Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

At the outset I would like to thank the member for Hasluck, my chairwoman on the Standing Committee for Employment and Workplace Relations, for her generous comments. It is my melancholy duty to tell you, Madam Deputy Chair, that the member for Hasluck is somewhat unreconstructed in this area. She had an unnerving habit of referring throughout the discussions to the Commissioner for Equal Opportunity as ‘her’. I pointed out to her that I thought that, if we were to have a commissioner for equal opportunity, the position should certainly be open to males as well. So I counsel her to try to reform her ways in this field in order that the debate may be moved forward.

With that small aside out of the way, I too would like to thank the secretariat for its sterling effort. The report is a substantial piece of work. There is much consideration in there and the secretariat has done a wonderful job of compiling it all. In fact, I wondered through the inquiry how on earth we would ever come to any recommendations at all.

As the member for Hasluck pointed out, I only joined the committee halfway through, so it did require a bit of catch-up on my behalf. I do not think that many people realise the depth of gender inequity in the workplace. We took a lot of evidence that undoubtedly shows that women’s lifetime earnings are significantly lower than men’s. We worked very hard to explore why this might be, and it comes down to many issues including length of employment, periods of absence from the workforce, superannuation issues and promotion issues.

Overwhelmingly, what was pointed out to us through the duration of the inquiry was that the jobs where women are employed in high numbers, in certain streams of the workforce, were typically the caring and low-paid roles in our workforce. It is an issue for society generally to make that decision about how highly they really value these roles. Does our society really value those who care for our children, our aged and those who are disabled? At this stage, I think all you can say is: we do not. And that is a real challenge for all of us—to make sure that we send the messages out there that will put some balance back into this situation. I broadly support this report. There are, I think, off the top of my head, 68 recommendations—

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