that, when a man and a woman go for the same job, the chances are that the man is going to get paid a little bit more than the woman. The problem with this scenario is that the 14 per cent gender pay gap that we currently have in Australia has translated to about $263 per week on average. The problem with an average is that there's always more and there's always less. This has an outsized impact on a woman's life. If you start off with lower pay, it translates to fewer assets, less super and, finally, more vulnerability later in life. It's not a secret that women over the age of 55 are now the fastest-growing group of people ending up marooned and homeless, and that's simply because they do not have that financial buffer that men do, especially when they encounter the headwinds—or the storms, actually—of life: job loss, bereavement, relationship breakdown. These are the reasons why we are so invested in addressing this vexed problem on multiple fronts. And we don't pretend that it's going to close in the next few years, but we're certainly not prepared to wait 26 years. That's outrageous. As far as this legislation goes, what we are planning on doing is—

Debate interrupted.

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