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

My question is to the Minister for Workplace Relations. What progress has the Albanese Labor government made toward closing the gender pay gap? What reforms have contributed to this?

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

I really want to thank the member for Swan, someone who has been committed to acting on closing the gender pay gap not just since she got here but right back to her time in the resources industry. She has always been so strong on it.

The data last week showed that the gender pay gap is now the lowest it's ever been on record, down at 12 per cent. It had averaged 15.4 per cent under the previous government and is now down to 12. That's at the same time that a whole lot of women have been entering the workforce; more than 330,000 extra women are now in jobs since the election. Interestingly, 57 per cent of those new jobs are full time under this government.

It hasn't happened by accident or by coincidence. It's because of a deliberate design feature of this government wanting not only for wages to get moving but also for that to happen in a way that the gender pay gap is closing. Some of the actions have been obviously targeted at pay and pay for women, like fixing the bargaining system to get wages moving, particularly in feminised industries, which is what we did with the Secure Jobs, Better Pay legislation. We also changed the law in that same bill to put gender equality at the heart of the Fair Work Commission's decision-making. We backed and we funded the 15 per cent pay rise for aged-care workers. An overwhelming majority of workers in that industry are women. We also banned pay secrecy clauses. Many people here from all sorts of jobs know the exact connection in how pay secrecy has been used so that women in a workplace don't find out how much more their colleagues are earning than they are. That's now banned because of legislation put through by this government—opposed, I might add, by those opposite.

But there's also a second group of changes, not only the ones that were directly aimed at wages but a set of changes directly aimed at improving participation: expanding access to flexible work arrangements, making early childhood education and child care cheaper and more accessible for 96 per cent of families and delivering the biggest boost to paid parental leave since it was introduced. All of these measure mean that not only have we taken action to make sure that women are paid more; we've made it easier for women who want to return to the workforce and participate in the workforce to do so.

That now means the average woman working full time in Australia earns $135 a week more than when we came to office and, under the tax plan, will get a tax cut of almost $2,000. That's how we've managed to get the gender pay gap to the lowest level that's ever been recorded. But, as far as this government's concerned, that job is not yet done. There's more to go— (Time expired)