Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I'm delighted to be speaking on this important legislation and I commend the comments that were made by the previous speaker, the member for Kooyong, while I was in the chamber. Can I just say this: there's a 25 per cent gap in the retirement savings of women and men. Because of superannuation, Australians are now retiring with around $200,000 in retirement savings. That's real money. I know when my parents retired they never had anything anywhere near that, but today, as a result of over 30 years of superannuation, retirement experiences are being transformed. On average a male is retiring with about $200,000 in retirement savings in superannuation. The situation has improved for women, but there is still a 25 per cent gap in the superannuation savings. As women approach retirement they have around $150,000 in superannuation.

If you lift up and look under the bonnet at what's driving this gap between a woman's experience of retirement and a male's experience of retirement, you'll see that the superannuation gap is driven by two things: a wages gap and a career gap. We need to take action on both of these things to ensure that we close that gap, and we are. In the area of the wages gap, we've taken decisive action as a government, making pay equality an objective of our workplace relations laws. More than that, we're ensuring that in our own area of employment, but also where we are the significant funder of services, we are taking heed of those equity principles.

Take an area like aged care, which has a workforce where women are engaged in doing the majority of the work. If you look at their wages they are significantly below the wages that would be paid for equivalent work being performed in male-dominated industries outside the aged-care sector. There was a problem there to be solved, and we solved it. In fact, the biggest line item in our first budget was funding for the aged-care sector so that they could pay their workers a decent wage. The workers benefited I think about $6 billion from that first budget. The workers benefited, the aged-care providers benefited, and so did all Australians, not just because inequity was dealt with but because people were attracted back into the sector because they could afford to live and work in an industry they cared about.

We haven't stopped at aged care. We're currently looking at child care, which, again, has an overwhelmingly feminised workforce. There are significant gaps between what somebody can earn as a childcare worker and what somebody with equivalent skills and competence can earn working in a male dominated industry, which is why the government has taken action and we're funding 15 per cent wage increases.

I just spent a bit of time talking about that because the superannuation gap that I've talked about is factored off a wage gap. Why is that? It's because, under our system, superannuation is paid as a percentage of wages. If there's a wage gap then there's going to be a superannuation gap because, if a woman is earning less in wages than a man, she's going to be taking home less and putting away less in her superannuation than an equivalent man. So an important lever in addressing that gap is dealing with wages.

The second gap that the government has identified is the career gap. That is because overwhelmingly women will take time out of work not only to have the child but to care for the child, particularly in its first six months. This is something towards which concerted action has been taken across excessive Labor governments. I've got to say it was the Whitlam Labor government that first introduced paid maternity leave in 1974 for Commonwealth government employees, with the hope of extending that throughout the workforce. It did extend into the financial services industry over the next decade, but it stalled, and it took the Gillard Labor government and the Rudd Labor government to reinitiate that program back in 2007 through to 2012. I do remember a former leader of the opposition saying that he would introduce paid maternity leave as a universal condition over his dead body. Some unkind people said that that would be a win-win, but I was very pleased to see that it had become a bipartisan position, in part, over the next decade.

Paid maternity leave, commenced by the Rudd government and introduced by the Gillard government and made a part of Australian law, was a great reform, again helping to close that career gap. So too was the provision of child care because, if families don't have access to child care, then they're not able to make decisions based on all of the economic factors available to them to return to work or not to return to work. If they're able to access child care, it makes returning to the workforce an option. I'm sure there will be other members in this place who have been talking to families in their electorates, and one of the concerns they'll have heard is getting access to a childcare place, which is stopping people returning to work. It's all the more reason why we need to put emphasis on that childcare wage increase, bringing more workers into that sector and ensuring there are more places available to Australians who want to return to work after a period of parental leave.

So, in terms of the wage gap, we're working on it. There were changes to the law in the last Labor government and changes to the law in this Labor government. In terms of the career gap, we're working on it through extending paid parental leave. There were historic changes extending paid parental leave to 26 weeks under this government, which we're very proud to be a part of, making a meaningful difference. But, if you look at the way leave is treated as a workplace entitlement in this country and you look at the payments that are made in respect of leave, you'll notice that, if you're on long service leave, you get superannuation. If you're on annual leave, you get superannuation. If you're on sick leave or carers leave, you get superannuation. It strikes us as a huge anomaly that the only form of leave that is freely and lawfully available to every Australian worker as a right that does not accrue superannuation is paid parental leave, more commonly known outside of this place as paid maternity leave—and for a reason. So this is an equity issue. There is one form of leave overwhelmingly taken by women that doesn't attract superannuation, and that is maternity leave or parental leave.

So I'm proud to be part of a government which is addressing that issue, including through the legislation before the House today. It has a cost—$1.1 billion over the forward estimates to introduce the entitlement by 1 July next year. We hope that it is augmented by private sector employers who agree to it as a staff attraction or retention element and who top up from the government funded PPL component with a privately funded PPL component so that we can extend and improve that benefit. Again, what is the objective here? The objective is to ensure that women retire with access to the same quantum of retirement income that men do.

I thought that this was an issue that would, without controversy, obtain bipartisan support, and there were early indications that I was right. Can you imagine my surprise when I read overnight that the opposition has adopted a different policy? It's a policy which is aimed at undermining the very objective of the scheme, which is to close the superannuation retirement gap. It has been their objective, over many decades now, to undermine the role of superannuation in our economy and in our workplace. There is no doubt about it. There are many frontbench coalition MPs and senators who, from their first speech to their last in this place, have said that superannuation should not be a universal entitlement. We should not be surprised.

But I have to say, when I first saw this reported on last night, I had to quickly grab the news report to see whether it was an announcement by Senator Bridget McKenzie and therefore one that would have the shelf life of an ice cream in the sun. It wasn't. It appeared to come out in the name of the official spokesperson. We hope they recant because they will face the same community backlash in relation to this thought bubble as they faced when Senator Jane Hume, when she was the government minister responsible for superannuation, proposed that women suffering and afflicted by the scourge and crime of domestic violence should pay for domestic violence services and relief from their own superannuation. Anyone who thought about that for about three seconds would understand what a diabolical proposition that is.

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