Senate debates

Thursday, 9 March 2023

Committees

Work and Care Select Committee; Report

4:11 pm

Photo of Linda WhiteLinda White (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the tabling of the final report of the Senate Select Committee on Work and Care. I join with my fellow senators in thanking the secretariat for the fantastic work that they performed in supporting us and marshalling a range of witnesses before us. I thank, too, Senator Barbara Pocock, who before coming here was in fact an expert in this area in her own right. It was a privilege to serve with her on this inquiry. The deputy chair, Senator O'Neill, added her experience to the mix, and I found that invaluable, as were the contributions of Senator Askew, Ari Stewart—Senator Stewart's new child—and also Senator Bragg.

I'm no stranger to the complexity of the problems which face people, mainly women, who have to struggle simultaneously with the responsibilities of work and care. My working life before I came to this place was characterised by fighting for the rights of working people to care alongside their right to work, like fighting for the provision of paid parental leave at Qantas, fighting for the first EBA to include paid family and domestic violence leave, or fighting for and winning extra super in agreements at many, many private-sector employers. But, even with my experience of progressing issues like this, the committee process for this report highlighted just how far behind the times Australia has fallen in providing a decent structure to assist our fellow Australians to balance their working hours with their caring responsibilities. Unfortunately, Australia is an international outlier that demands that working carers mould their lives around working conditions designed for workers and households of the last century.

Paid parental leave is a great example. While the previous government stalled, the world around us moved towards more comprehensive models of paid parental leave. Just this week, we saw the Labor government begin to turn this tide around by legislating for 26 weeks, a full six months, of paid parental leave by 2026. The changes have also increased flexibility arrangements and incentivised blokes to take on more caring responsibilities by strengthening the 'use it or lose it' provisions. This structure improves the way Australian families balance work and care by making it easier for both parents to participate in the workforce and share care. It means having a baby isn't as much of an economic and professional setback as it once was. I would note that the committee heard—and this is reflected in the final report—that 52 weeks of paid parental leave is generally considered international best practice. Given that, I echo the sentiment of the report, which recommends the Australian government consider how to fund and implement that best-practice standard. We deserve no less.

Another example is the adoption of part-time work as the default option for working carers. In other countries, full-time work for parents is much more common because of the support systems around them to make this possible. Where there is part-time work, it has been structured to allow for flexibility and security. In Australia, part-time work is looking more and more like casual work but without the loading—that is, it's insecure and underpaid. In Australia we need to remedy this by thinking carefully about what a casual worker is, what a part-time worker is and what the important differences are between the two. We need to make sure that these different modes of work are defined meaningfully and can't be used to undermine flexibility and pay. The evidence has also reminded me of just how much is lost for our domestic economy and for individuals when the structure is not fit for purpose. As it stands, our system does not adequately recognise that work and care are two sides of the economy and labour in Australia. Both are productive and both take effort.

We heard that women who have caring responsibilities for kids, the elderly or others don't want to be working part time. They want full-time work and full-time hours, but the inflexible nature of the way we approach things like rostering, leave entitlements and child care mean that for many woman full-time work can't be juggled with everything else. That is a shame for Australia because we actually lose a whole pool of workers who want to contribute more and who want to work more. It's also a shame for Australia because this same pool of workers is more likely to be the sort of professional carers we desperately need right now. They are the nurses, the disability support workers, the childcare workers and the aged-care workers that are in shortage.

It's also a shame for women. Without the proper policy ecosystem to support women to work the increased amount they wish to, we are never going to cut the gender pay gap and we are never going to cut the superannuation gap. While the implicit assumption of our industrial relations and employment policies is that women are expected to sacrifice their professional work to fulfil their caring responsibilities, women in already poorly paid industries will not be able to get ahead. It's also a shame for men, who don't get the opportunity to care for their children and parents. We are failing pretty much everyone.

Women and their families should be supported by governments, and the Labor government is starting to turn around a decade of that not being the case. Cheaper child care absolutely pays for itself. Rostering practices need to improve to generally consider employee views about the impact of proposed roster changes and to provide genuine flexibility for caring responsibilities. We heard all too often that a veneer of flexibility exists in rostering but that the reality of chopping and changing rosters with too little notice leaves women and those with caring responsibilities on the outer. We need to look closer at defining the meaning of casual employees in a way that truly reflects the nature of casual work and is restricted to work that is generally intermittent, seasonal or unpredictable. Similarly, we need to ensure that part-time employment isn't just a form of casual employment without the loading. This is important because, as the committee heard many times, limiting insecure forms of employment and creating a more predictable employee-employer relationship will, by extension, provides greater flexibility and scope for accommodating care responsibilities.

One thing that is clear from the final report and from the evidence the committee heard is that there is no quick fix to the challenges Australia faces in rebalancing our system of work and care policies. At the moment, it's clear that our system doesn't provide the correct level of flexibility and support required to get the most out of the workforce and doesn't accurately reflect the caring responsibilities of a modern Australia. As important as it was in 1920, we can no longer rely on the Harvester judgment to organise our ideas of the workforce and the family, because that decision no longer reflects the families, economy or labour market of 21st century Australia. We have to look to what other countries are doing on many fronts: child care, parental leave, working hours, aged care and much more. Other countries have lowered the gender pay gap and have a better balance of work and care than we do. But there is no one silver bullet to improve the key indicators on which we want to be measured. We cannot continue to be an outlier in the world.

I look forward to working as part of a government that is committed to tackling these challenges and that thinks critically and exchanges with complex issues rather than shirking their responsibilities, as has been the story in the last decade. This report is important. It contributes vital, contemporary knowledge to the debate about the state of work and care in Australia. It also provides great insight into the lived experience of workers who are also carers. These experiences are often neglected and fall by the wayside. I am pleased that the Senate has taken the time to listen, and I look forward to the discussion the report encourages us to have. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.

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