Senate debates

Thursday, 8 October 2020

Questions without Notice: Take Note of Answers

Women's Economic Security, Budget

3:04 pm

Photo of Jenny McAllisterJenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Families and Social Services (Senator Ruston) to questions without notice asked today by Senators McCarthy, Keneally and O'Neill relating to the budget.

The Prime Minister has described those expressing concern that women have been left behind by his government's budget as 'voices of disruption and division'. More disturbingly, some young man—I assume it was a young man—in the Prime Minister's office took time out of his busy day to ring up a female journalist and take her to task for her coverage of his government's budget, saying that 'no-one credible' was making criticisms of the government's budget on the grounds of its inadequacies in terms of women. When the Minister representing the Minister for Women was asked about these comments, her response was simply to say she's concerned about the level of understanding about how her budget works. How patronising! When Australian women raise their voices and raise objections about how this government performs and responds to their issues, the answer is, 'Oh, they clearly just don't understand.' Well, I'll tell you what: if I have to choose between the Morrison government and the credible women who are raising concerns about their budget, I know who I will choose. I will choose the credible women every single day.

For the people on the other side who don't understand the issues—because I think it's this government who doesn't understand; it's not Australian women—let me take you through it. We are facing the worst recession in almost 100 years. It's a recession triggered by a global pandemic, and it has disproportionately affected Australian women. Women have lost their jobs and they've lost their hours, and they've lost them at a faster rate than men. Since March, almost 200,000 women have lost their jobs, and 110,000 women have left the labour force altogether. At the peak of the coronavirus restrictions earlier this year, more than one million women had no work whatsoever, and outside the workforce a whole lot of new tasks accrued to women in the home: homeschooling and looking after unwell people—a massive increase in the burden of work at home.

But, during the pandemic, what did the government do to support women? Well, they set up JobKeeper in a way that excluded short-term casuals, and that overwhelmingly impacted women more than men; they withdrew JobKeeper from the childcare sector, unbelievably; and the women who were excluded from other measures of support were told that what they should do was draw down from their already meagre super balances, forcing women to choose between their financial security now and their financial security in retirement.

The government had an opportunity to redeem themselves in this budget. They had an opportunity to fix some of this stuff-up, because there is no doubt that Australian women have borne the brunt of the pandemic and the Morrison recession that's accompanied it. But, despite racking up more than $1 trillion worth of debt, the Prime Minister's office rehashed the women's economic statement and allocated $230 million in new funding, 0.024 per cent of the new spending measures in the budget. For absolute clarity, we are spending more in this budget on a waste-recycling program than we are on the Women's Economic Security Statement. We are planning to spend more on buying petrol than we are on the Women's Economic Security Statement. We're spending twice as much on putting in a new computer system in the Department of Human Services as we are on the Women's Economic Security Statement in this budget. So, when credible women say to you on the government benches, 'Your budget does not deliver for us,' a humble government—a listening government—would actually take that concern seriously. It would listen and respond. It would not try to demean and diminish the voices of people who raised their concerns about its performance, because that is essentially the kind of arrogance that will not be rewarded.

People who raise concerns about women's issues are not voices of disruption or of division. We are ordinary voices of Australian women who are tired of having our interests ignored by a government that only sees the world through male eyes and appears incapable of appreciating women's perspectives, uninterested in addressing them and hostile to hearing women's voices. I stand with the credible women.

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