Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

We welcome the significant progress achieved in recent weeks and particularly welcome the acknowledgement by all countries that Millennium Development Goals need to recognise and have a stand-alone goal for gender equality once those MDGs expire in 2015. I would like to place on record my thanks to all of the women who were involved in negotiating that great outcome.

I wish to express some concern about a short statement in the minister's response just tabled, where she notes: 'Without addressing gender inequity in all its forms, we cannot expect meaningful progress in other spheres of development.' On that note, I wish to place on record the Greens' extreme concern at the mooted proposal to abolish gender workplace reporting requirements currently overseen by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency. There has been quite a lot of talk about the fact that these reforms will be either watered down or abolished entirely and lifted from their current application to workplaces of 100 employees up to workplaces of 1,000 employees, which would cover some five per cent of workplaces across the country. You cannot fix the gender pay gap by hiding it, so clearly we need to keep gathering this data—if the minister is serious about tackling gender inequality in all of its forms. I would urge the minister and those on the government side to reflect on those words and keep these very important gender workplace reporting mechanisms on our books.

I also wish to place on record my concern with the finance minister's recent statement that he believes women in parliament are a 'side issue'. Again, if we have professed concern about gender inequality in all of its forms then I would ask the finance minister to reflect on his very inappropriate remarks about the representation of women in this place.

I conclude my remarks by addressing and putting on record our concerns about cuts to foreign aid funding. If Australia is playing, as it should, a strong role in the international community in supporting women's rights and supporting equality for women, then how on earth can we achieve that by cutting a projected $4½ billion from overseas aid funding in the forward estimates? That makes a mockery of the commitments that Australia was part of making, in recent weeks, at the convention on the status of women, and I would again urge the government to not take that step of cutting this crucial funding that will, in fact, help the status of women across the country.