Zaneta Mascarenhas (Swan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Structures matter. I don't think you need to be an engineer to understand this; I think we understand this as humans. You need to get the structures right, and then you can get the foundations, build the walls, create a home and create scaffolding.

The Labor Party started looking at our party's structures 30 years ago. We looked at the gender ratio within our party. Earlier this week in Parliament House we got to celebrate 30 years of the great Australian Labor Party's affirmative action policy. Sheila O'Sullivan, one of the original movers of the motion at a Labor Party conference 30 years ago, came and celebrated with the parliament—specifically, I'll say, the Australian Labor Party. The other mover of the motion was Carmen Lawrence, a proud Western Australian. I understand that Helen Creed, one of my constituents, also helped work on this. There are 'pinch me' moments in this job; celebrating affirmative action was absolutely one of those moments. I think it's important that we understand our history so we can know where we are going. For these women, who helped look at our structures 30 years ago, to see that the Labor party achieved 50 per cent women in our caucus must have been an amazing moment. This is not something that you just win and do nothing with. The truth is that the Albanese Labor government has been working tirelessly to make sure that we make a tangible difference to the lives of women all across Australia.

Another 'pinch me' moment was when we introduced domestic violence leave in this place. The truth is that there were advocates sitting up there watching on who had been advocating for this policy, which was about ensuring that people who were looking at leaving a violent relationship would have access to two weeks of paid leave. I spoke to a teacher in Victoria who explained to me that if you don't work on the last day before the school holidays, you don't get paid during the school holidays. That person was in the process of leaving a violent relationship, was thinking about every single dollar and didn't realise that this domestic violence leave payment existed.

We've also made child care cheaper, which is something that I'm really passionate about because it's something that helps families. When I went through preselection the first time, I was heavily pregnant. The second time I went through preselection, I had a six-month-old baby and was still breastfeeding. The thing that's interesting is that I'm not the first member in this House to have a small child. There have been many women who have come before me. Because of people who have been in this House, we think about things such as child care and making sure that it is more accessible. We want to make sure that families can participate in the economy, but we also want to make sure that children have the best early childhood education opportunities.

We also looked at the minimum wage. A lot of our minimum wage workers are women. We also increased the wages of aged-care workers. We recently announced increases to childcare educators and an increase to their wages. When we looked at our tax cuts, we had an opportunity to leave them as is or, alternatively, amend them to see if we could benefit more Australians. We decided to do the hard thing and change them. This means that 90 per cent of women across Australia are better off because of the changes that the Albanese Labor government introduced.

Most recently, we talked about the work that we're doing around domestic violence leave. Last week, the Prime Minister announced $4.7 billion to help address what we're doing in domestic violence. We want to see more work and support for frontline workers, and we also want to make sure that we have appropriate responses to perpetrators.

I feel really privileged to be a part of a government that is working for all of Australia, including women. It surprises me that in Western Australia we haven't seen enough women being preselected in the WA Liberal Party. We need to do more; women hold up half the sky.

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