Marielle Smith (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm really happy to be contributing to this debate today. It's a really important debate and a really important topic, particularly today, on International Women's Day. I'm particularly happy to be able to contribute to this debate from the government benches, as part of the Albanese Labor government. We agree that women in Australia of course deserve genuine progress on safety, health and economic security, but do you know how that happens? It happens only through the long-term, systemic, structural changes that can be made from government.

If we need any evidence of this, we only need look at the past decade, where no amount of protest or opposition was enough to stop Tony Abbott when he appointed himself as the Minister for Women, in a cabinet with only one other woman. It wasn't enough to stop the Liberals trying to force those experiencing domestic violence to raid their superannuation accounts. It wasn't enough to stop the then government, now opposition, leaving the Respect@Work report to gather dust on a shelf, and it wasn't enough to stop the plummet in staff numbers at the Office for Women. No. Opposition, as loud as it may have been, wasn't enough. It wasn't enough to stop us going from 23rd to 50th for overall gender equality, in the Gender Gap Index. That's what happened under the previous government. Do you know how you change it? Do you know how you turn that around? You do it from within government, by forming government, not from opposition, not from the noisy stuff on the sidelines.

Being in government requires adult decision-making processes, decisions which require you to pay for things—cost them, prioritise them and deliver them—and the Labor Party does deliver. When we're in government, we deliver. Indeed, I would say we are the only party in this place that could stand here with any meaningful credibility and say that we have delivered real, long-term, systemic changes which have made a significant difference to gender equity and equality in Australia. We've done this because we believe in gender equality. We fight for it, but we are also the embodiment of it. This is the first government in our nation's history which is majority female, and it shows. It shows in what we're doing. It shows in how we're acting. It shows in what we're prioritising.

This Labor government is not the first reforming Labor government on the question of gender equality. Every time we've held government, we've made significant strides to make this place, this country, a better, fairer, safer and more equal place for women, whether it was the Whitlam government introducing no-fault divorce and supporting equal pay, the Hawke and Keating governments introducing the Sex Discrimination Act, or the Rudd and Gillard governments introducing Commonwealth paid parental leave and the National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children. Every time Labor is in government, we deliver for women—not from the sidelines but from these benches—by making the tough decisions, the difficult decisions, that prioritise women's equality and equity.

Our government, the Albanese government, will be no exception. We're one year in, and already we're embedding women's economic equality as a core economic imperative, making significant investments in early childhood education to boost productivity and women's ability to participate in the workforce, knowing that their children are well cared for and that they can afford to make the decision to go back to work. We're extending paid parental leave, progressively, up to six months. Importantly, we're also making it fairer so that more families can access paid parental leave, including single-parent families. We're establishing the Women's Economic Equality Taskforce to provide advice to government and to commence work on a national strategy to achieve gender equality. We've supported a pay increase for aged-care and low-paid workers, who overwhelmingly are women.

We've led negotiations with the states and territories to finalise a National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children, and we've backed this up with funding of $1.7 billion to implement the plan, including $83 million for consent and respectful relationship education and $100 million for crisis and transitional housing options for women and children fleeing domestic and family violence. We've legislated paid family and domestic violence leave, which was a huge and proud moment in this parliament. And we're funding and legislating to fully implement all 55 recommendations of the Respect@Work report.

In addition to this, when it comes to women's health we've established a National Women's Advisory Council to tackle medical misogyny. You don't have to dig too deep into our healthcare system to see how it disadvantages women. But the truth is that if you want to make these big structural changes you have to do it as a party of government. There's only one party in this place that's delivered for women on these big structural issues and made meaningful strides towards gender equality. It's Labor, Labor, Labor.