Zoe Daniel (Goldstein, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I haven't been in this parliament for long, but already I feel like a broken record. Women want to work, but they want their work to be respected, and we do have to take care that we make the overdue changes in ways that produce the right result. This is a massive piece of legislation produced in a short period and there has been almost no time for community consultation. An amendment to the Fair Work Act it may be, but at 243 pages, with an explanatory memorandum to match and with further amendments to come, it's much more than that. The amendments have the potential to create vast and positive change, but the process is fraught. How do I balance what are the clear upsides of the bill against the concerns of business? This quandary has literally kept me awake at night this past week since the bill was tabled.

I represent a community with upwards of 17,000 small businesses, including cafes, small manufacturers, residential builders and skilled individuals who work as sole traders, as well as others who work in high positions in some of Australia's biggest companies. Also, in Goldstein, I represent thousands of women who work in the care sector, aged care, early childhood education and disability care. Almost 2,000 nurses, midwives and carers live in the suburbs of Bentleigh, Ormond and McKinnon alone. I also represent people—many of them women—who work fragmented shifts in other sectors such as retail and cleaning.

In being elected to this place, I vowed to speak up for those women, those who are not in the room and those who do not have the loudest voices as individuals, and I vowed to advocate for our prosperity as a nation. Wages, productivity and prosperity intersect, yet the share of GDP going to wages is at an all-time low. Productivity has grown at twice the pace of real wages over the last two decades.

The fastest-growing sector of the economy is the care and service sector. As Chief Executive Women said in its prebudget submission:

While the care sector, largely powered by women, has been the safety net of the economy, this sector has been widely undervalued. The care sectors are encumbered by critical workforce shortages, resulting from high levels of insecure work and low pay.

The face of modern unionism is a 40-year-old woman in the care sector; that's the reality. And more than four million Australian workers are now in insecure work. Many are women, an untapped resource, in part due to their lack of power. Not only are they saddled with the bulk of society's unpaid work, held back by a lack of child care, paid parental leave and super; they're undervalued when they do work. Often they're sandwiched between children, elderly parents and employers, rostered sporadically, disempowered, underpaid and, frankly, run ragged. Award wages merely keep them down. In turn, their children can be affected by intergenerational transfer of disadvantage. A recent survey of almost 6½ thousand retail workers asked them what they wanted. The answer was simple: decent pay, job security, predictable shifts.

Several of these concerns are addressed in this bill. I wholeheartedly support the provisions for supported bargaining for care industries. This would help give agency to these largely feminised industries where, in many cases, currently, hours are too short and shifts are irregular, precarious and changeable. Currently, women earn, on average, $472 per week less than men. The gender pay gap sits at 14.1 per cent and, disgracefully, it has only narrowed by a miserable 5.1 per cent since 1983.

These supported bargaining provisions will allow women to negotiate for better pay and conditions. The women who work in our care sector deserve this. And it's not only low-paid working women who stand to gain. All working women can benefit from changes to transparency rules around salary, which will enable female employees who are being paid less than their male counterparts to say so.

A new study by the ILO found that pay transparency measures can help to address the gender pay gap and reduce broader gender inequalities in the labour market. Pay transparency may provide workers with the information and evidence they require to negotiate pay rates and provide them with the means to challenge potential pay discrimination. Additionally, the capacity to not only ask for flexibility but also to ask the Fair Work Commission for a review should the employer say no is broadly a good change. I have suggested to the government that small businesses with fewer than 25 full-time staff should be exempt from this. This goes to one of my concerns about this bill.

Apart from the obvious issue of the very short time frame provided by the government for the consideration of this complex set of amendments, there are some unintended consequences, and there is much to clarify before this bill passes both houses. As the bill stands, small businesses with a headcount of less than 15 could be subject to mandatory multi-employer bargaining. And, as I said earlier, there are thousands of those small businesses in Goldstein. How they fare matters not only for those who own these businesses and those who work for them but also for the community that depends on them. Already these businesses are grappling with the higher input costs resulting from spiking inflation, especially energy costs. This alone threatens the viability of these businesses, many of which have been built up over decades of hard work and sacrifice by their owners. A headcount of 15 would potentially drag every cafe and small independent store and some early childhood education businesses into the net and subject them to mandatory multi-employer bargaining.

I've suggested that the government consider amending this provision to ensure that it does not have the consequences I have outlined. Based on what the small businesses in Goldstein that I represent are telling me, a figure of more than 25 full-time staff would be more realistic. This could simply be inserted into these amendments and left as existing in the rest of the act regarding issues like unfair dismissal. There is also deep concern among businesses in Goldstein about the flexible work provisions, two-year contracts and the zombie agreement transition provisions. Again, these issues could be resolved by explicitly setting a higher number of full-time staff in the flexible work provisions and providing a staged change to the other provisions.

On the question of single-enterprise multi-employer bargaining, I support explicitly directing the Fair Work Commission to preserve the primacy of single-enterprise agreements and providing a six-month buffer period after expiry of an agreement before an employer can be forced into a multi-employer negotiation. Common and public interest definitions need to be clarified to avoid competition issues, and a reasonable review period—less than the five years proposed—is needed, in my view.

Finally, I return to what I believe to be one of the most important elements of this bill. In its definitions, the legislation should make it clear that what we are seeking is gender equality in the workplace, not merely gender equity, as currently stated. Equity merely sets the stage for equality, putting women only at the starting line rather than requiring an outcome. If we are to get beyond our miserable long-term record on equality of pay for equality of work, if we are to get more women who want to work into the workforce, if we are to get the productivity benefits that that would create, if we are to get the growth we need for future prosperity and if we are to be able to look our daughters in the face and say, 'No more,' then this is what we must do.

The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the ILO gender equality conventions and the Workplace Gender Equality Act all say that gender equality means substantive equality between men and women. If, as the government says, this legislation is about elevating feminised workforces then this must be the result of this legislation, not merely the aspiration. The women of Australia have waited too long, and I stand here to say this on behalf of those in Goldstein and elsewhere who are not in the room.

See this speech in context