Jess Walsh (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you to Senator Brown for the opportunity to speak on what is a critical issue right now for hundreds of thousands of Australian workers and families, and, particularly, women. Australian women are asking themselves today: does this government really prioritise $150,000 bathroom renovations over the working women of Australia? Within the space of a week, this government has decided to hand out $25,000 grants to the very few people who can, right now, afford to spend $150,000 on their home renovations. They say that's to support tradie jobs, but we all know this scheme makes absolutely no sense whatsoever because it's subsidising jobs that were already there on projects already in the pipeline. Meanwhile the government is ripping JobKeeper away from 120,000 early childhood educators, three months early and three days after they said they wouldn't do it. These are hardworking women who've done everything that's been asked of them during this pandemic to support our community. So how is it that this government sees fit to kick them off JobKeeper while handing out money for $150,000 renovations? Now they've announced they're ending free early childhood education right at the time that so many women are struggling to get back into work to support themselves and their families in the toughest of economic times. That's on top of denying JobKeeper payments to so many women in the first place—women who work as casuals and in jobs that have been the hardest hit in this pandemic.

This is not a government that has the backs of Australian working women and this is not a government that understands the pressures that women face every day—and even more so in this COVID-19 crisis—including juggling lower-paid jobs than those of their male counterparts; casual jobs; jobs that have been shut down; juggling their caring responsibilities at home; exorbitant childcare fees; and trying to get back into work to support themselves and their families. But, as we enter Australia's first recession in almost 30 years, these are apparently the priorities of this Morrison government: giving out bathroom renovations with one hand and ripping away programs that support women with the other. For weeks now, MPs and senators on the government's back bench have been calling for an early snapback to cut off support, and now it looks like the government is giving in. This is a snapback to a complex and expensive early childhood education system that is prohibitively expensive for so many families who are now trying to get back to work. This is just so counterproductive at a time when we really need to support people to get back into jobs. This decision is going to hurt families, it's going to hurt businesses, it's going to hurt the economy and it is particularly going to hurt working women.

Household budgets are under incredible stress, and the last thing that households need is to go back to paying the same exorbitant fees which they were paying back in February which had soared by 7.2 per cent in one year alone. This is going to hammer families at a time when many parents are earning less, have seen a reduction in hours or have lost their jobs. This is happening at a time when many families are desperately trying to get back on their feet. It's happening at a time when many families are struggling to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads. A recent national survey conducted by The Parenthood found that almost half of all families had at least one parent that had lost income. For families trying to go back to work or increase their hours, this is really bad news because, for many of them, the cost of child care won't make sense versus how much they could earn at work right now.

The Parenthood survey also found that ending free child care would force 60 per cent of households to reduce their work hours and 34 per cent of parents would need to reduce work days or remove their children from early childhood education altogether. That figure almost doubles to 63 per cent for those families whose incomes have been hit by this pandemic. This is going to set families back and it is going to set our economic recovery back too.

We know that the decision to end free early childhood education and care will have a much larger impact on women and their ability to work when compared with men. In The Parenthood survey, out of those households that said they would have to reduce their work hours, 68 per cent, or over two-thirds, said that it would be the women in the household whose work would have to go. This will just compound the damage already done by this crisis and by this recession, which we know has hit women the hardest. We know that more women than men have lost their jobs during this pandemic. We know that more women have lost more hours when compared with men and that women dominate the workforces of the industries that have been hit hardest by the pandemic. Women are far more likely to be casual workers, millions of whom the government has excluded from JobKeeper. Women are far more likely too to take on the extra caring responsibilities at home, which is probably contributing to the fact that they're twice as likely to have stopped looking for work right now.

Of course, history tells us that many workers who find themselves out of work during a recession find themselves out of work for a long, long time. If we don't take action to support women's jobs and their capacity to work, we will potentially put at risk decades of progress when it comes to women's wages and workforce participation. So we need to see policy choices from this government that support women in the workplace right now, and it's clear that removing free early childhood education and care makes parents' return to the workforce more difficult and much more difficult for women in particular.

This is really a double blow for women's jobs. At the same time as making it harder for women to return to the workforce, the government are making the job security of 120,000 early childhood educators, of whom we know 97 per cent are women, even more uncertain. Not only have they risked the stability and viability of early childhood education services around Australia by removing free child care; they're also removing early childhood educators from the JobKeeper scheme months earlier than originally planned—what a slap in the place for those hardworking women.

Our early childhood educators have been absolute heroes during this pandemic. Throughout it, they have faced extreme uncertainty. Some have lost their jobs and others have been fearful about the survival of the sector. Many have been fearful for their own health as well as they've gone to work. Social distancing is just not an option in early learning centres when working with small children. But, through it all, hundreds of thousands of educators continued to go to work, caring for and educating our children. And they did it with absolute professionalism every day. We all need to be saying a massive thankyou to our educators, not making their work even more insecure during this recession. They are essential workers that are too often undervalued, and their professionalism allowed other essential workers to continue to do their jobs too. So why is it that the government is kicking these workers off JobKeeper first? It's concerning that this government thinks it's appropriate to remove JobKeeper from these workers at such a crucial time.

It's even more concerning that the government has said that more so-called adjustments could take place for other workers into the future. It was only last Friday that the Prime Minister guaranteed that workers would be able to rely on JobKeeper until September. Three days later and that promise, like so many others, was broken. This time it was broken for 120,000 early childhood educators. It's not just that these decisions are bad for working women; they are bad for the economy as a whole and they are bad for the recovery. Economists have been warning for weeks not to remove support packages like JobKeeper too early and free child care too early. Why? Because it risks jobs and it risks our recovery. The government needs to be doing all it can to create jobs and support parents and women to get back into work. Women have been hardest hit by this economic crisis, but there is no need for them to miss out on the government's economic support as the economy recovers. The end of free childcare education is the start of the snapback—a snapback that will be bad for workers, bad for families and bad for women.