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

Well, for 2,509 days, this backward-looking government, as exemplified by the last contribution, has completely failed women. While we live in hope that they might stop phoning it in from the 1950s, there is no indication that anything has changed during the most serious period we've been through economically, the first recession in 29 years, while we have been dealing with COVID-19. They have failed mothers by snapping back to a childcare system that is expensive and complex. They have failed older women, leaving them to face poverty and homelessness in retirement. They have failed young women in insecure and low-paying jobs by making so many of them ineligible for JobKeeper.

We know what those opposite think in their hearts about working women. They think that women's economic lives don't matter and that they would be better served in the home, as we heard from Senator Rennick just this week. But, unlike so many of those opposite, we don't hanker for a world where women are locked at home behind white picket fences. Unlike Senator Seselja, we don't think that women's and men's interests stand in opposition to one another; we think that both ought to be considered and that this is an absolute imperative in the public policy debate.

Labor want something more for Australian women. We want our daughters and our nieces to have every opportunity. We want them paid what they're worth on the day that they enter the workforce and every day subsequently. We want them to retire in dignity. If they decide to have children, we want them supported to combine a career with their parenting responsibilities. Is any of this at all laid out in any way in the government's plan for women or for the response to COVID-19? We wouldn't know very much, because the government rarely talks about women. Indeed, invited to do so today, we've just had five minutes from Senator Seselja where he could barely find it in himself to even mention the word. They show almost no interest in the economic lives of women.

It's not surprising, in some ways, that their policy settings have so little to offer Australian women when we think about the government's Expenditure Review Committee, which is comprised entirely of men. There is not a single woman sitting in that most important decision-making body. I recall on one occasion when I raised the issue of the unfair impact of tax arrangements on Australian women, then Treasurer Morrison responded with the patronising reply, 'We don't have pink forms and blue forms at tax time,' and that there was no need to consider the impact of their tax proposals on Australian women. The Liberal men of ERC may think that women's economic lives are a joke. I can tell you that that is not how we see our lives. Survey after survey indicates that women want so much more. Tragically, the first thing they want is respect—respect in the workplace and, I dare say, they'd like some respect from their representatives here in Canberra.

The COVID-19 period would have been a good opportunity for the Liberals to change direction, to come to grips with the very great differences between men and women's economic lives and the need for a policy that responds to the lives of women. The ABS has released data showing women have lost jobs since March at 1.3 times the rate that men have lost jobs, but we don't see any specific response to that or any indication that it matters. Part-time work and casual employment can be conveniently flexible, but often the result is that women are taking these jobs so they can balance their work and family lives. When it came to designing a response in COVID-19, what did the government do? They constructed JobKeeper in such a way that so many people in casual work were excluded, and so many of them were women.

There is an opportunity now to create something better. We don't want a snapback to an unfair world for women. We don't want a snapback to a world where women earn 14 per cent less than men. We don't want to snap back to a world where women retire with 47 per cent of the super balances of men. We don't want to snap back to a world where women's career possibilities are constrained because child care is not available or affordable. We don't want a snapback to one of the most gendered labour markets in the world. This crisis presents a perfect opportunity to actually build something better for Australian women, and it's a shame the government appears entirely uninterested. (Time expired)