Jennie George (Throsby, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Environment and Heritage) Share this | Hansard source

Yes. As my colleague says, including fees at ABC Learning Centres. The issue of family-friendly or lack of family-friendly workplaces was also aired during the course of the inquiry. This is an issue on which there was a divergence of opinion which led to different recommendations being proposed. The majority believed the farcical notion that flexibility in industrial relations and individual bargaining will produce better outcomes for women, that all we need is cultural change and that we should leave it to individuals to negotiate their own arrangements. The dissenting report, with which I concur, points out the need, based on historical practice, for appropriate legislation and regulation to ensure that family-friendly provisions are spread across the board and do not just remain the preserve of professional people and people who can argue for and negotiate their own employment conditions.

Historically, in Australia, the reason why we have provisions such as parental leave, carers leave and maternity leave is because we were able to spread these benefits through running test cases before the Australian Industrial Relations Commission. With the new Work Choices legislation, we will not have the opportunity to spread such provisions across the board and people will increasingly have to rely on what they can negotiate. Reliance on individual negotiation is starkly revealed as not producing outcomes for all, when you consider that only 27.6 per cent of women who work in the private sector today are entitled to any form of paid maternity leave. Our view has always been that, in a society as wealthy as ours, in a society which needs increased participation by women at work, and in a society where demography is destiny, if we really want to be serious about our very low rates of participation by women of child-bearing age and mothers in the workforce, we need to do more.

In that regard I would draw the government’s and the minister’s attention to some of the suggestions that I believe should be carried out. We should expand the safety net in the Work Choices legislation to incorporate family-friendly provisions; we should guarantee the payment of penalty rates, shift loadings and overtime; we should restore the right of national test cases to be handled by the Industrial Relations Commission; we should introduce legislation along the lines of the United Kingdom part-time workers regulations which ensure that part-time workers are not treated less favourably in their terms and conditions of employment; and we should investigate the reasons for the very high levels of casual employment among women and the options for their conversion to permanent part-time work. We should support a right to request legislation which would extend parental leave and regular part-time work based on the UK model which would help families to better balance employment and domestic roles.

A lot of issues are traversed in the report. I regret that we were not able to reach bipartisan recommendations but I would urge the government to appreciate that Australia’s female participation rate is only moderate by OECD standards and particularly low among mums and women over 55. It is time that the government took these issues and the concerns of the community more seriously in terms of their policy framework and the expenditure to deal with the real issues that are out there in the community.

See this speech in context