Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Education, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations and Minister for Social Inclusion. Will the Deputy Prime Minister inform the House why a fair workplace relations system is important for women?

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Calwell for her question and I know that she is dedicated to fairness and decency at work. I know that she, like members of the government generally, would frequently discuss with their constituents the challenges of balancing work and family life—the challenges of families making choices. In order to be able to make those choices, women in particular rely on a fair and decent workplace relations system.

We know when we look at working women that one in five is reliant on awards. That is, they are reliant for their terms and conditions at work on a safety net—a safety net that cannot be stripped away, a safety net that gives them rights in their workplace. We know that almost half of Australian women with children under five are in paid work. We know, too, that 86 per cent of single-parent families are headed by women and that, at the appropriate stage of life, many of these women seek to balance work and family life as they take care of their children.

Understanding this about our modern economy and our modern society, the Howard government—the Liberal Party, aided by the National Party—introduced Work Choices so that it could strip away basic protections. We know from the statistics that, under Work Choices, it was women who bore the brunt of these harsh and unjust laws. We know that it was women who bore the brunt of what happened under Work Choices. If we look at what happened under Australian workplace agreements—statutory individual employment agreements—ABS data tells us that working women on AWAs earned less than working women on collective agreements. The take-home pay of women working full-time on AWAs was, on average, $87.40 per week less than their female colleagues working on collective agreements. That is a staggering figure. We know that women working on AWAs in casual jobs earned $94 per week less than women on collective agreements. Once again this is a staggering figure about what Work Choices did to working women.

It is because Labor understood the deep unfairness of Work Choices to working Australians, and to working women in particular, that we killed Work Choices and replaced it with a fair and decent system at work. But, on the weekend, the opposition leader let the cat out of the bag. When challenged about whether or not he would reintroduce this kind of unfairness in our workplace, he refused to rule it out. Of course, he refused to rule it out because the Liberal Party is now and always will be the party of Work Choices. We have seen some remarkable conduct on display in question time today. We know that the Liberal Party does not like women asking questions, we know that they do not want to listen to the Minister for the Status of Women when she is answering questions, and we know that they are in the embrace of deep unfairness about women at work. We also know that, if they ever had the opportunity, they would bring Work Choices back—with all of the consequences that it would have for Australian working women.