Page 351 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 23 February 1993
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
The other interesting factor is, of course, that the alternative to paid work, remaining home and raising a family, is consistently undervalued and is under-recognised in terms of its worth to the community. The role of the wife and mother has lost its status as the necessity for leaving home and for getting out there and trying to get a second income has - - -
Mr Connolly: Who says that? That is what you say when you are opposing women in employment.
MR KAINE: You and your Mr Keating, the world's best treasurer, have driven the Australian economy to the point where women have to get out there and get a second job. It is not so much a question of choice any more; it is a question of absolute necessity. It is a bad thing, because your Federal Government has driven the economy into the ground, to the point where women are obliged to go out and work whether they wish to or not. The point is that you have destroyed the economy, so that they are forced to go out there, and when you put them into the workplace you do not provide them with equality of opportunity. That is what I am saying. It is an indictment, Mr Connolly, and you are a part of this Government that is privy to all of this.
Madam Speaker, over the last 10 years or so there have been some changes, admittedly. There have been affirmative action programs which to some degree have advanced women's issues and a number of women have gained considerable advantage from them. I am not saying that everything is bad and I am not saying that everything that Labor has done is bad; there have been some good things done. I think that it can honestly be said that, in the broad, the opportunities and the status of women are not much better today than they were 20 years ago. That is an indictment, as I said, of Labor, which has essentially been in government, at both the Federal and the State level, in this country for at least 10 of those years. It is no less true in Canberra than it is everywhere else.
I do not think we need go much further than this Government's current budget and the Women's Budget Statement that was put out in conjunction with it for this current fiscal year of 1992-93. I point out that the Women's Budget Statement was initiated by the Alliance Government while I was the Minister responsible for the status of women. It was not introduced while Ms Follett was the Minister. Our intention was to be able to summarise in a practical and useful way what the Government was doing to advance the cause of women in our society. That has been subverted, because the interesting fact is that the Women's Budget Statement this year is the biggest document in the package of budget papers. It is even bigger than the program information paper.
So we have a big document that again says nothing. It does not say anything about really advancing the cause and the status of women. I will just draw on a few statistics. At page 21 of this document there are employment statistics. We are told that in June 1992 a total of 150,000 people were employed in the ACT labour force and, of those, just under half were females - it was 44.4 per cent. I suppose you can say that that is just under half, but there was a fair number of women in the work force. Full-time employment for women had fallen from a peak of 70,000 in 1989 to just 66,600 in June 1992. That was a fall of 4.9 per cent in the participation rate of women in the work force. This is in the ACT. I am not talking about any other place; it is right here.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .