Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Attorney-General (Senator Brandis) and the Minister for Employment (Senator Cash) to questions without notice asked by Senators McAllister and Cameron today relating to the annual wage review conducted by the Fair Work Commission.

I rise to take note of the answers given by Senator Brandis and Senator Cash to questions asked by me and Senator Cameron. This may be a first for question time: this afternoon, Senator Cash has been unable to answer a basic question that is relevant to not just one but both of her portfolios. You will recall that Senator Cameron asked Senator Cash how the minimum wage would impact on the gender pay gap. But, despite being the Minister for Employment and Minister for Women, Senator Cash basically ducked the question. She named 16 per cent as the current gender pay gap, but that is just one measure, and the same agency that she oversees cites a much higher number for the gender pay gap because the gender pay gap, when you consider total full-time remuneration, is actually 23.1 per cent. It means that men are earning, on average, more than $26,000 a year more than women, and I note also that this gap is much higher in the private sector than in the public sector.

But the big issue is that the answer she gave also completely missed the point about men's work and women's work. It is not the case that, if we wish to consider closing the gender pay gap, we need to look at higher income people, because the truth is that one of the key drivers of the gender pay gap is occupational and industrial segregation. If you want to unpack that and put it in normal language, it means that women are far more likely to work in low-paid jobs within a particular industry or within industries that have very, very low rates of pay—and the minimum wage is absolutely relevant to the take-home pay for those women and it is absolutely relevant to the gender pay gap. Thirty per cent of the gender pay gap arises from industrial and occupational segregation, and those are stats that, again, come from the minister's own agency. When we look to the future, the new, high-paid jobs that are anticipated to come into the economy seem likely to be created in industries that are dominated by men, but the new jobs that are likely to be taken by women are part time, casualised and in very, very low paid, caring industries traditionally occupied by women. Lifting the minimum wage absolutely helps to close this gap, and it is astonishing that the Minister for Women would point us away from low-paid women when we are talking about the gender pay gap and ask us to consider better paid women. The money that we are talking about might not matter that much for a partner in a law firm, but it matters for the people on the minimum wage and it matters for their families. Many of these people are in care work, caring for our ageing population, for people in our community with a disability and for children—and care work is highly feminised and underpaid.

I had a look at some of the other, more thoughtful submissions to the Fair Work Commission around this question of the minimum wage, and I took a look, you will be interested to know, Madam Deputy President, at the submission made by United Voice—because they actually do listen to real people. They do listen to the women who are working in care work and in low-paid, feminised jobs. They quote testimony from a woman named Ruth, who is a cleaner in outer suburban Sydney. She says: 'Recently I had to find the money for a deposit for three excursions. I had to go without in groceries that week to make sure we had the money.' That is the reality of the low paid in this country. This is a situation where a family, to meet the basic objectives of schooling, be part of the school community and participate in an excursion, had to go without groceries. That is disgraceful and it is astonishing that, under these circumstances, where wages are flat and where so many families are doing it tough, this government has refused to provide support for an increase to the minimum wage. I am, frankly, shocked that, in a week where the government has faced so much criticism about its heartless approach to penalty rates and its persistence in offering a $50 billion tax cut to our largest businesses and to our financial institutions, it is unable to come to grips with the seriousness of this issue and the challenges faced by low-wage people in Australia.