Michael Ronaldson (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, and for the country. Why is it totally beyond you to acknowledge good news? Why does Senator Webber come into this place today and completely abuse the statistics regarding women? Just for the record, I will go through the situation in relation to women’s wages, and hopefully Senator Webber, in the time that she is still in the chamber, will take good note of this. Since the government came to office, the hourly gender earnings ratio has averaged 88.9 per cent compared with an average of 86.8 per cent under the previous Labor government. Indeed, the World Economic Forum’s latest Global gender gap report 2006 described Australia as:

... leaders in closing the gender gap.

In addition, data from the OECD publication Women and men in OECD countries show that Australia’s gender wage gap is significantly below the OECD average and other similar countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States.

What is this bad news that Senator Webber is talking about today? What is this bad news in relation to women’s employment? I will tell you what the bad news is: female employment is up by 113,500 people in the last 12 months. That is the reality of the situation.

The other matter I want to raise is in relation to job security—and I have heard Senator Carr and Senator Ludwig talk about this, and I have heard other people from the Labor Party talking about it. Job security is the mantra that underpins their attack on Work Choices. I invite the Labor Party to read the ‘Features’ section in the Australian today and look at what is written about job security. Before I go to that, I want to talk about the Bracks Labor government, who are proudly talking about spending hundreds of thousands of Victorian taxpayers’ dollars on industrial relations. This is the same state government that have seen cost blow-outs in relation to the so-called fast rail project and the Southern Cross Station—you name it. These matters have involved a gross abuse of their position as a state government and they intend abusing it further in relation to these advertisements. Just quickly, I want to quote this Australian article for senators. It states:

There is no hard and fast measure of job security. The official labour force survey offers the best clue and here the message favours the Howard Government.

At the end of 2005, in the final days of the old workplace regime, 96.5 per cent of employees could expect to be working the following month, the Australian Bureau of Statistics found. The proportion of employees who became unemployed was 0.9 per cent, while the remaining 2.6 per cent dropped out of the labour force. By any reckoning, this was a pro-worker labour market.

A year later, the hourly number that shifted was a fraction fewer employees became unemployed—

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