Sharryn Jackson (Hasluck, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I rise to speak on the Making it fair report, in addition to the five minutes that I spoke as the chair of the Standing Committee for Employment and Workplace Relations. The five minutes that the chair gets to speak is never sufficient, particularly after a report of this nature. I am pleased to follow the remarks of the member for Pearce and I thank her for speaking about this issue with such passion.

As I said last night, it was to my horror that I discovered that 15-year-old girls starting in the workforce could be paid differently because of their gender. This was a shock to me and sparked both my political interest and my commitment to social justice. With growing anger over the last 17 months of this inquiry, I realised how little we have achieved in the last 32 years, so I am very pleased to be associated with this report. It was a mammoth undertaking. From the beginning, the committee wanted to ensure that it was a detailed look at the issue, not just another commentary about the situation existing in a particular state or industry, and to make some real and positive recommendations about changes for the future. At the time of the initiation of the inquiry we were also facing a substantial skill shortage in Australia, a skill shortage that is looming again, particularly in my home state of Western Australia. It seems at times like this most employers, industry and business understand the need to encourage the greater participation of women in the workforce.

The committee received more than 150 submissions. We held 29 public hearings and, as I said, the report is the result of an inquiry that took some 17 months. There are 63 recommendations in total. While some of them are not unanimous recommendations, a substantial number of them are. They are extremely wide-ranging recommendations and I urge people to read and digest the report and understand the nature of the recommendations we are making. I have to say that for committee members involved in the inquiry who regularly participated—notably, by gender, only two women and eight men—it was a long and worthwhile journey. Some of us may even have started with fixed views that equal pay, at least as between men and women involved in the same occupation, had already been fixed and that we were somehow looking at some other difficulty. I think those views were substantially changed as a result of the overwhelming evidence presented before the committee. I have to say that I was shocked myself at the prevalence of the lack of gender pay equity across industry and across Australia. I think many readers of the report will find that the statistics it contains that set out the scene that exists in Australia are quite shocking.

I want to make a couple of comments about the nature of the report and the minority report. I note the presence of the member for Grey here in the Main Committee and I should indicate, before I make those comments, my very grateful support and respect for both the deputy chair of the committee, the member for Kalgoorlie, and the member for Grey, who joined the committee after it had been initiated and had an awfully large catch-up to do on the bulk of evidence that had been presented. It has been a pleasure to work with the two of you through the course of the hearing, along with my Labor colleagues.

I know that, although not all the recommendations were agreed to unanimously, there is nevertheless a will to see the issue of pay inequity addressed by both sides of the House. I also hope that we can make some substantive changes together, particularly in the next 12 months of this parliament. Where we differ a little bit is on the issue of waiting. Maybe it is a naturally conservative view that when you have a relatively new piece of legislation, as we do in the Fair Work Act 2009, the desire is to wait and see how it operates for a little while. But, as I said in my foreword to the report and in my comments last night, I think Australian women have been waiting long enough for this issue to be addressed.

A lot of people do not want to be too interfering in individual workplaces by issuing greater regulation or obligations on them about this issue. But, frankly, if we do not take some positive steps for change, I think we will be back here in 10, 20 or 30 years time bemoaning the fact that we have not seriously addressed the pay equity gap. And I have to say to you with great goodwill that the direction of governments in recent years—and when I say ‘recent years’ I am taking the last two decades—has been this idea that we will promote community awareness about the issue, we will raise community and business understanding of the concerns, we will promote, by way of reward and prizes, best practice in individual workplaces and, when people see the wisdom and greater productivity that comes from ensuring pay equity, somehow, miraculously, this will flow across the country. Well, the evidence is in, and the sad reality of this report’s findings is that the evidence is unequivocal: over the last two decades the pay gap between men’s and women’s earnings has gone backwards. So the current system does not work. If we are to change this and address this decline then we need to act and to act now.

I particularly endorse the comments by the member for Pearce regarding the impact that low pay is having on women, particularly as they age, with many living in poverty in their retirement. Already it is women who are more likely to be on pensions because of their lack of access to superannuation.

I did not want to be critical but I find myself today needing to be so. I think most members of the committee endorsed the Australian government’s decision to participate in a pay equity test case in the community services sector—and that will soon be underway through Fair Work Australia. I indeed applauded that decision and thought it was long overdue. However, tragically, the decision by at least the shadow minister for workplace relations to not support the legislation which would see the proper implementation of a national system of industrial relations has thrown some of the important questions associated with that pay equity test case into great confusion. I say that because many the employers involved in that test case are not-for-profit organisations and charitable organisations who to this day are unclear about whether they are captured by the terms of the Fair Work Act 2009, in the same way they were uncertain about whether they were captured under the terms of the legislation that this act replaced, which we know as Work Choices.

I would urge members of the opposition to reconsider their position, not only because the legislation is sensible and businesses and others have been calling for a national system of industrial relations but also because the lack of such a system will throw this test case into complete confusion. We need to address this issue and address it as a matter of some urgency. Frankly, the test case is one of the issues referred to in the minority report as a reason to hold off on the legislation, in that members of the opposition hope that through this test case under Fair Work Australia there would be clear progress on the implementation of pay equity. But I would urge them to consider their position on this matter to ensure that we do not waste the time or the money of these organisations in trying to determine whether or not they are training corporations, whether or not they are caught by the terms of the act, and just put in place a national system under which people can clearly operate.

There is another industry that I want to touch on, and the nature of this industry reflects my view and, I think, echoes the comments by the member for Pearce that what is at the heart of this issue is the lack of proper value attributed to women’s traditional work, whether that is paid or unpaid. I am talking about things like cleaning, catering and caring occupations. There was an overwhelming amount of evidence presented by organisations, employers and employees, as well as peak bodies and unions, involved in the aged-care sector throughout Australia, a sector that we know is largely dependent on the Commonwealth for its funding. And its concerns were echoed by sectors like disability services, which are largely dependent on state funding for much of their wages.

While I am convinced that if the government acts to implement the recommendations of this report we will have ensured that there is a mechanism in place which will assist and provide an avenue that is less adversarial, a means by which we can properly do research, and collect and analyse the data and put forward practical solutions to these issues of gender pay inequity, it is my great concern that the aged-care sector be one of the industries where this issue is addressed as a matter of urgency. Certainly, in my foreword to the report, I have called on the relevant ministers, including the minister for finance—the person with the chequebook—to be involved in those discussions. I do hope it is something to which we can have a joint approach and not a party political one.

The other issue is the importance of the breadth of the recommendations. I do not think that you can just act on one section and one section alone and hope that that will cause the kind of change that I envisage happening across Australia; we need to implement the vast bulk of those recommendations. We need a combination of amendments to the Fair Work Act 2009 and to the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 in order to increase the powers of the Sex Discrimination Commissioner. We need to establish as a matter of urgency a specialised pay equity unit with a very broad mandate for change under the guidance of a deputy president. We also need an advisory committee of industry and employers to be behind that industry pursuit and examination of practical solutions and proactive approaches to addressing pay inequity.

There is much work to be done, and I hope that we will have a government response early in the new year which sees much of this report, if not all of it, implemented as a matter of urgency. If these recommendations are implemented, we will begin to actually address the issue of pay inequity. Perhaps some of that anger that I still hold and the spark that burns still bright might finally get some relief in the long term.

Along with the member for Kalgoorlie, I placed on record last night my thanks to the committee secretariat. I have found this inquiry process and working with the committee secretariat one of the most satisfying things that I have been involved in since I became a member of parliament. I have nothing but respect and admiration for the professionalism of the secretariat and the staff and the work they do, and I know that is a view shared by all members of the committee.

In closing, I thank the state and territory governments around Australia as well as all those people who participated in the inquiry. Their invaluable contributions and their willingness to provide additional information and put up with the foibles of a committee of people of divergent views and backgrounds made it a pleasure to be involved. I thank them for their support and I thank also the people involved in the parliament who provided our web casting and who visited and travelled with us. I thank the Hansard staff and all involved in what I think has been, as I said earlier, a long and worthwhile journey. I hope the government implements these recommendations, I hope we begin to address the issues of pay inequity and I commend the report to the House.

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