Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Newcastle, someone who's always advocated that releasing gender pay gap data is effective. You'll always have people on this side know that releasing that data is effective. You will only find those on the other side of politics anyone arguing that it's useless.

With the data that's just been released, we now know we have the gender pay gap at its lowest ever level, and overnight we've had the release of the company-by-company data. The days of secretly paying women less than men are now over. That's as a result of particular changes that had been made by law by this government. It's part of a suite of measures aimed at closing the gender pay gap. There was one time in the previous term when there was a sharp fall in the gender pay gap. It was in the November 2020 figure. But it wasn't because women's wages were suddenly rising; it was because lockdowns happened and male wages collapsed. That was the only time that you had a sharp closure of the gender pay gap.

The view of this government is that the way to close the gender pay gap is to get wages moving and to look at where there is a disadvantage in feminised industries and change the laws so that those wages move too. The data that's been published shows that 30 per cent of businesses are published in the target range, but, for more than 60 per cent of companies, women are still paid more than five per cent less than men. That's why this government has taken the measures that it has. It's why we've banned the pay secrecy clauses. It's why we've expanded access to flexible work arrangements. It's why we now have a positive duty to protect against sexual harassment. It's why we established 10 days paid family and domestic violence leave. Every one of these changes deals with participation as well. Every one of these changes corrects a system which has structurally disadvantaged women workers.

It should be the case that, when you go to work and you work hard and you get paid, that pay simply reflects the effort you've made and what you have brought to that job. But, as we see with company after company after company, women are still in a situation where that gap, while lower than it has ever been in the history of it being recorded, is still structurally too high. As long as there are those opposite who think that acting on this and publishing this data is somehow useless, we will have a group opposite that has no intention of closing the gender pay gap, which explains why they have opposed each of the laws we brought in to close it.

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