Nita Green (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator Askew, for that contribution. I know it's shared with senators on this side as well. We appreciate you addressing the Senate on that today. The Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Secure Jobs, Better Pay) Bill 2022 is designed to ensure that people in female dominated professions, like health care, aged care, disability support and the early childhood education sector, get the pay rise and support that they so desperately deserve. But it's these changes that those opposite in question time yesterday deemed radical and, in the other place, referred to as 'extreme'. It's very important for us to understand what is in this bill and how it will improve gender equality.

Those opposite call these changes radical, including gender equality and job security as objects of the act—and I don't see anything extreme or radical about that—and also limiting the use of fixed-term contracts to give genuine fixed-term arrangements. Again, I don't see how this is incredibly radical but that is the proposition being put by those opposite. This bill introduces a statutory equal remuneration principle. That's right: equal pay to close the gender pay gap. How crazy and extreme!

The bill also includes prohibiting pay secrecy clauses, something that we know has contributed to the gender pay gap for many, many years. The bill includes providing stronger access to flexible working arrangements, desperately needed by women returning to work. And the bill makes sure that we're providing stronger protections against workplace discrimination for the protected attributes of gender identity, intersex status and breastfeeding.

The bill also does this very important thing, which those opposite don't want to talk about. It implements recommendation 28 of the Respect@Work report—a report they let sit on a table—to prohibit sexual harassment at work. Well, if this is radical and extreme, it's for those on the opposite side to explain way.