Maitland Women

Media Release

9 March 2007

What would you hear if you asked most of my political opponents what they are going to do to give political support to women?  Laughter, I suspect, or if they could contain that, just resounding silence.  Instead, they are embroiled in childish, headline grabbing disputes about political signage, or they whinge about the origami of political brochures they throw like confetti at local householders or the deceptive non-disclosure of preferences.  But the fact is that women make up more than half of the population of Maitland, and while they carry on I have no intention of ignoring the issues that women from my electorate have raised with me.  My opponents do so at their peril.

Last week another report was released, this time by ANU, confirming yet again that Australia is going backwards in gender equity, that the pay gap between men and women has widened and that there has been a "dismantling of women's policy machinery and the silencing of the women's NGO sector", and criticising the NSW Labor Government's downgrading of its Department of Women.  It is no surprise that the report concludes that neither major political party is much committed to reversing these negative trends.

What must we do to have our fearless leaders put women back on the agenda?  We know that women's working lives are characterised by broken patterns of workforce participation due to child raising, by underutilisation of their skills, and by entrenched wage discrimination.  We know that an estimated 475,000 Australians now perform the role of informal primary carer of people with disabilities or older people, and that over 70 per cent of these carers are women.  Knowing this, should we be surprised that Australian women are not experiencing the financial and other benefits that flow from continuity of employment, and consequently lack financial independence by the time they reach retirement age?

But we also know that Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has said that nothing is more important for development today than the economic, political, and social participation of women, and that getting more women into work is part of the solution to a raft of economic woes, including shrinking workforce participation, skills shortages and poverty.

To make full use of their national pools of female talent, State and Federal Governments need to remove obstacles that make it hard for women to combine work with having children or with caring for the aged or for people with disabilities.  Our State Government should be fighting for a federally funded paid maternity leave scheme that will support working women by providing payments as a return on the tax that they have paid and will pay, for reform of the tax and social-security systems to remove disincentives for women to work, and for affordable child care and nursing care support.

The payoff from fairer treatment of women is obvious.  It gives us our greatest chance--and perhaps our only real chance--for long term success and sustainability.  But action without political will is difficult to achieve, and the fact is that most candidates aren't really interested.  Ask any candidate what they are going to do to make it possible for women who want to work to get back into the workforce, and see what they say!

The issues are complex but we must make a start.  There are no excuses for not doing so, and it is critical that we start now: the real issue is not just one of equality, it is the very survival of our economic and social systems.