Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Canberra for her question, as well as for her continued advocacy for progressing the cause of Australian women. This government is working every single day to make women's lives better, fairer and more equal. We've taken targeted action to improve women's economic security and equality and, of course, to close the gender pay gap. We've increased the pay for early childhood educators. We've secured record pay rises for hundreds of thousands of women on award wages. We've fixed the bargaining system to get wages moving in feminised industries. Under this government, women's average weekly earnings have increased $173.80 a week since May 2022. We've been publishing employer gender pay gaps to hold companies to account and we've reached record highs in women's economic participation.

Under Labor the gender pay gap is the lowest it has ever been at 11.5 per cent, down from 14.1 per cent when we first came to office. Yesterday, the ACTU released research that shows that our policies are closing the gender pay gap at a rate three times faster than under those opposite. We're closing the gender pay gap at a rate of 1.3 per cent per year compared to the rate of 0.4 per cent under the coalition. If we had have continued down the path of those opposite and not done the hard work of implementing policies such as making gender equality an object of the Fair Work Act, expanding paid parental leave and banning pay secrecy, the average full-time working woman in Australia would be $1,900 a year worse off than they are now. The research also shows that a whole-of-government commitment to gender pay equality through our national strategy and by putting women at the centre of our economic agenda is making a difference. We've made these changes because women deserve economic security. They deserve economic equality. And we've made these changes because we want to put women at the centre of our economic agenda. And those policies are working.

I'm asked about other policies. The Liberals and Nationals have not put forward a single meaningful policy to improve outcomes for women.

They've opposed many of Labor's reforms that have delivered those real outcomes for women. It is, frankly, clear that this Leader of the Opposition is a risk to this progress—the progress of women's equality—because we know his record. We know his record of pushing wages down, pushing prices up and not supporting all of the measures that Labor has put in place to make sure we actually closed the gender pay gap. The Leader of the Opposition's reckless arrogance has real costs for Australian women. His agenda is wrong for Australia, and it is wrong for Australia's women.

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