Julie Collins (Franklin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Ageing and Seniors) Share this | Hansard source

If ever we needed another example of how the government is not listening to women when it comes to cuts in a post-COVID recovery, we got it today. When the Prime Minister was responding to a question about women giving birth on the side of a highway and said, 'Don't worry; we'll spend more on the road,' I think he missed the entire point. Unfortunately when this government are actually responding to the post-COVID recovery and the economic crisis that we have today, they keep missing the point. They missed the point when it came to the frontline workers who have been leading us through this crisis. They missed the point when it came to responding to the aged-care workers, the childcare workers, the retail workers and the nurses, who are all on the front line.

When it came to things like JobKeeper for the childcare sector, the government said that they're going to snap back, cut JobKeeper and pull the rug out from under all the early childhood educators. Ninety-seven per cent of that industry are female workers. What don't they get about that? What don't they understand about child care, the fact that families need it to be able to go back to work and the fact that people will no longer be able to afford some of the highest childcare fees in the world?

The government said that they were going to recognise the contribution of the aged-care workers during COVID-19—great idea; we supported it. But, of course, yet again, they implemented it badly. And what have we seen? Almost 40 per cent—125,000 aged-care workers—missing out on their retention bonus. Again, this is another industry dominated by women; 87 per cent of them happen to be women. You can see a bit of a pattern forming here when it comes to the government's response.

Then we see one of the centrepieces of the government's response—the early drawdown of super. What do we know about women and superannuation? We know that women already retire with half the superannuation balances of men, and we know that women, as part of some of the figures, have a lower withdrawal rate than men in terms of the amount. Why do you think that might be? I suspect it's because women are completely draining their superannuation balances. The other thing we know is that they told us Treasury did no modelling on the impact based on gender prior to this decision that this would be part of the recovery. They didn't want to know the impact on women in Australia when it came to retirement incomes. What we know is that this is not going to improve the retirement incomes of women in Australia.

And of course JobKeeper—who was JobKeeper supposed to support? It was supposed to support workers, and what have we seen from the government's own figures? The number of people who've lost their jobs in Australia has been disproportionately women. Indeed, the minister at the table gave us the number yesterday: 325,000 women have lost their jobs during this COVID economic crisis that has been caused by the government's decisions.

The thing about this, of course, is that the government could have made a choice to include more people in JobKeeper originally because most of the people who are missing out are of course women. Modelling estimates 200,000 of those 325,000 women who have lost their jobs could have been employed on JobKeeper, if it had included casuals. What a good idea that would have been! But instead, according to the payroll data yesterday, 9.5 per cent of women have lost their jobs, and women of course are losing more hours than men.

We've heard about a lot of people who are getting fewer, and indeed zero, hours when it comes to employment in Australia today, and of course we know they are women. Studies and the data have told us that women are doing more of the child care at home. Women were doing more of the homeschooling when schools weren't in session. Women are doing more housework during COVID.

And we see the government's response: HomeBuilder—again, a good idea. Let's invest in some infrastructure but, instead of spending it on social housing to help women fleeing family violence with their children, we see it's being spent on people's home renovations. Seriously, you have to have $150,000 to be able to get 25 grand to renovate your house. In my home state of Tasmania, I doubt we'll see even a couple of hundred of those, but we could have seen, proportionately, $13 million go into social housing in Tasmania. That would've made a difference to an enormous number of women and children fleeing family violence in Tasmania.

We have from this government a whole series of deliberate decisions that they have made that disproportionately impact on women as they prepare this country, as they make decisions, for how we're going to come out of this recession—the recession that the government admits that we are in because of the decisions that were made during COVID-19. The government can and should do better when it comes to responding.

Today we had a good announcement from the minister—$1.8 million for some scholarships to help some women. That's a good start, but where is the plan? Where is the actual holistic plan for responding to the disproportionate impact that women have felt during this recovery? There isn't one. You can get nearly $800 million for thousands of workers in a male-dominated industry, which is a good idea, as I said, but they could have spent it better. They could have done a better job with it and a better job with JobKeeper. They could've done a better job with their childcare package. They could've, and they should've, done a better job on all of it, and then the women of Australia wouldn't be in the position they're in today.

What we need from this government is for them to actually listen to the women of Australia. The gender pay gap has been around 15 per cent for more than two decades. But, of course, we had the Treasurer come in here just a few months ago and tell us prior to COVID that there was nothing to see here: the gender pay gap has closed in Australia. Well, it hasn't. I doubt after this that it'll be the same as it was prior to, given the government's deliberate decisions that will probably expand the gender pay gap.

The gender pay gap has only closed marginally in Australia very briefly due to legislation that this side of the House implemented when we were in government and of course the mining boom. They are the only two things that have impacted the gender pay gap for the last two decades. If this government was serious after seven years, they might have done something about it. If we want true equality in this country, if we want women to be equally represented in the workplace and in other spheres around Australia, the government needs to listen to what women are saying to them today. Quite frankly, when we got the Prime Minister's response to a very legitimate question about women giving birth on the side of the road to get an answer about more road funding, it seriously shows what a joke and a farce the government is when it comes to listening to women.

There are a lot of great women over on that side of the House but, please, the government needs to listen to what they are hearing and what they are saying when it comes to responding to this economic crisis. We cannot continue to have language like 'snapback'. I don't think the women of Australia want to snap back to a 14 per cent pay gap. I don't think the women of Australia want to snap back to the highest childcare fees in the world, almost. I don't think women want to snap back to some of the decisions that this government has been making around people like aged-care workers. That is not the answer. The government needs to come up with a comprehensive plan for addressing the disproportionate impact that this economic crisis has had on women, and it needs to do it quickly. It needs to listen and do it quickly.

Those on the other side of the House come in here talking about how they want gender equality. We had dorothy dixers to the minister yesterday talking about the 325,000 women who have lost their jobs, but where is their plan to fix it? How many jobs does JobMaker provide for women of Australia? I'd really like an answer to that. I want to know: how many jobs for women will JobMaker actually make? That's what we want to know. That's what the women of Australia want to know. The government should be able to do the work and have the plan so they can actually answer that question, because we all know that they have no answer to it today. They should have an answer, they could have an answer, but they don't. They need to. They need to be able to say to the women of Australia, and their families: 'We understand the situation. We understand women have been disproportionately impacted, and we are going to come up with a comprehensive plan to address it. We are not simply going to snap back to the inequality that we had beforehand.' We are not going to be able to snap back and create thousands of jobs for women who have lost them, because the government have bungled the implementation of the recovery plan and they need to fix it. They need to do the work very, very quickly, because Australian women will not put up with this government continuing to make decisions that disproportionately impact on them.

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