Louise Miller-Frost (Boothby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

LLER-FROST () (): I'm pleased to rise to speak on this very important motion. We often hear that the fastest-growing demographic of people experiencing homelessness is women over 55, and what sits behind that is women's poverty. No matter what the story, no matter what the life course, poverty always sits behind homelessness. Each person has their own journey and their own story, but I'm going to talk about a typical story from my experience in the sector. We'll call her Susan.

Susan is 58 years old. She married relatively young and had a couple of children. Although she loved her career as a nurse, she and her husband decided that she would stay home to look after the children. About 20 years ago, she and her former husband divorced. The children were teenagers, so she returned to work part time and rented a property in the leafy eastern suburbs of Adelaide, near their school. When the children left home, she returned to work full time, but her nursing qualifications were no longer current, so she did a cert IV and worked part time and casually in three different aged-care centres.

Susan considered her life secure. She lived in a nice area in a lovely townhouse and had work that she found meaningful, until she got injured. And it might not be an injury—it might be a cancer diagnosis or an illness, a relationship breakdown or a redundancy. Susan could no longer work in aged care, and age and gender discrimination meant she couldn't find any other work. Initially, she used her savings to pay her rent, but when the savings ran out she put her belongings in storage, gave up her rental property and started house-sitting—until the house-sitting jobs dried up, and she found herself couch-surfing and sleeping in the car. Within the space of six to eight months, she had gone from living a secure life to being homeless, sleeping rough—something she could never have imagined would happen to her. Susan's story shows the perfect storm of gender disadvantage and where it ends up—a career path interrupted by caring duties for children, for a husband or partner and sometimes for elderly parents as well and insecure work in low paid, female dominated caring professions.

The Albanese government knows that this perfect storm of gender disadvantage needs to end. Women have had enough of hearing that things will get better by themselves or that they will be better for the next generation. That didn't work for my generation, my mother's generation or my grandmother's generation. So what are we doing about this? The Cheaper Child Care bill means women will be able to return to work earlier after having a child if they wish. This will help address the career gap that cripples women's economic prospects and, in Susan's case, might have meant that her degree qualification remained current and she could have continued to work as a nurse at a higher pay rate. That would have meant that she would have more superannuation. She wouldn't have paid the double penalty of a career gap and lower pay rates impacting superannuation contributions.

We also know that the national gender pay gap remains, despite nice words over so many decades. In May 2022, the national gender pay gap sat at 14.1 per cent, which means on average a woman working full time earns $263.90 less per week than a man working full time. If you include full time, part time, overtime and salary sacrifice, the total gender pay gap is 29.7 per cent. The Secure Jobs, Better Pay bill will add gender equity to the modern awards and minimum wage objectives and adds the need to improve access to secure work to the modern awards objective. This sets a clear expectation that the Fair Work Commission must consider gender equity when performing all its functions: when setting a minimum wage, when considering changes to awards and in all other decisions. This means that gender equity will be front and centre in the minds of the industrial umpire when it sets minimum pay and conditions and makes other decisions. The bill will also strengthen the Fair Work Commission's ability to order pay increases for workers in low-paid, female dominated industries by setting up two new expert panels in the Fair Work Commission. I also welcome the full implementation of the recommendations of the Respect@Work report. While I didn't touch on this in Susan's story, it is a common feature in the lives of so many women.

There is much to be done to address gender equality and I welcome these bills that will improve the lives of Australian women who are 51 per cent of the population.

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