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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 8 Hansard (8 August) . . Page.. 2539 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

It is important that we ask why it is that women, in particular, have pursued this issue with the vigour that they have and why it is that women, in particular, have insisted on the importance of us recognising the value of unpaid work and the importance of unpaid work being measured. The subject goes back, in a sense, to issues around the community's understanding or expectation and acknowledgment of what is work in the first place. Historically, much of the work that women have done has not been seen, particularly by men, particularly by governments and particularly by the community, as work at all. The nub of the issue is that historically, perhaps since the year dot, women have borne the burden of the double shift, the double burden of seeking to maintain a family materially throughout the day and of maintaining a home or household.

Notions around the role of women within society and the extent to which we acknowledge the work that women do in a modern sense in both the paid and unpaid work forces are at the crux of the debate about the need for us to acknowledge and recognise unpaid work. We need to make the fundamental point that this debate is not so much about the value of volunteer work done in the community by both men and women. It is, essentially, a debate about the nature of the role which communities are expecting women to play increasingly, with so many women working in the paid work force still assuming an unfair burden of the unpaid work. There is a real need for us as a community and a society to address the fact that it is still the case, even in these days when a majority of women choose, are required or, by personal circumstances, are forced to participate in the paid work force, that after work, after knock-off time, those women are going home and, under their domestic arrangements, continuing to do a majority of the unpaid work.

I will get back to that after I have spoken about the other issues around the importance of governments and communities acknowledging the enormous valuable contribution or extent of unpaid work. We need perhaps to reflect on what that has meant, particularly for women, over the ages. There is a debate we still need to have around the extent to which we as a community value the paid work which women do. There is still a live debate in the community today about the different levels of remuneration which men and women enjoy within the paid work force. There is a continuing debate, a drastic and desperate debate, about the extent to which women are still confronted by glass ceilings. Many of the problems about pay rates, equality of access to senior positions, equality of access or opportunity in relation to appointments to statutory boards, equality of access or opportunity in relation to parliaments, equality of opportunity or access in relation to so many structures within the community are to some extent, in an historical sense which we perpetuate today, a result of decisions or values that society has placed on the contribution and role of women.

Let us pursue the point or the issue in relation, for instance, to so-called traditional women's employment, say, nursing. Society once deigned nursing not so much as a profession, not so much even as work, but as a vocation and, because it was a vocation and because it was a female vocation, it was a vocation that did not demand the same sorts of rates of remuneration as so-called real work demanded. What do we find today, after 150 years or so of the vocation of the Florence Nightingales of the world, a vocation for which women did not dare demand an appropriate recompense because it was not really real work, it was an extension of women's work, and therefore the community could demand that women pursue this vocation without any expectation of a fair and just reward or remuneration?

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