Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Higgins for putting this very important issue to our parliament. The challenges women face in their homes, in the workforce and in their retirement are persistent and pervasive. They are structural, social and economic. We know that when women can share the domestic load, participate in the workforce equally and achieve financial security at all points in their lives our whole society benefits. The 2018 KPMG report Ending workforce discrimination against women found that halving Australia's gender pay gap would increase our GDP by $60 billion by 2038 and that reducing the difference in average earnings of women and men by just 50 per cent would see our households better off by $140 billion over the next 20 years.

When women earn more by having the opportunity to work or by being paid more equitably they can spend more and they can save more, creating greater financial security throughout their lives and into retirement. Right now, many women who have spent their adult lives working in the home, raising families and creating the social fabric of our society have been unable to accrue superannuation or savings. If those marriages end, those women often struggle. Women over 55 are the fastest-growing demographic of people who are homeless. Unless we address the structural barriers preventing economic gender inequity, women over 55 will remain at increased risk of poverty and of homelessness. Superannuation must be appended to maternity and other care-related leave as an essential step towards financial equity for women in retirement. In recent months, I've been pleased to help legislate important reforms to help reduce the gender pay gap, including recommendations of the Respect@Work inquiry and changes to eligibility for subsidised child care hours. I take this opportunity, though, to again call on the government to accompany the cheaper-child-care package, which increases the amount of subsidised care hours for working women, with an urgent intervention into the crisis in the early childhood education workforce.

A crumbling early childhood education workforce harms gender equity twice over: firstly, because the childcare workforce comprises some of the lowest paid women in this country and, secondly, because workforce participation of women is dependent on the accessibility of child care. Australia has some of the highest levels of education for women in the world, but we are ranked 38th in the world for workforce participation. As the Grattan Institute's Danielle Wood has suggested, if untapped women's workforce participation was a massive ore deposit, we would have governments lining up to give tax concessions to get it out of the ground. Treasury estimates that the government's the cheaper child care package will fund an extra 1.4 million hours of workforce participation each week. This is a significant equalising measure for families lucky enough to get a spot in a childcare centre. But therein lies the problem. There are already insufficient day care positions for our children. Increasing the childcare subsidy without increasing child care enrolments won't get women back to work. It will just cut the cost of child care for those who are already working.

Qualified early childhood educators are leaving our workforce at an alarming rate, with 15 per cent having left that workforce since October 2020. Fewer people in the early childhood workforce means fewer women in our national workforce. The benefits to households, communities and the national economy when we advance gender equality are clear. I'm very pleased to support the motion moved by the member for Higgins today, and I will continue to work for legislative solutions to increase women's workforce participation and to close the gender pay gap.

See this speech in context