Marielle Smith (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In my minute and a bit, it's great to be speaking on the Workplace Gender Equality Amendment (Closing the Gender Pay Gap) Bill 2023. I want to respond to something that Senator Waters just said about the collection of data by WGEA. My understanding is that WGEA does use total remuneration, including super, overtime, bonuses and other payments. I just wanted to make a statement about that.

It is absolutely a privilege to be standing here talking to a bill called closing the gender pay gap—it's about time! We have been talking in this chamber for many, many years about the inequity that exists in the earnings of working women as opposed to the earnings of working men. The reality is that, for all of us who believe in a more equal future for working Australians, that more equal future requires and necessitates equity between women and men in the workplace. We know that when women go into the workplace—as Senator Waters just said—as well as all the additional caring responsibilities that they carry the additional burden of, to be frank, in most households in Australia, they also then enter the workforce and, for the same job, are not remunerated equally to their male counterparts. That has to stop. There has been a lot of advocacy in this space over many years—indeed, many decades—to close the gender pay gap, but what we do know is that the work we have done to date hasn't been working fast enough and hasn't been working effectively enough. We need to change our approach. We need to get tougher with our approach.