Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Housing) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, I was actually going to agree with the member for O’Connor in one respect, which is that that does suit many families. There are many families where they want to have one person working part time. But there are a lot of families where women want to work full time too. It is a little difficult to be the Governor-General or the CEO of Westpac or the CEO of Heytesbury Holdings and work part time. In fact, there are women all over Australia who are supporting themselves and supporting their kids, struggling along with full-time work—and they are proud to do it.

The fact is that the modern world has both men and women working and it has both men and women wanting to share the responsibility and the joy of raising kids and looking after a family. Our modern workplace laws have to reflect that. They have to reflect the modern reality that women work part time and full time. Dads tell me all the time that they want to spend more time with their kids. The fact that some women want to work part time so dad can be home with the kids on the weekend certainly is not a reason to exploit them. It is certainly not a reason to pay them less or take away their pay and conditions. It reflects a very old fashioned view that women are not supporting a family when they work; they are working for pin money.

Last week we saw the gratuitous insults about women in our defence forces. We heard opposition members say that women on the front line would threaten rational thought and the success of the mission and that the psychological standards of the forces would be compromised by the admission of women. Well, news flash: women are already soldiers, sailors, pilots and medics. They are already on the front line.

We see an emerging trend here—an emerging trend of an opposition stuck in the past and out of touch with the reality of modern Australian lives. And nowhere is this more evident than on the website of the Liberal Party of Australia. I had a look at the website of the Liberal Party of Australia and it has a section about the Liberal Party. In the section about the Liberal Party it has a subheading ‘Women and the Liberal Party’. It is good. It is very interesting and very informative. I looked at the picture in the ‘Women and the Liberal Party’ section and found that it has one, two—

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