James Purser [INSERT WITTY CATCHPHRASE HERE]

My question is to the Prime Minister. Will the Prime Minister explain the government’s investments in health, especially the importance of primary health care?

You have done very well.

I want to raise the issue of how schools are classified as being disadvantaged schools, and I do that pursuant to last year’s list of schools under the national partnership agreement. It was interesting that my colleague the member for Werriwa had some concerns, and I recall him asking a question of the minister at that time. One of the local schools known well to me, Albion Park Rail Public School, was missing from the list, and the school requested that I take up the issue with the minister. Under that agreement states were to have had flexibility to nominate schools from outside the provisional list, outside the nationally agreed methodology, if they could provide a more accurate identification of low-SES schools using more detailed state based data, so I was involved in continuous representations, both at the federal and state level, without much success. Let me quote from the principal about this particular school, which I think on the data would show how disadvantaged it is:

My school has a 13% Aboriginal population … 8% NESB students … 13% of our school has physical, intellectual or mental health diagnosis. The area includes Government Housing, Aboriginal Housing and Emergency Housing. My school’s SaCC (Tongarra Family Cottage) caters for an Aboriginal Playgroup, Autism Playgroup, parenting courses and two young mothers groups with mums under 18 years old.

Regrettably, I was not successful in having Albion Park Rail Public School listed under the program. In that regard I welcome the announcement made by the Minister for Education this week in which she has said that an additional $11 million on top of the $2½ billion already allocated to help disadvantaged schools would flow through and that data from the My School website indicated there were an additional 110 schools that would have fallen through the cracks and missed out on additional funding. The minister said that without the My School information, the federal government would never have known these 110 schools had large numbers of students that required the additional assistance.

I welcome the announcement to cross-reference state data with federal data. I think there are obvious statistical discrepancies, such as the comparison between a local school, Bulli High School, and Trinity Grammar—and of course we all wait for the information about resource allocation, which ultimately can only stand to benefit students in disadvantaged schools.

On several occasions in parliament I have taken the opportunity to raise the issue of youth unemployment and what can be done in a practical way to address the matter and specifically how, in our region of the Illawarra, we can encourage local employers to provide our young people with apprenticeship opportunities.

For the past several years I have chaired a local Illawarra apprenticeship committee which has been able to shine a light on our local challenges. Our research showed that many small to medium sized businesses found the financial cost of taking on a young person prohibitive in the first couple of years when they were still learning their trade. We have been able through the project to get the support of the state government in arranging pre-apprenticeship courses through our local TAFE colleges. In this way, employers who took on a young person at the completion of this course were employing the equivalent of a first year trained apprentice. We have been successful in placing over 400 young people through this innovative project.

The former federal government funded the apprenticeship coordinator position currently held by Ian Nicholls and auspiced by our local Illawarra Business Chamber. The recent federal government decision to provide an enhanced Apprentice Kickstart Bonus was the impetus for my approach to the editor of our local newspaper, the Illawarra Mercury, to see what assistance the Mercury could provide in publicising this important initiative. This resulted in our committee, in conjunction with our local paper, the Mercury, running a joint local campaign since 19 December last year under the banner ‘Project Kickstart’. An editorial on that day explained the features of the campaign:

Our aim, in concert with the Government, is to find places for 500 apprentices before March next year. Project Kickstart is extraordinarily ambitious, yet it goes to the heart of one of the greatest challenges the Illawarra faces.

With unemployment dancing around 10 per cent we are by definition a disadvantaged region. But on closer examination the jobless numbers reveal a much more horrendous rate of 30 per cent for those people up to the age of 19 searching for work. Combined with a relatively low school retention rate, a clear picture emerges of where this community needs to be giving serious focus.

For weeks after the launch of the campaign, the Mercury ran stories of local young people looking for an apprenticeship—people like Michael Brajkovic, Dale Baker, Dimitar Klimoski, Benjamin Coulstock, Logan Hartley—and several stories of committed employers, like Geoff Bailey from Jamberoo Native Nursery, who were keen to take on a young person. This culminated in a front-page story featuring a local young person, Tim Bonanno, who was employed as an apprentice by Matt Cahill from Wollongong Collision Repairs.

Under the banner headline ‘Our campaign: give a kid a go’ the Mercury ran a special edition of their regular supplement My Career on Wednesday, 20 January. It featured the portraits of about 120 young people and a short statement from them indicating their reasons for wanting an apprenticeship and the areas that they were interested in. In the words of the editor: ‘We appeal to the region’s businesses to make a real difference to the lives of these kids. It’s time to give them a go.’

Our committee met last Friday to review the progress of the campaign, and early figures show how successful it has been to date. By mid-January this year, 236 young 15- to 19-year-olds had commenced their apprenticeship. Our TAFE representatives at the meeting reported an increase of up to 30 per cent in some popular apprenticeship courses like bakery and hairdressing. I am confident we are going to reach our target of 500, and hopefully more, by the beginning of March 2010.

I take this opportunity to thank the editor of the Mercury, Stuart Howie, and all the Mercury staff who have been involved in one way or another in this innovative community based campaign. It is a fantastic example of how we can use our local media to address and find solutions to local challenges facing our community. It is certainly the best organised community campaign that I have been involved with in my time as the member for Throsby. It makes you feel good to know you have made a difference in some small way to the life chances of young people in our region—hopefully 500 or more of them by the end of this campaign.

My question is to the Prime Minister. Will the Prime Minister update the House on the importance of a market based emissions trading system as the best method to transition to a low-pollution economy of the future?

A while back I blogged about the fact that the Royal Mail had shutdown a third-party provider of post code information Ernest Marples. Well as with all things there were knock on effects.
 

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My question is to the Minister for Defence Personnel, Materiel and Science and Minister Assisting the Minister for Climate Change. Why does Australia need to take action on climate change and what are the most effective and efficient methods of so doing?

I want to begin by commending the report from the Standing Committee on Employment and Workplace Relations entitled Making it fairwhich was only tabled yesterday evening, so in my contribution tonight I am not going to do full justice to the very comprehensive overview of this very critical issue. But I do want to say that I think this report will stand the test of time and that it will be another milestone in that eternal quest for pay justice for women. I did read the foreword, in which the chair writes:

Pay equity or the lack of it was one of the issues that sparked my interest in politics and social justice. As a young woman I was outraged that someone could or would be paid less for their work because of their gender.

It angers me that over 30 years later, despite some progress, this is still the case.

I think in those words the chair of the committee, the member for Hasluck, has summed up the feelings of many women who have campaigned for a long time about this critical issue. I must say that in our previous lives before we were elected as members of this parliament both the member for Hasluck and I had lots of ongoing campaigns about this very important issue.

I think the fact that we now have this report kind of opens a new era in terms of looking at some proactive strategies for the future, because we have realised some of the limitations in the approach that up until now had placed a lot of the emphasis on trying to secure justice through the IR system. So I want to commend her and members of her committee in producing a report of great substance. There is a wealth of information in there that will make for fascinating reading. I think it is very important that the issue of pay equity is now on the mainstream national political agenda.

The report has 63 recommendations. I have only had the opportunity to skim through them but I have found them to be very comprehensive, strategic and yet very practical. It is clear that, 40 years on, we need a wide-ranging proactive strategy to end this historical injustice that remains so entrenched despite our best efforts to deal with the issue over four decades and more. As the member for Moreton said, it is probably now the third wave of feminists who are looking at this issue with fresh eyes. I think the committee has done a fine job in raising the profile of this issue onto our national agenda.

We all know that 40 years ago the first federal equal pay case was prosecuted by the ACTU and it established the principle of equal pay for equal work. We all thought that was going to be nirvana. Despite our hopes that it would put an end to the enshrined inequities that have plagued our wage-fixing system, we saw over a period of time that the narrow definition of ‘equal pay for equal work’—how do you define ‘equal work’?—was not going to be the big breakthrough that we all hoped for.

It is interesting though that, during the war, the contribution of women was recognised and their wages were raised from 54 per cent to 75 per cent of the male basic wage. It was suddenly realised that women were an integral part of our economy, but when the war was over the injustices resurfaced. I was lucky in that when I began teaching in 1969 I was the beneficiary of an earlier ruling by the New South Wales commission in 1958 that provided equal pay for teachers. I had always been in a profession where if you were doing equal work you were remunerated equally, but it did not compensate for the fact that all the women were congregated on the lower levels of the pay scales and all the top hierarchy were men—a very common situation in many professions.

When it became clear that the principle of equal pay for equal work was unable to advance the interests of women across the board, because they were congregated in female dominated occupations, it became clear that the narrow definition of ‘equal work’ became a barrier in our quest for wage justice, so that principle was expanded in 1972 to the concept of equal pay for work of equal value. Yet again we found in practice that the IR system had difficulty in defining objective measures by which to assess work of equal value, for it was a fact that historically women’s skills and experience had been undervalued and not given the same accreditation as those of men.

I remember thinking at the time: how did one explain why a skilled female machinist earned substantially less than a male who fixed the machine when it needed repairing? Why was one set of skills credentialled, given recognition and well remunerated at the end of an apprenticeship and the other set of skills—those of the female machinist—not valued because they were never formally recognised through our vocational system? Even today I find it hard to find an explanation for why an apprentice hairdresser is earning $80 a week less than an apprentice builder.

Pay inequity was an entrenched fact of life embedded in our awards and in wage relativities prior to the 1970s. However, ironically, when we looked at how we were faring against comparable OECD countries, the fact that we had a fairly regulated centralised IR system underpinned by awards meant that we as a nation were able to claim that our outcomes were pretty good in comparison to those of other countries. So we did well in closing the gap at the minimum rates of pay.

Then we had award restructuring and the minimum rates adjustment, which for the first time allowed us to compare women’s wages in certain occupations to others. The metal industry award was then set as the standard. But, regrettably, there were too few cases pushed under those principles. I do recall at the time that librarians and childcare workers used the opportunity to win good increases for their members.

Unlike in other countries, pay equity issues in Australia to date have largely been addressed by wage-fixing tribunals within the IR system rather than by direct legislative measures. However well we did within the scope of the regulated industrial relations system, it was once you stepped outside that area of regulation that the gap really became very problematic.

So where do we stand 40 years later? The last lot of data I looked at by the ABS for average earnings for women showed that it was $729.80 a week compared to men’s earnings of $1,110. That is $380 more for men or almost $20,000 over the course of the year. It adds up, as the report says, to a 17 per cent wage gap between men and women. In traditionally male dominated sectors like mining, manufacturing and construction you would expect that men would do better but what really shocked me was that even in female dominated sectors like health and community services and education the progress has been appallingly slow. In education—the field that I came from; a female dominated sector—women’s average weekly earnings in May 2009 were $841 compared to men’s $1,055.

So even in those sectors things are really bad and, as the report points out, the gap between men and women’s wages at ordinary-time earnings are now at the highest level they have been in 21 years. That is a consequence of the deregulated system that we had under the Howard government and the focus on individual contracts. So it is clear to me that there are factors outside of the control of the IR purview of wage rates. There are factors that need to be addressed beyond the IR system alone. It needs more than test cases—as important as they can be—to address wage inequity. And that is why the recommendations in this report are so important.

I do not want to underestimate the importance of historical test cases and I do want to commend our government for its support of an impending major test case on pay equity for people who work in the community sector. This sector employs more than 200,000 employees—87 per cent of whom are women. I cannot think of a more deserving group of workers entitled to substantial wage justice. These are the workers who keep our communities together but, to our common shame, they have been poorly paid for what has now become for many a labour of love.

These are the workers who provide accommodation and support for people with disabilities and who run crisis accommodation, counselling services, and home and family day care. It is scandalous that these workers at the coalface, working for our communities, currently can earn up to 30 per cent less than those people in the public sector and the public service doing comparable work. So to that extent I think this impending test case will be another important historic step along the path. But the report rightly points to a whole range of factors that need to be addressed in a comprehensive strategy. We all know that women’s skills—particularly in the caring occupations, because somehow that is seen to be women’s work—are not properly valued.

We know that women receive a lower share of discretionary payments, like overtime and bonuses, that have been outside the scope of industrial regulation and despite our best efforts we do not seem to have made any substantial inroads there. We know that occupational industrial segregation has an impact. We know the impact of family responsibilities. We know that because women work in part-time and casual employment that that has a bearing. I think the report also shows that the issue of the invisibility of the pay gap at the workplace level is an important factor, and that is addressed in one of the recommendations, which suggests that government ought to lead the way by doing regular workplace audits.

So there are a whole host of factors that need to be considered. In the chair’s foreword she says:

From the outset of the Committee’s Inquiry we agreed that we needed to go beyond past reports because we wanted substance to our recommendations, to recommend legislative reform if that was required, to use best practise examples that worked and to build on successful initiatives in states, territories and individual workplaces and internationally.

To the chair and the members of the committee I want to repeat, as someone who has spent a lot of years of her life actively involved in the eternal quest for justice for women, the chair’s own words:

Some will say that we should wait – for what I am not sure, divine intervention?

It got to the stage where it seemed that nothing we had tried, while we were making progress at a snail’s pace, comprehended the totality of factors that contribute to this historical legacy of inequity. I want to say to the member for Hasluck that this is a seminal report. It will open a new chapter in the quest for equal pay. I am sure that many groups, particularly women’s groups, are really looking forward to reading this comprehensive report, full of incredible data, historical context and practical, strategic and proactive recommendations. As I said, I have only had time to glance at it in a very cursory manner, but it is going on my pile of Christmas reading. I am looking forward to reading and digesting the contents of this substantial report. I thank all our colleagues for placing this critical issue on the national political agenda.

I take the opportunity this morning to advise my parliamentary colleagues of my intention to retire at the next federal election. It has indeed been a great privilege to represent the people of the Throsby electorate since first elected in 2001. It is a wonderful community to represent in the national parliament. I and my electorate staff have worked diligently over the years to represent their many and diverse interests and needs and to deal with their concerns as effectively as possible. We do not always win each case we pursue, but we always try our best.

We have campaigned locally over the years on many issues of importance, such as doctor shortages, dental care, youth unemployment, apprenticeships and funding for education and training, to name a few. I am so pleased that, since the election of the Rudd Labor government, we have seen a remarkable investment of funds and resources locally to address the neglect of the past. The benefits of these investments, in the hundreds of millions of dollars. will be with us for many decades ahead.

At the last federal election Labor recorded a 65 primary vote in my electorate of Throsby—the highest in New South Wales. I am sure that all who placed their faith in the election of a federal Labor government can already see the tangible benefits that have resulted in such a short space of time. Our successes are the result of collective efforts. In that regard I want to place on the record my sincere thanks to my electorate staff—Idalina, Michel, Sarah and Danielle—and to their back-up relief staff: Annie, Ben and Brian. My thanks go to my loyal supporters in the branches and to all who worked on the election campaigns and polling booths over the years. I have been sustained by the comradeship of my local union colleagues. In particular I want to mention Andy Gillespie, Garry Keane and Arthur Rorris.

It will be sad to move on but the time is right. My first appointment as a teacher was way back in 1969. My 40 years in the workforce means that I can retire well satisfied that I have made a contribution to public life in a variety of positions. But of course there is still some unfinished business between now and the next election which will keep me fully occupied. Among the issues are the establishment of the promised Medicare/Centrelink office in Warrawong, which was taken away by the Howard government, the finalisation of the CPRS and advocacy of the cogeneration plant at the local steelworks—just to name a few. In conclusion, I want to thank the community for the privilege it has afforded me in representing them in the federal parliament.