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

Today, in what may be my last speech in this term of parliament, depending on when the Prime Minister decides to call the election, I want to talk about a vision for rebuilding our economy and coming out of the COVID pandemic. This is a vision that takes into account everyone in our society but particularly works to redress the undervaluation and underappreciation of the care economy and the people that work in it. Not all of those people are women, but they predominantly are women.

I want to note that I've benefited greatly from reading the Per Capita discussion paper put out, I think, last year. The author, Emma Dawson, says, and I concur with this 100 per cent:

As we rebuild our economy in the wake of COVID-19, we have the opportunity to fix broken systems, and to rethink what we value as a society, and what kind of country we want to be.

The Per Capita paper, written last year, argued for a care led recovery which focuses on the things that really matter to Australians: the health and wellbeing of their families and communities, the time they have to spend with one another, the security of their work and the recognition of the value we find in caring for one another. If those things aren't at the heart of the vision for what the country looks like as we come out of COVID and in the years and decades in the future, then we're doing a disservice to the men and women in our community.

We know that women, during COVID, were the most likely to lose paid work and were the most likely to bear more of the unpaid but essential work at home as we went through essential but very difficult public health restrictions and lockdowns. And we know from recent ABS data that women are more likely to be underemployed—wanting more work but not able to get it—than men are. Recently, I spoke with a constituent, Amy, who lives in Seaford and is a self-employed architect. Amy has two young children. She and her fiance work from home, and did so before the pandemic, but, because of the industries they work in, they were not classified as permitted workers during lockdown. It meant that they couldn't access child care for a large portion of the last two years. Someone had to look after the young children who could no longer go to child care, and, like in so many families in my community and across the country, that role fell to Amy. Amy is not unhappy about that, she's not complaining about it, but the reality for Amy, and for many women, is that to care for her children she had to give up work. This—I will quote Amy—'was heartbreaking for me. It has been devastating to watch my business slowly die.' She said:

… due to my situation with no access to childcare I had to turn … business away as I could not guarantee when I would be able to work again.

Amy made to me the observation that so many others have: sadly, it seems that the Morrison government hasn't heard, or doesn't understand, that the necessary health response to COVID, the lockdowns and restrictions, disproportionately impacted women, particularly women with children, and that still hasn't been properly addressed. It particularly impacted women who were sole traders, missed out on both state and federal support for their businesses and had to stop working. I couldn't put it any more clearly than Amy did when she said to me:

I'm concerned about the flow on effects of lost wages, lost super and lost opportunities for women with children as a result—

of COVID.

In her recent address to the Press Club, the indomitable Sam Mostyn, wearing, I think, her CEW hat—she has so many hats—put it like this:

We are now living with what Professor Elizabeth Hill … describes as a great weariness and whiplash for women across this country: the weariness and emotional havoc of paid and unpaid work during lockdown; the whiplash of disproportionate jobs and hours lost during COVID, where 55 per cent of the jobs lost during April 2020 were women's and, this year, 60 per cent of the job losses across Australia between June and September were jobs lost by women.

We know that feminised industries are paid less than male dominated industries. We know that there is a gender pay gap, we know that that has been exacerbated by what we've gone through, and we deserve a government that will deal with it. That will be an Albanese Labor government, which I will be proud to work in.