Libby Coker (Corangamite, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australian women are front and centre for the Albanese government. This was reflected in our first budget last October, a budget which began delivering on our election commitment to making Australia a world leader in gender equality. I'm so proud that, after a decade of neglect under the former Liberal government, our government is unlocking and valuing the talent, potential and contribution of women across our nation. We know that policies which are good for women are also good for our economy, good for productivity and good for families.

The Women's Budget Statement set out the Albanese Labor government's plan to deliver long-term change to advance gender equality, focusing on women's economic equality, ending violence against women, and gender equality in health and wellbeing. These themes are invariably interconnected, and they matter. Financial insecurity can impact on a woman's ability to leave a violent relationship. Violence can have devastating health impacts and diminish a woman's capacity to participate in the workforce and progress her career.

The gender pay gap and time out of the workforce can have a long-term impact on a woman's lifetime earnings, especially impacting retirement incomes for older women, including, importantly, superannuation. That's why the Albanese government is leading the national push to close the gender pay gap. Progress in closing the gender pay gap between Australian women and men stalled in 2022. According to the most recent annual data, released last December by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, the gender pay gap remains at 22.8 per cent. That means women earned, on average, $26,596 less than men in 2021-22.

Voluntary reporting data released by the agency showed 50 per cent of employers had set some sort of target for gender equality in the workplace. Of those who had set targets, more than half—55 per cent—had done so to increase the number of women in leadership; however, far fewer employers had targets to reduce the gender pay gap, just 38 per cent. Over the past two decades the gender pay gap has persisted. It has decreased by only 1.2 percentage points since May 2002 and by only 5.1 per cent since 1983. We must do better. Women have an average of 23.4 per cent less super when they come to retirement age than men. The gender pay gap is a constraint on the Australian economy, representing a cost of around $52 billion a year. These outcomes are more than disappointing.

That's why the Albanese government is providing $20.2 million in investment to the Fair Work Commission to establish two new expert panels—one on pay equity and the other on the care and community sector. This will strengthen the commission's capacity to determine applications from female dominated industries, where work is often undervalued and underpaid. Already under the Albanese government we have set a commitment to a 15 per cent increase in the wages of aged-care workers. This increase is absolutely needed to support a predominantly female workforce, a workforce which was overworked, underpaid and undervalued by the former Liberal government.

At a community forum I held in Armstrong Creek in my electorate I heard from Donna, who is a personal care attendant in a local aged-care facility. She spoke about low wages, insecure work and the frustration of being unable to properly care for frail, elderly and vulnerable residents. These are her words: 'I love my job. I wanted to make lives better, but now we are facing a roadblock. We've got six minutes to put each resident to bed each night.' To Donna I say: we are listening and we are acting. That's why we have committed to this important wage increase.

We're also reforming the workplace relations system to make gender equity an objective of the Fair Work Act and to legislate an equal remuneration principle. We have also taken the first step to remove barriers that limit women's opportunities when they have caring responsibilities. That includes delivering a $531 million investment to expand the Paid Parental Leave scheme, up to 26 weeks, by July 2026. It is the biggest boost to Australia's Paid Parental Leave scheme since it was created by the former Labor government in 2011. It is something I am very proud of and have fought for, together with many other women. It will support parents to spend more time with their children and to share caring responsibilities more equitably.

The bill builds further on those important gender equity initiatives. This bill takes additional decisive action to accelerate closing the gender pay gap at work by amending the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012. This follows a 2021 Workplace Gender Equality Agency review, which found improvements were needed to enhance the Workplace Gender Equality Agency's ability to improve the quality of available data and the level of support provided to employers. The reforms in this bill include allowing the agent to publish employer-level gender pay gaps for the first time and a requirement for employers to provide gender equality reports to the governing bodies. The reforms also set new requirements for policies and strategies across gender equality and refine what employers report to the agency. The bill adopts either in part or in full almost all recommendations in the Workplace Gender Equality Agency review.

The bill's headline reform allows the Workplace Gender Equality Agency to publish gender pay gaps for individual employers. This is important. It will promote accountability and encourage accelerated action and change within organisations towards closing the gender pay gap. The first release of pay gap reporting will be in early 2024, based on the current reporting period of April 2022 to March 2023. It will appear on the agency's website, and it will be searchable. Employers may choose to publish an explanatory statement, providing context for the gender pay gap and planned actions.

This bill allows the agency to require relevant employers to provide reports to all members of their governing body, such as a board of directors, as soon as practicable after they receive the report from the agency. This would include providing an executive summary report and an industry benchmark report, ensuring that the people governing the organisation are fully aware of their organisation's gender equity performance—good or bad. The bill amends the existing act to rename the current 'minimum standards' as 'gender equality standards'. This reinforces the increased ambition and importance of those measures in strengthening gender equality, thereby improving outcomes for both women and men in the workplace. The bill also changes aspects of the legislation to clarify terms and remove ambiguity in some areas. In addition, the bill makes amendments to the legislation to include sexual harassment, harassment on the grounds of sex, or discrimination as gender equality indicators in the act. These are commonsense changes which support the implementation of the government's Respect@Work initiatives.

It has been more than 10 years since the Workplace Gender Equality Act was first passed. In that time, we've seen meaningful progress, but the rate of change is far too slow. We know these measures will work from the successful experience in the United Kingdom, which introduced similar legislation in 2007. The reforms in this bill result from close consultation with stakeholders across the nation, including: the business and not-for-profit sectors, employee groups, state and territory governments, higher education providers, the women's sector, and other users of the government's data. The government has committed to reviewing the new legislation after five years. It is a great thing to always look back and reconsider, and to robustly interrogate how effective these measures have been in accelerating progress towards gender equality.

Improving workplace gender equality is critical. Australian women deserve fair and safe working conditions. They deserve equal opportunity and equal remuneration. Without the changes in this bill, it is estimated that, at the current rate of progress, it could take as long as 26 years to close the gender pay gap for women in Australia. We must accelerate the pace of change. Women have waited long enough. I commend this bill to the House.

Zoe Daniel (Goldstein, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Workplace Gender Equality Amendment (Closing the Gender Pay Gap) Bill 2023. No matter which way you cut it, the gender pay gap is unacceptable—whether you take the national gender pay gap of 13.3 per cent or the more accurate 22 per cent as calculated from data from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, it's wrong both morally and economically. The 13.3 per cent figure released by the Austrian Bureau of Statistics last month shows that women earn, on average, 87 cents for every $1 earned by a man. If you consider women's average weekly ordinary full-time earnings across all industries and occupations, they earn $253.50 less than men each week. Estimates indicate that at the current rate of progress it would take 26 years to close the full-time gender pay gap.

The story is predictable, and it goes like this. The gender pay gap starts when women first enter the workforce and it increases as they progress in their careers, until they retire with less superannuation than men. The super gap currently sits at 26 per cent. On average women in Goldstein have $54,000 less in super than men when they retire. If the government is serious about women having true economic equality, it has to start resolving these gaps. This is about more than equality, fairness and respect—it's about money. The gender pay gap costs our economy $51.8 billion a year in lost income. Closing this gap is also vital to strengthening Australia's economic prosperity. But first we have to understand what causes it. The gender pay gap is evidence that gender inequality remains a persistent issue in Australian society, with complex drivers both social and cultural. Gender segregation in job type, sexism, and care and family responsibilities all contribute to the uneven playing field. And all these things don't float around in their own universe; they're interconnected, deeply embedded in society and stubborn to move.

There's no escaping the fact that in Australia industries and occupations are highly gender segregated. An example of industrial segregation is the high proportion of women in health care, at around 76 per cent, and in education and training, at around 72 per cent, relative to the low proportion of women in construction, at around 13 per cent, and mining, at 19 per cent. Occupational segregation involves the underrepresentation of women in high-paying roles such as management and chief executives and overrepresentation in low-paying roles such as administration or care work. This segregation in occupation and the concurrent wage gap raises a series of questions about low-status and low-wage work and why feminised industries are innately low paid.

Women want to work and they should be able to work in their chosen field, but in many cases they're not even at the starting line, shut out by conscious and unconscious bias. Those who shout that women are underpaid based on performance or that they somehow don't want better paid jobs due to genetics are way off the mark—and, yes, these people exist. This is not some wild feminist theory, as some would like you to think; job segregation is real and it holds women back in terms of job satisfaction and finances.

Women also do a disproportionate share of unpaid work, which keeps the gender pay gap ticking along. According to the ABS, in 2020-21, women spent, on average, around 30 hours a week on unpaid care and housework, nine hours a week more than men. Care is chronically undervalued in both the home and the workplace. Put simply: it's just expected—'women's work'. I say to the women of Australia: I see you when you roll your eyes.

All these factors occur against a backdrop of Australian women being among the most educated in the world. Australian women are more likely than men to have attained a bachelor degree or higher education qualification, but what happens next? Despite making up almost 50 per cent of the labour force, women comprise only 19 per cent of chief executives and 33 per cent of board members. At the current rate, it'll take 100 years to achieve gender balance in chief executive roles.

Job segregation, gender discrimination and caring responsibilities affect women's economic security over a lifetime and make it more likely that she will earn less than a man, make it less likely that she will advance her career and make it so she accumulates less super and savings than a man and is more likely to live in poverty in retirement. Single women are especially overrepresented in the population below the poverty line.

Until now, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency has been striving to close the gender pay gap without the necessary clout. Since 2014, WGEA has been facilitating the public reporting of private and Commonwealth companies or entities with 100 or more employees against six gender equality indicators. Under the Workplace Gender Equality Act, relevant employers report to the organisation in different ways. Fifty-five per cent are standalone organisations and 45 per cent are corporate groups. WGEA cannot currently publish an employer's gender pay gap at an organisational level. It's only been able to publish gender pay gaps by industry, not by individual employers. This means we're not getting the whole picture and it means employers are getting away with paying women less for the same job. This is why the closing the gender pay gap bill is important and needed.

The current approach of publishing aggregate industry gender pay gaps is not creating the transparency, accountability or insights necessary to close it fast enough. Women should not have to wait more than a quarter of a century. At the Jobs and Skills Summit in September last year, I said that women were done with being secondary and I called for this mandated gender pay gap reporting. My words were heard by women in my electorate, across the country and, perhaps, even here in parliament.

The purpose of this bill is to boost pay gap transparency and encourage actions to close gender pay gaps within organisations. It aims to do this by implementing key recommendations of the 2021 review of the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012—namely, publish organisation gender pay gaps to accelerate action to close them; bridge the action gap with new gender equality standards; support Respect@Work implementation to prevent and address workplace sex based harassment and discrimination; and set WGEA up for future success to support employers to drive gender equality in Australian workplaces.

Bridging the action gap is critical. As it stands currently, employers have to meet the minimum standards, which means merely having a required policy or strategy in place to report the data—that is, the act does not directly impose a requirement for employers to continue to improve beyond having the relevant policies and strategies set out in the minimum standards. This bill bridges the action gap by: requiring relevant employers of 500 or more to commit to achieve and report to WGEA on measurable, genuine targets to improve gender equality in their workplaces; to have policies or strategies which cover all six gender quality indicators; and to provide the executive summary report and industry benchmark report from WGEA to all members of their governing body. These measures that shift the thinking from minimum standards to gender equality standards will make employers more accountable for the workplace standards and culture they set. This is the systems change that we need, and this bill is a good start. I would like to see WGEA explore future opportunities to expand the coverage of the act to include employers with fewer than 100 employees; perhaps a digital solution to streamline supporting smaller organisations to opt in. Employers can play a critical role in achieving gender equality in the workplace. The UK has reported employer-level gender pay gaps since 2017 and there is clear evidence from their experience that publishing employer gender pay gaps leads to companies prioritising gender equality and a lowering of the gender pay gap.

Gender equality is good for everyone. It helps prevent violence against women and girls, and it makes our communities safer and healthier. It is a human right and it's good for the economy. Pay transparency will help achieve gender equality in the workplace. Women want to be equally represented, valued and rewarded at work. I will continue to work with the government on gender policy to elevate our women and girls, and I will on all my days in this place speak up for those who are not in the room. To our girls who are still at school, to the women juggling work and family—including single mums—to the sandwich generation, juggling care of children and older parents, to those who see their super and salaries stalled, to the older women struggling financially, this is another building block among many. I see you, and we are finally getting somewhere. I support this bill.

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

PERRETT () (): I am proud to join my work sisters in supporting this piece of legislation. I thank them for their earlier contributions. This bill is yet one more example of the Albanese Labor government methodically bringing into effect an election commitment that was signed off by the Australian people in May last year. This time our commitment was and is to take positive and affirmative action to close the gender pay gap. The bill before the chamber starts this process by publishing gender pay gaps, boosting transparency and encouraging actual action to close the gender gap in organisations across our nation. However, I point out that the measures we are talking about only apply to those businesses with 100 or more employees. Small businesses at the moment have enough challenges and so will be spared from this process.

The legislation we are debating gives effect to the recommendations of the 2021 review of the Workplace Gender Equality Act, which included introducing gender pay gap reporting at the employer level instead of at the industry level. The review identified where further action was needed to strengthen the act and enhance the Workplace Gender Equality Act's ability to improve the quality of data and the level of support provided to employers.

To set the scene, in 2022 Australia's national gender pay gap was 14.1 per cent. In practical terms, as of May last year the average weekly full-time earnings of a woman in Australia across all industries and occupations was lower than the equivalent for men by $263.90 per week. To compound matters, women have on average 23.4 per cent less super than men when they arrive at retirement age. This is both a strain and a constraint upon the whole of the Australian economy. The gender pay gap alone represents a cost of $51.8 billion a year to the economy.

In 2021 a review of the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012 made 10 recommendations that would help Australia accelerate towards workplace gender equality. There was broad consultation before and after the review and consultation and support for employers will continue. But something has to change, and change will start with this bill. Better information, reporting and transparency will play an important role in helping to reduce the gender pay gap. If you can't measure you can't manage it. Everybody in business knows this maxim—sadly, not everyone opposite.

Providing better information and transparency has never really been on the agenda for those opposite, on pretty much everything and anything, whether it was a certain Prime Minister secretly giving himself a few extra ministries or a couple of MPs in the Nationals knowing about this secret but then saying nothing; or the member for Fadden who, as minister, was advised as early as July 2019, by the secretary of his department as well as acting chief counsel, about robodebt being unlawful. Armed with this knowledge he still allowed this cruel robbery to continue through August, September and October. It was not until November that he stopped the robodebt juggernaut. Speaking of hiding, how about the member for Hume hiding rises to electricity prices from the public until two days after the election, or more recently the member for Dickson trying to hide from the voters of New South Wales and the voters of Aston that he is actually the Leader of the Opposition. He was trying to hide that he was a proud senior member of that Morrison government, hide that he was on the Expenditure Review Committee—the small select group that made all of those cruel budget cut decisions. I am happy to remind all Australians who is leading the coalition. It is the bloke trying on the red budgies every day here in question time.

For the LNP transparency is a dirty word, but transparency helps good government. It doesn't hinder it. It is something that can provide data and information for the public and workers about what the actual gender pay gap is in their organisation.

The bill will allow the Workplace Gender Equality Agency to publish gender pay gaps of relevant employers for each reporting period. This simple act of transparency will help promote accountability and, importantly, encourage accelerated action and change within these organisations. What organisation will want its workers and wider public to know that they are one of the nation's worst when it comes to paying women the same as men? I can tell you that if you are that business you'll be making changes quickly to fix it because good quality workers are scarce at the moment, they're at a premium and business will do what they can to retain and attract.

It is envisaged that if this legislation passes the first release of the gender pay gap will be reported early next year and will be based on the current reporting period of 1 April 2022 to 31 March 2023. When the first report is made public employers will have the opportunity to include statements providing context for their data. They can also outline any planned actions that they are or will be taking to address their own gender pay gaps.

The Workplace Gender Equality Act entails working with employers in the lead up to the first report to make sure they understand what's going to be made public and how they can make, if they wish, relevant statements that can inform that data. The public will be able to see these statements along with the organisation's data to give context and an insight into how they plan to improve the situation in that workplace to close those pay gaps. They will be able to do this as the data being reported on the Workplace Gender Equality Agency's website will be in an easily searchable and digestible format. So if you or a family member work for a particular organisation you can jump on the site and find out how your employer is doing when it comes to gender pay rates. This will make it clear to workers how their organisations are doing with regard to gender pay gaps, and allow women who are in organisations that are doing poorly to ask why and basically ask their employer: what are you going to do to fix it?

The WGEA will also be able to improve accountability within organisations, as this bill will allow the WGEA to require relevant employers to provide certain reports, such as the executive summary report and industry benchmark report, to all members of their governing body. This will deliver the most current information as soon as practicable to the governing bodies to help make decisions and take action where their organisation may be failing in regard to gender pay equality or, conversely, help them celebrate their successes in reducing their gender pay gap through actions they've initiated—carrot as well as stick.

The bill will also look at strengthening the focus on gender equality. It will see a change away from the current wording of 'minimum standards' to 'gender equality standards'. The change reflects the increased ambitions of these measures to strengthen gender equality, improving outcomes for both women and men in the workplace. We will also see an important administrative change, with the head of the WGEA to be known as the chief executive officer. This was recommendation 9.2 of the review and helps avoid confusion with company director roles and align the language of the act and the WGEA with the language of modern businesses. The legislation also amends the act to align it with the 2013 instrument by including sexual harassment or discrimination on the ground of sex as gender equality indicators in the act. This is an important alignment to include these indicators.

Finally, these changes will also support the full implementation of the Respect@Work report. People may wonder how these reporting requirements affect the day-to-day operation of businesses large and small, and the short answer is they won't. That's because there won't be any increase in the reporting burden to business; these changes simply draw on data that is already provided. The remade instruments action changes to actually make reporting easier for employers. One of the outcomes of the Jobs and Skills Summit was to include these measures to businesses with 100 or more employees. This is consistent with the current coverage of the WGEA, so it maintains consistency through its dealings with businesses—so, no extra burden on employers, but also lets smaller businesses look at the larger landscape in their sector.

This will mean that unlike in the past, where whole industries were reported, individual employers will now be reported on. This will deliver greater transparency within industries. Those employers doing the heavy lifting in a particular industry will be seen for doing that and, hopefully, will then be rewarded by workers voting with their feet and heading towards their doors, while others, who are not lifting a finger for better opportunities for women, will have the spotlight shone more brightly on them, possibly for the first time. In a perfect labour market, workers might then vote with their feet out the door towards better workplaces. It will mean industries will look within for solutions and opportunities to do their business better, making our workplaces smarter and more modern. They can look to similar businesses who are achieving equality when it comes to pay rates. They can look at what they're doing differently, see what works for them and set out a path to improve equality within their own business, whether it be in Moreton, Solomon or anywhere in between. You have to agree that that's a win for everyone.

In regard to non-binary data collection, the government does not intend to legislate for this at the time. By not committing to recommendation 7.2, this allows the government time to explore and consult on the pathways for introducing mandatory data collection on non-binary people. It's important that, as we move forward, we protect their privacy and safety in their workplaces, making sure this is front of mind when future collection of data is introduced, whenever that might be. This will be actioned through research and consultation on the collection of additional diversity data, such as what already occurs with people of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander background, culturally and linguistically diverse communities or people with disability. In the meantime WGEA will continue to collect data on non-binary employees on a voluntary basis, as it has done since 2021.

The Albanese government will also not legislate for the addition of a new gender equality standard requiring employees to commit to report against and achieve specific targets showing their progress on achieving gender equality. The development of these gender equality targets requires further close consultation with businesses and other stakeholders. The Minister for Women, Senator Katy Gallagher, is working to develop a further legislative package for introduction at a later date. It is envisaged that this new package would include measures to give effect to outstanding legislative recommendations. To sum up, these changes, with a few more still to come, will lead to a reduction in the gender pay gaps we now see. This isn't just good news for women; it's good news for the economy and the nation, and I recommend the legislation to the chamber.

Kylea Tink (North Sydney, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In the words of the great Kofi Annan: 'Gender equality is more than a goal in itself. It is a precondition for meeting the challenge of reducing poverty, promoting sustainable development and building good governance.' The gender pay gap that remains prevalent in Australian workplaces holds our society and our national economy back, and it taints our human rights reputation worldwide. In this context, I stand to welcome the Workplace Gender Equality Amendment (Closing the Gender Pay Gap) Bill 2023 and its provisions towards closing the gender pay gap in Australia. But I do so with caution, as, by its very nature, this bill presupposes that simply shedding light on the facts will force a change across our society. Sadly, there are many examples where simple factual knowledge changes nothing. To this end, we must acknowledge that this is just one step towards achieving gender equality in the workplace and creating safer, fairer workplaces for all. We must acknowledge that there is still a long way to go and many deeply ingrained societal barriers to overcome.

There is strong support for this bill from human rights and advocacy groups as well as businesses, with many stating that it is an overdue step forward for Australia, and I honestly could not agree more. The gender pay gap proves that gender inequality remains a persistent, deeply ingrained issue in our Australian society. It is widely recognised that, from the early stages of their career until they retire, women in Australia experience gender inequality in the workplace despite record women's workforce participation. This is also even though Australian women continue to outnumber men at every level of higher education, with women accounting for 57.3 per cent of undergraduate degrees and 56 per cent of postgraduate degrees in 2018 alone. For such a fortunate country, it sincerely baffles me that this remains true. How is it possible that, in this day and age of education and empowerment, simply being a woman creates disadvantage in Australian workplaces—let alone the additional disadvantage that comes with being a woman with an intersectional characteristic, such as being of a culturally or racially marginalised background or having a disability?

I'm grateful the government are beginning the work that is required and I applaud the Minister for Women for leading the government in realising their commitment to implementing the recommendations from the 2021 Review of the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012. However, again I must emphasise that this is just the first step, with the measures in this bill only implementing, in part or in full, four of the 10 recommendations from that review. It's a strong first step in the right direction, and closing the gender pay gap is crucial to Australia's economic future and our aspirations to be an equal and fair society for all.

All of us in this place, then, must do all we can to accelerate the rate of real change on workplace gender inequality, whilst ensuring a manageable reporting load for businesses. Women's employment, believe it or not, is growing at a rate nine times faster than the rate for men, yet Australia's gender pay gap currently stands at over 20 per cent, with women, on average, earning nearly $27,000 less than men each year. This is not a discussion, then, about equal pay; rather, this is a discussion about the very real and already existing difference between the average earnings of women and the average earnings of men. It essentially reflects how differently we value the contribution of men and women in the workforce.

Statistically speaking, being a woman increases job insecurity, vulnerability to discrimination in the workplace and difficulty in maintaining a successful career, especially if you want to have a family. Women often face bias in progression and promotion opportunities, as many employers simply do not offer promotions to employees who are in a part-time role—and, let's face it, part-time roles are staple fare for mothers who are primary carers.

I recently undertook a survey on paid parental leave across my own community of North Sydney, and what was really interesting was that the vast majority of feedback made it evidently clear that mothers find it especially hard to manage a healthy work-life balance, because of the unique difficulties faced by women in the workforce. One woman actually told me that being a full-time carer for a young child is such an undervalued role in society. She referred to the enormous undertaking of raising a healthy, happy, kind child with both parents working, which, in her words, 'You have to do to live in Sydney.' Another woman reported that her contract of employment and the lack of job stability had impacted her ability to plan for a family. She was, quite literally, feeling like she was having to decide whether she should start a family and leave her job, or stay employed. The fact that anyone is put in this position, where they feel that they cannot financially afford to have a family in this country, is unacceptable. The cost-of-living crisis is becoming unbearable for all Australians, and we cannot afford for the gender pay gap to exacerbate that.

The WGEA review report solidified these thoughts. It concluded the gender pay gap in Australia was not closing fast enough. There were 10 recommendations made in that report, all aiming to accelerate this action and increase transparency in the process. I am pleased that this bill implements, in part or in full, recommendations 2, 3, 5 and 9 of that review.

I believe these amendments are a good start and a strong step in the right direction. I specifically acknowledge the improvements made to ensure greater transparency around the pay gap. With that said, we do still urgently need to improve standards of behaviour and integrity in our workplaces. And while this might start with greater transparency, transparency in and of itself will not be enough. Accurate and truthful reporting on the gender pay gap information will provide a good foundation but, as I said earlier, access to accurate information doesn't always drive behaviour change. It will take far more than this to fundamentally shift the dial. The fact that the bill will rename minimum standards as gender equality standards does mark a significant shift, however, as it changes the day-to-day language that we use in this area. Language is an incredibly powerful tool to drive real change.

The Senate committee inquiry heard, from expert witnesses, that data shows that relevant employers easily meet the current minimum standards, with 99.2 per cent of relevant employers doing so in the last reporting period. Let's face it. If this is the case, then the current minimum standards are setting the bar way too low.

The National Foundation for Australian Women commented that this is likely due to the fact that most employers already have standing policies on sexual harassment, to comply with other state and federal legislation, making the minimum standards functionally meaningless. In this context of such deficiencies, various submitters argued the minimum standards need to be outcome based and time bound. This would ensure, year-on-year, that employer performance against the gender equality indicators can be assessed on something greater than the simple presence of policy documents.

Many in my community of North Sydney are still bemused that it is only recently that a code of conduct for parliamentarians, their staff and all that visit parliamentary workplaces has been developed and endorsed. On this basis, the fact that this bill also supports the implementation of the recommendations of the Respect@Work report more broadly, by including sexual harassment and harassment on the grounds of sex or discrimination as gender equality indicators in the act, is welcomed and long overdue.

Last year it was estimated that the total financial cost of workplace sexual harassment in the Australian economy was $3.8 billion, and this is likely a conservative estimate with most of the costs associated with the lost productivity, which is approximately $1.8 billion, borne by Australian businesses. This furthers the truth that closing the gender pay gap requires a multifaceted approach, and it is in the best interests of our society and our economy to get this right. I support the suggestion of the Greens senators that it is essential that we assist businesses to meet and beat their responsibilities.

While reform in this space has been slow to eventuate, change in now coming thick and fast, and we must ensure businesses, especially smaller businesses, have the support they need. This could include: ensuring the Workplace Gender Equality Agency has adequate resources to identify companies struggling to close their gender pay gap, and to be resourced to deliver targeted training and workplace consultation; assistance in the development of action plans; and support for managers of similar organisations that have successfully closed their gender pay gap to mentor others.

I've repeatedly noted in this place, across portfolios, that the legislation being put forward by this government is a welcome first step, but it cannot be viewed as a final step. Rather, this bill builds our floor. We must reach for the ceiling to ensure we take real action to achieve gender equality. I note assurances from the Office for Women that further progress will be made by the government, and that the bill, yet again, is a first step forming only part of the architecture supporting gender equality, and it should be viewed in conjunction with the remade instruments and further consultative measures. In this context, this bill, like many other pieces of legislation that have passed through this House since the new government took power, is, again, a promise that more will follow in quick succession. On that basis, I would note that my community and I are looking forward to seeing further reform come through this place soon. As Mike Honda stated, 'Equal pay isn't just a women's issue; when women get equal pay their family income rises and the whole family benefits.'

In this context I also want to take the opportunity to call for improved support for families and unpaid care as a relevant next step. I've been vocal about the need to improve our Paid Parental Leave scheme in Australia, and I welcome the progress that has been made in that space. International experience tells us in no uncertain terms that the fastest way to address the gender pay gap is to introduce shared paid parental leave. As the Grattan Institute has noted in a report, 'Greater sharing of child care is one of the best ways to improve women's economic security.' That is why I continue to call on the government to set 26 weeks as the minimum length of paid parental leave, increasing to 52 weeks based on the Scandinavian shared care model so that parents can decide how to use the available support that suits them and allows for women to work if they want to. We also need to ensure that families have access to quality and affordable care to allow those that either wish or need to return to work to do so. This means not only affordable but also accessible early childhood education.

The interruption of superannuation for paid parental leave and those in unpaid care positions, the majority of whom are women, must also be addressed. Ideally, men and women should have equal opportunity to work and to care for their families. The gender pay gap should not be about a woman's choice to be in the workforce or to be a full-time carer.

There are additional vulnerable communities living in plain sight who will not necessarily benefit from any of the developments that have been discussed previously tonight, and one of those communities is single-parent families. The fact is that punitive budget saving measures backed by both major parties in the last decade have left single-parent families, most of whom are headed by women, in an unsufferable situation. It is a wicked choice to ask someone to make when they are literally trying to weigh up whether they keep their family together by staying in a violent relationship or risk sinking into poverty when they choose to leave it. We cannot let these families and these women continue to go unseen and unsupported. If genuine equality is what we are sincerely pursuing, this cannot be allowed to continue.

In conclusion, while this bill does represent long overdue progress in closing the gender pay gap, it is only a small part in achieving larger, broader reform of our human rights legislative framework in Australia. As this bill is considered we must look at it through our current human rights framework, which, while far from perfect, requires us to consider our obligations to protect individual social and economic rights, which includes the right to work. I look forward to a time when the gender pay gap is closed and Australian workplaces are full of thriving, safe, progressive and fair environments for all. But this will not happen without significant and concerted effort. I commend this legislation to the House but note that it is the beginning, nowhere near the middle or the end.

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

The gender pay gap is not a new phenomenon. It is something we've long reckoned with in this society. And it's certainly not something that's going to remedy itself of its own accord. I remember talking about the gender pay gap in local government almost a decade ago with fellow staff and a younger female staff member saying, 'It won't happen in our generation—it'll be fixed in our generation,' and an older staff member, a woman in her 60s, replying rather wearily, 'We said that in our generation. We said that in the seventies, we said that in the eighties, we said that in the nineties, and here we are. How long do we have to wait? And why should we wait?' Of course, what the younger staff member didn't know was that it was already happening in her generation. It was likely already happening to her. How would she know? Women earn less than their male counterparts right out of school or university, but with pay secrecy, how would you know?

The gender pay gap is pernicious. It's structural. It has consequences and harms that go well beyond the headline figures. That's why I'm so pleased to be speaking on this bill, the Workplace Gender Equality Amendment (Closing the Gender Pay Gap) Bill 2023. The bill amends the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012 to implement our election commitment to close the gender pay gap, and it responds to a number of key recommendations of the 2021 review of the act. The review made 10 recommendations designed to help Australia accelerate progress towards gender equality. This bill is the government's response. It's designed to accelerate action and to close the gender pay gap, and it does so in a number of key ways.

The bill requires the Workplace Gender Equality Agency to publish the gender pay gaps of relevant employers. Previously, this information was only available at the industry level. This measure is designed to promote transparency and accountability, to encourage employers to take steps to create change in their organisations to close their gender pay gap. It will encourage companies to prioritise gender equality. It will mean that women are more able to see clearly whether they are being valued equally, and the public will be able to see which organisations value their male and female staff equally. We are confident that this mechanism, one of accountability and transparency, will work because when the UK introduced similar legislation in 2017, companies did begin to prioritise gender equality in their pay.

The first gender pay gap reporting window will be in early 2024 for the current reporting period, which is 1 April 2022 to 31 March 2023. Crucially, this requirement will mean only very limited additional work for employers because the data on the gender pay gap is already provided to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency. The change will simply see the agency publish the data at an employer level, allowing greater transparency and accountability as to where more work is required to close the gap. Further to this, in publishing their reporting employers are able to provide a statement giving context to their gender pay gap and detailing steps they plan to take to remedy it. This statement will be published alongside their gender pay gap data, and data will be reported on the Workplace Gender Equality Agency's website in a searchable format.

The bill also moves to improve accountability within organisations. The bill will allow the Workplace Gender Equality Agency to require relevant employers to provide reports—the executive summary report and the industry benchmark report—to all members of their governance body as soon as practicable after receiving the report from the agency. This will mean that those tasked with running such organisations cannot reasonably claim not to be aware of the gender pay gap within their organisation. In tandem, we plan to simplify the existing reporting processes, which employers have identified as a key pain point. This will reduce the regulatory burden on businesses, freeing up valuable time for them to focus on what is actually needed—fixing the gender pay gap and delivering action to reach gender equality.

In crafting this legislation, the government has consulted widely with stakeholders. We have consulted with stakeholders from business and the not-for-profit sector right across Australia, as well as employee organisations, higher education providers, the women's sector, users of Workplace Gender Equality Agency data and state and territory data, and—importantly—the Workplace Gender Equality Agency itself. It's fundamental to the mission of this bill, closing the gender pay gap, that women's voices are at the forefront of driving this change. Of course, we know that the gender pay gap will not be closed overnight. That's why the government has committed, as part of the bill, to review these amendments and the process of gender pay gap reporting five years after they're passed. This will ensure we have the flexibility to adapt reforms based on a comprehensive and critical interrogation of their effectiveness in achieving what they set out to do: driving progress towards gender equality in Australian workplaces.

It's so important to keep the mission of this bill at the heart and centre of this debate when the gender pay gap affects so many Australians. In 2022, Australia's national gender pay gap was 14.1 per cent. Practically, this means that, as of May 2022, the average weekly full-time earnings of a woman in this country, across all industries and occupations, was lower than their male counterparts by a whole $263.90 per week. That's $13,722.80 a year, or $672,470 over a lifetime. If you add in casualisation, part time and time off for parent work then the dollar gap is even more. There are parts of my electorate where you could buy a pretty reasonable flat or even a very small house with that kind of money. When you realise that older women are retiring with significantly less superannuation than their male counterparts, meaning more older women living in poverty, that is the direct impact of the gender pay gap. This is truly unacceptable and a constraint on the Australian economy at large. The gender pay gap alone represents a cost of $51.8 billion each year. The previous government committed to working towards implementing all recommendations of the 2021 review, and now the advancement of this bill is a welcome step in actually getting those aspirations done.

The gender pay gap reflects a deep structural inequality. It isn't an accident. It isn't an anomaly. It isn't just going to go away. It is not simply that many women take home less income than their male counterparts, although that is an obvious injustice. It's also about something bigger and deeper in our society. It's about how we recognise and reward different types of work.

During the pandemic, we found our who our essential workers really are. They're the nurses. They're our aged-care workers. They're our early childhood educators. They're our retail workers. The one thing that all of these industries have in common is that, essentially, the work undertaken in them is predominantly done by women. There is a second thing they all have in common, and I've said this in this place before: by curious coincidence, these workers are not rewarded in a way that recognises just how essential they are to the functioning of our society. That's why I was proud when the Albanese government advocated for a minimum wage rise last year and delivered one. It's why we will continue to fight to improve the wages and conditions of workers in these highly feminised industries.

When it comes to the gender pay gap, as I said earlier, the ramifications are sometimes hidden and ongoing, and we see this in the fact that older women are the fastest-growing group of people likely to experience homelessness. I've seen it countless times in my prior work. A woman approaching retirement age loses their employment or maybe has a family breakdown, and suddenly they find themselves with no way to pay the mortgage, no way to pay the rent, nowhere to live. This is often exacerbated by the fact that women often have far lower superannuation balances than men. Again, that reflects their lower wages across their lifetime. This is driven by a combination of the fact that women are statistically more likely to work in casual and part-time employment and the fact that much of the caring work done disproportionately by women is low-paid work or unpaid work. In practice, it means limited options for far too many women, too little economic security and a continued struggle to achieve gender equality.

That's why I'm proud to stand here as a member of the Albanese Labor government, which is truly committed to closing the gender pay gap, establishing an independent women's economic security task force to help inform budget decisions in advancing economic equality, making gender pay equity an object of the Fair Work Act 2009, requiring large companies to publish their pay gaps through this bill and, of course, extending paid parental leave, introducing paid domestic violence leave and cheaper child care, a constraint on women's work and often a cost borne by women. We are backing a real pay rise for aged-care workers, who are overwhelmingly women, and looking to provide backing for similar industries. Labor is committed to eliminating the gender pay gap because Labor is committed to real gender equality. Labor is the party of gender equality in Australia. The achievements that have marked the progress towards gender equality, almost without exception, have been delivered by Labor governments, and we will use all means at our disposal to continue this legacy to deliver gender equality in Australia. I commend the bill to the House.

James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak in support of the Workplace Gender Equality Amendment (Closing the Gender Pay Gap) Bill 2023 and absolutely welcome the opportunity to take important steps forward when it comes to closing the gender pay gap. To begin with, I commend the contribution of the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, who was, of course, the lead speaker for the coalition on this bill earlier today in the House. Many speakers have shared some important experiences that they have had as far as inequitable treatment in the workplace goes, and the deputy leader reflected on some of the experiences from early in her career. Those were important to listen to and reflect on, because it's always very helpful to have that kind of informed personal experience to contribute to discussions on bills such as this.

Of course, this is a bill that has support from all sides of the chamber. It comes out of a review that commenced in 2021, and I think it is going to bring some important transparency to the issue of businesses of a certain size or greater that are now going to have this requirement to report on—and therefore have some scrutiny of—the situation of the gender pay gap in their businesses.

We know the statistics about the gap as it is now, and it has been even worse in the past. We see this as an opportunity to improve upon the statistics and hope that for businesses—while many, I'm sure have been making good progress in this area—this will add an additional level of incentive to make sure that they are very seriously looking at what issues are contributing in their business to a gender pay gap, if one exists. We know, of course, based on the industry-wide statistics and the national statistics that clearly that is probably the case in the vast majority of businesses. We also look very closely at the Public Service and what we in the different levels of government do. In my personal experience with the Public Service, I think the Public Service has been a commendable employer when it comes to improving and eliminating the gender pay gap.

I think we need to be really nimble in this debate, and once this legislation is enacted and we see it working. There were some stakeholders who didn't not support the bill but just had some hesitation around privacy issues to do with this sort of reporting. I think that those are addressed in the bill, but we might want to ensure that through regulation and the like that people's privacy is not inadvertently breached. I don't anticipate that, but I think we should look very closely at that and ensure that we monitor this as we see it implemented and make sure there aren't any unintended consequences. But, as I say, I don't foreshadow that. I expect that there will not be those issues. We hope that this will be the next step. We've come a long way, but there's still a long way to go.

I was particularly pleased to speak on other legislation that has been through the parliament in previous months and that I think will provide important tools in addressing the gender pay gap. Those are areas that have further to go. Paid parental leave is obviously something that is very important, and so is child care. We on the side are particularly concerned about child care and the equity of access to child care. Whilst the government has undertaken reform in child care, there is nothing to address the childcare deserts that occur, particularly in regional areas and regional electorates. We would like the government to look very closely at that.

I am also very interested in looking at issues around tax deductibility for child care, and giving more flexibility to parents, depending on their situations. We obviously want a really good universal system—and it is not universal for the reasons I just outlined—but we in the coalition also believe in flexibility and giving people as much flexibility as possible to make their own arrangements and not have their decision-making overly skewed by what the government does and doesn't let them do to provide for the child care of their children. Tax deductibility is something that I think is well worth looking at closely, as an option on top of the current scheme that exists for a tapered subsidy. Certain people in certain income brackets may want to make choices or can't get access to the subsidy because of means testing. Child care, I think, is worthy of being considered as a deductible expense in the course of earning your assessable income. I think that's very relevant to this debate because I think it's equally as important that high-income-earning women have no disadvantage, the same as the population at large, when it comes to managing how to balance the raising of a family and not having an unfair cost to your career. I certainly know in my own family's circumstances and those of friends and from what constituents raise with me that there is a gap there, where high-income-earning couples have enormous costs to meet around child care. It's not a deductible expense on your assessable income. That is something that I think we should consider looking at. I think that would be very relevant to what this bill is about, which is addressing the gender pay gap. I think that anything we can do to provide flexibility in the workplace and give more options in the workplace when undertaking the delicate balance that occurs around progressing a career and managing family responsibilities is a good thing.

I think it is excellent that culturally we have changed so much, particularly in the last 10 or 15 years. In the period of my adult life, I have noticed that there is much more equitable burden sharing around family responsibilities. I have a lot of friends where that has been very clear in the way in which they share the responsibilities when it comes to starting a family, raising children and not having those old attitudes that expect the man to prioritise his career and the woman to prioritise responsibilities of the family and children in particular. We live in a much more equitable and shared era now, and that is a good thing. I think that culturally that is something that is well and truly engrained in this country now, and we want to see that continue into the future.

I think it's always good to improve our awareness of challenges. This is a bill that is going to ensure we have more transparency around this challenge. I think the more information we as policymakers have access to the more we therefore have a greater ability to look for an opportunity to continue to drive reform.

I will close on this. I think we have made progress that we should not dismiss, but we still have a long way to go. I think that this is a bill that can be used to help us continue to progress further in making sure that we close the gender pay gap, get rid of it entirely. Hopefully in a few years time we will be considering some of these measures and looking at their success and reflecting very proudly on days like today when we have come together in unity as a parliament to work together on addressing something that we all agree is a very important priority in this country. I strongly commend the bill to the House.

Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a great delight to rise in this place this evening to speak on the Labor government's Workplace Gender Equality Amendment (Closing the Gender Pay Gap) Bill 2023. While Australia's gender pay gap is trending in the right direction, we know we have a long way to go. In fact, on current trends, it will take around 26 years for the gender pay gap between men and women to close. That will take us through to 2049.

So where are we at? The national gender pay gap is currently at 13.3 per cent. Women earn on average 87c for every $1 earned by a man. If we look at men and women's average weekly full-time earnings across all industries and occupations, women earn $253.50 less each week than men. Women on average have 23.4 per cent less super when they come to retirement age than men. We are overrepresented in the industries with lower wages and underrepresented in positions of leadership. Although women make up half of Australia's workforce, we represent less than a quarter of all chief executive officers. About one-fifth of all boards and governing bodies have no female directors—that's zero. Women hold just 18 per cent of chair positions and 34 per cent of board member positions. We know that at the beginning of women's careers the gender pay gap is very modest, but by the time a woman retires it's the largest. This largely comes down to those middle earning years in your mid-30s, when women are having children, and they're coming in and out of the workforce.

Of course, gender discrimination in the workplace doesn't impact just women; it's a constraint upon the whole Australian economy. The gender pay gap alone represents a cost of $51.8 billion each year. Australia now ranks 43rd in the world for gender equality. I think we can all agree in this House that, as an advanced nation, that is not good enough. I am proud to be part of a woman-majority Labor government that is committed to ending this disparity—a government where gender is not just some add-on but central to our thinking, a government that understands the critical importance of women's work to the economy, women's work in the care sector, women's work in the non-traditional industries and women's workforce participation everywhere.

The Workplace Gender Equality Amendment (Closing the Gender Pay Gap) Bill 2023—the bill before the House right now—is part of the solution. It responds to a 2021 review of the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012. That review made recommendations to help Australia accelerate progress towards workplace gender equality, as well as making reporting easier for employers. It also fulfils a key election commitment by our Labor government: to close the gender pay gap at work, to boost work pay transparency and to encourage action within organisations to close gender pay gaps. This bill will be a key driver for employer action, for transparency and for accountability.

The current approach of publishing aggregate industry gender pay gaps is not creating the transparency, accountability or insights that we now need. For the first time, this bill requires employers with more than 100 staff to report their gender pay gap to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency. Our changes will ensure that employers themselves are part of the solution, not the problem, by putting employers on notice that they need to take action. It is just one part of our commitment to make sure that women are respected and valued at work and that they have the security they need to thrive.

Our efforts to drive a better deal for Australian women don't stop there. In the first 10 months of government, the Albanese Labor government has supported a pay increase for aged-care and low-paid workers, who are overwhelmingly women. We've legislated to make child care cheaper and have been at pains to point out the economic and productivity advantages that come with making child care cheaper in Australia. We've increased paid parental leave to 26 weeks. We've finalised the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children, supported by a record investment in the budget of $1.7 billion to implement it. We've legislated 10 days paid family and domestic violence leave. We've funded and legislated to implement in full the 55 recommendations of the Respect@Work report. We've established a National Women's Health Advisory Council to tackle medical bias and improve health outcomes for all Australian women, and, most recently, on International Women's Day we launched a survey and discussion paper to inform the development of the National Strategy to Achieve Gender Equality. The Albanese Labor government is embedding a gender lens in government in everything, from how we work with the NDIS and the social security system through to IR laws and the budget more generally.

But we know that gender inequality is not experienced in the same way by everyone. For First Nations women, for women of colour, for women with disabilities, for LGBTIQA+ women, for migrant and refugee women and for women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds that gap is even wider. As my colleague, Senator Jana Stewart said in the other place, the gender pay gap:

… for First Nations women when compared to non-Aboriginal men is a huge 32.7 per cent.

That is mammoth, more than double the statistics for non-Indigenous women in Australia. The gap between First Nations women and non-Aboriginal women is roughly 19.7 per cent. This data is not easy to find, and the new reporting requirements under this bill will make a significant difference in presenting a fuller picture of workplace participation and the gender pay gap.

What we do know is that employment outcomes tend to be worse for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, who have substantially lower rates of workforce participation, at 51.5 per cent, than for Indigenous men, who are at 65 per cent, and for non-Indigenous women, for whom it is 59.2 per cent. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are half as likely as Indigenous men to be owner-managers of businesses and they are overrepresented in most of the lower weekly income brackets and underrepresented in the highest income brackets. First Nations women are also less likely than Indigenous men to receive support from their workplaces if they encounter racism.

We must do better as a nation to ensure that every woman feels safe in the workplace, regardless of income, cultural background, citizenship status or ability status. Data on women from culturally diverse groups in the workplace is also lacking and somewhat fragmented. We know that women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds face particular challenges relating to the formal recognition of overseas education, of their qualifications and skills and of the need for access to childcare support. We know that this is impacting culturally and linguistically diverse women more acutely. As a result, migrant and refugee women are more likely to work in low-income, low-skill and insecure jobs, despite the often very substantial tertiary education they've received or the significant jobs they've undertaken prior to arriving in Australia. ABS data also shows that culturally and linguistically diverse women have a significantly lower rate of workforce participation compared to culturally and linguistically diverse men. Those figures are 47.3 per cent compared with 69.5 per cent.

Systemic discrimination and bias, both conscious and unconscious, can create inequalities at every stage of the employment cycle. Improving accountability and transparency through this legislation will go a long way to help shine a light on some of the discrepancies facing women in workplaces everywhere. Hiding the gender pay gap between men and women will no longer be possible, and that is a good thing. Nothing good is ever achieved by putting our heads in the sand and pretending that something isn't happening. Undervaluing women's work will no longer be acceptable. Not only will government be able to see exactly where inequalities occur but it will also be able to see where that's occurring for current and prospective employees. Employees will be able to monitor and see what's going on in their respective workplaces, and that is a good thing too. These are the additional transparency and accountability measures that this bill seeks to address.

This bill is an important first step, but there is much more that we want to do, not just broadly on workplace gender equality but also, specifically, with regard to how WGEA can help us understand and close the gender pay gap. For example, recommendation 3 of the review calls for the addition of a new gender equality standard, requiring employers with 500 or more employees to commit to and achieve specific targets, and report their progress against these targets to WGEA. This government is absolutely committed to this reform and to getting it right. This has been a long time coming. This recommendation has been around since that initial review, and this bill seeks to ensure it is implemented in a timely manner now.

The development of these gender equality targets requires close consultation with businesses and with other stakeholders, and meaningful metrics which are shown to help progress gender equality. One of the recommendations of the review was that the act should be amended to enable the mandatory collection of data that captures employees who identify as nonbinary. This has been collected on a voluntary basis since 2021. Again, this is a change the Labor government wants to make. It will bring this important piece of legislation in line with other Commonwealth standards such as those used by the Australian Bureau of Statistics when collecting data on gender. It will also enable a more fulsome picture of our workplace, one which will more acutely reflect Australian society. That's an important matter too. Our laws, like our parliament, must reflect the communities we represent and the communities we belong to. But this change needs to be done carefully, in close consultation with businesses and employees, and with representative and advocacy groups and members of the LGBTQIA+ community.

During the 2022 election, women across Australia voted for change. After a decade of Liberal government inaction, defunding of services, and general disregard and disrespect for women's call for change, the need action is more pressing than ever. Together with our new national strategy to achieve gender equality, and working in concert with Respect@Work, secure jobs, better pay, and improvements for family and gender equality legislation passed by this government, this bill will bring us closer to achieving our goal of being one of the best countries in the world for equality between men and women.

Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On 8 March, International Women's Day, my recently married daughter, Georgina Bell, had this to say on Facebook: 'Here's to strong women. May we know them. May we be them. May we raise them.' Powerful words. I'm proud of her, as I am of my wife, Catherine, for what they have done in the workplace and what they have done in business. My wife worked for many years in a male-dominated housing and construction industry, and held her own for 17 years as a regional manager.

This Workplace Gender Equality Amendment (Closing the Gender Pay Gap) Bill 2023 is important. It has consensus across the parliament. It implements a number of recommendations from the review of the Workplace Equality Act, undertaken while we, the coalition, were in government. There is no further regulatory burden for business under these proposed amendments, and that's important. It's vital that we know that, because we want business to be its best self, particularly at the moment, with cost-of-living pressures which, you could argue, impact women more unfairly than many men. No technical changes are required by employers in terms of reporting processes or the type of data provided to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency. (Time expired)

Debate interrupted.