Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Before beginning, I need to seek leave to speak a little beyond 10 minutes, certainly not longer than 20.

Leave granted.

This evening I rise to mark the occasion of International Women’s Day. International Women’s Day is a time to celebrate women’s achievements and their contribution to society. It is also a time to take stock of what remains to be done to ensure that all women are able to live full and productive lives, in their own interest and in the interest of their families and communities. It is a time to remember both how far we have come and how far there is yet to go in the quest for equality and empowerment.

So today in recognition of International Women’s Day, I want to speak briefly about women’s workforce participation and the contribution that women’s paid work has made to their own empowerment, to the financial security of their families and to the productive capacity of this nation. I also want to touch on the barriers that remain to women’s full participation in the Australian workforce—barriers that constrain women’s personal development, limit their capacity to provide a secure economic future for themselves and their families and restrict their contribution to Australia’s productivity; barriers that see Australian women with significantly lower incomes than men throughout their working lives and with woefully inadequate retirement incomes.

As I said in my first speech in this chamber, there is no doubt that access to paid work and the benefits that flow from it are central to individual wellbeing. This fact has long been recognised by Labor feminists and is increasingly central to Indigenous activism as well. For women as for men, access to work under reasonable conditions and for fair reward is vital to the individual’s social and economic wellbeing. It is equally valuable to those who depend on them. Welfare payments and tax benefits may provide immediate relief to families at risk of financial hardship. However, as the OECD recognises, increasing maternal employment is often a more effective means of raising family incomes and reducing the risk of child poverty. This should not surprise us. We know that the surest route to child poverty is living in a household without an adult breadwinner. Children in dual-earner families have a built-in level of security that children in single-earner families lack. Living in a dual-earner household offers children greater protection in the event of parental separation, retrenchment or illness.

Little wonder that on average in the OECD children in households without an adult in work are three times more likely to grow up in poverty than children in one-earner households, and children in one-earner households are three times more likely to grow up in poverty than children in dual-earner households. That bears repeating: living in a dual-earner household reduces a child’s risk of growing up in poverty by a factor of three compared with households with only one breadwinner. In short, women who go back to work are helping protect their children from financial hardship just as surely as they are advancing their own social and economic wellbeing. As I have said, increasing women’s employment has also contributed much to Australia’s economic growth in recent decades. One such study by Goldman Sachs estimates that progress in closing the gender gap in the employment rate has already added a massive 22 per cent to Australia’s GDP since 1974. The same study estimates that closing the gap between male and female employment could boost GDP by a further 11 per cent.

Senator Coonanraised this report with the Productivity Commission during the last estimates, and I commend her for doing so. While the chairman of the Productivity Commission acknowledged that a very significant boost to GDP could come from closing the gender employment gap, he also suggested that the gap may be partly explained by women’s preferences. In relation to the relatively low employment rate of women of child-bearing age in Australia the chairman referred to not wanting to drag women out of their homes. The implication of such a statement is clear—mothers stay at home because that is where they want to be. But, as I said during the estimates hearing in question, this reference to choice is highly problematic. As I pointed out to the commissioner, the results of major consultations conducted in cities and regional areas across Australia last year by the National Foundation for Australian Women strongly suggest that there are a great many women who would prefer to work or do more work if they had the support needed to do so.

Talk of women’s preferences sits uneasily with the Productivity Commission’s own research which demonstrates that women’s employment rates vary dramatically depending not only on the age and number of their children but also on their level of education, their wage-earning potential, their marital status, their partner’s employment and their country of origin. Is all this variation to be explained by women’s preferences and by the fact that some groups of women have a greater desire to stay home than others or is it also that workplace culture and public policy combine to make work less attractive for some women than for others? Is it choice or is it simply that work offers too few rewards for too many women?

Improvements to child care and training programs, more flexible working arrangements and greater pay equity are three possible mechanisms for facilitating women’s workforce participation. These issues were raised time and time again by participants in the consultations undertaken by the National Foundation for Australian Women. As many senators will be aware, some of these issues have also been addressed by recent parliamentary reports, most notably the Senate Standing Committee on Education, Employment and Workplace Relations report on the provision of child care and the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment and Workplace Relations report on pay equity. The ACTU has welcomed the recommendations of the committee report on pay equity and has launched an equal pay alliance. This alliance is composed of 135 community and business organisations which have pledged to make pay equity a key campaign issue this year.

In this context I note that the Goldman Sachs report suggests that easy gains in terms of increasing women’s employment may already have been achieved in Australia. To maximise further gains, a more focused and uniform strategy to increase female engagement with the workforce is going to be required that encompasses things like a renewed emphasis on pay and reducing disincentives to work for second income earners within the tax welfare system, further improvements to childcare arrangements, more flexible work arrangements and measures to encourage women to take up more career orientated roles in a wider range of industries more in keeping with the talents and qualifications many women already possess. In terms of meaningful incentives to increase female participation in recent years the report concludes that the biggest policy developments have been the boost to childcare funding resulting from increases to the childcare tax rebate and the introduction of paid parental leave from 2011, which are both Rudd Labor initiatives.

Labor has introduced changes to the Fair Work Act, which should help address pay equity issues, including the right to equal pay for work of comparable value and a special bargaining stream for low-paid workers. The Australian government has also commissioned a review of the Equal Opportunity in the Workplace Act, and the consultation report for this review was released last month. Recommendations arising from this review will no doubt address some of the barriers to women’s workforce participation, including combating direct employment discrimination and providing incentives for the adoption of more family-friendly practices in our workplaces. As the consultation report identifies, many barriers to women’s participation, including childcare support and the tax treatment of second wage earners, lie largely outside the scope of this review.

In its recent report on the economic and social necessity of increasing workforce participation, the Business Council of Australia noted that a broad range of policy settings impact on women’s workforce participation. The report identified women of child-bearing age as one of the most likely targets for increasing participation, noting that Australia ranks a miserable 20th in the OECD on this score. The BCA report agreed that improvements to child care and the tax treatment of second wage earners are both important strategies for enhancing women’s workforce participation, along with more flexible workplace employment options.

A recent OECD cross country review of strategies to improve the labour market performance of developed countries reached similar conclusions. The OECD review noted that, in recent decades, the employment rate for women has increased significantly in developed countries. This has been an important factor in improving labour market performance overall. The review also found that, to face the looming challenge of ageing populations, it will be necessary to further increase employment rates, including those of women. The report concurred with the view that, to this point, gains in women’s employment have been made relatively easily mainly as a result of improvements in women’s education. However the OECD review found that further gains in women’s employment will require more focused strategies that reduce disincentives for women to work and encourage the diffusion of family-friendly employment practices.

The report highlights that variations in women’s employment rates between countries cannot be explained solely by cultural differences in attitudes to childrearing; they are also a result of different public policy settings. This helps to explain the positive correlation between employment rates and fertility rates in developed countries. For example, women in Scandinavia are both more likely to work and more likely to have children than their sisters in Italy, Spain or Japan. It seems that when women are not forced to choose between childrearing and paid work, most will choose to do both. In other words, we can have both more children and more working mothers, a double benefit in terms of our ageing population, if we get the policy settings right.

The OECD report identifies a range of strategies that have a proven capacity to improve women’s employment rate, including fairer tax treatment of second-earners, childcare support, paid parental leave and access to part-time work. These kinds of strategies are found to have positive impacts on women’s part-time and full-time employment, on the employment of different groups of women and on women’s wages. Importantly, however, some strategies have greater impacts than others. There is a wealth of international expertise in this field that I think it would pay Australia to draw upon.       In this field, as in so many others, we need to work smarter rather than harder if we are to achieve our goals. And when ordinary women across Australia, the OECD, the ACTU, the Business Council of Australia and investment giants like Goldman Sachs are all singing from the same song sheet, it may pay us to listen.

I hope that further work will be done soon by the Productivity Commission to identify what specific public policy settings will most effectively improve both the female employment rate in Australia and the productivity of women in our workplaces. Much more can be done to ensure that all women in Australia can choose to have both children and a career. On International Women’s Day, I conclude by emphasising once again that the pursuit of this feminist agenda will benefit not only women themselves but also their families and the nation.