Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Walsh for her question and for her years of representing low-paid workers, in particular women, through her service in the labour and union movement.

This government is committed to gender equality—not as an afterthought because we have a women problem—but because we understand gender equality as a core economic imperative that benefits all of us. This government recognises that there are structural challenges to achieving gender equality that need structural responses. There's been a decade of ignoring these structural barriers to gender equality, and women have been bearing the cost, including through lower pay, poor conditions and chronic labour shortages in feminised sectors.

We are getting on with the job of fixing this through our workplace relations settings, investments in cheaper childcare, modernising PPL schemes, reforms to close the gender pay gap and investments to end violence against women. These are structural reforms to fix the systems that are not working in the interests of women.

We're putting gender equality at the centre of workplace relations by making gender equality and job security objects of the Fair Work Act and strengthening access to flexible working arrangements. We will also establish a Pay Equity Expert Panel and a Care Community Sector Expert Panel in the Fair Work Commission. We will increase pay transparency by prohibiting pay secrecy clauses and strengthening gender pay gap reporting. We will prohibit sexual harassment under the Fair Work Act—a recommendation of the Respect@Work report, which we are implementing in full. While our workplace relations reforms will lift women's wages, our investment in cheaper child care will make early childhood education and care more accessible, and our PPL reforms will give families more choice when caring for their youngest family members.