Page 5863 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 7 December 2010
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contributes substantially to our communities on a day-to-day basis. As one of those workers working in the community sector here in the ACT for around 25 years, I know very clearly from my experience how workers are underpaid for such vital and valuable work. These are the workers who provide shelter to the homeless, who provide respite care to those with illness or disability and who support families to stay together. These are workers that give assistance for women who are pregnant and new mothers when help is not available from anyone else.
We need to commit fully to the basic principles of this campaign and support this campaign. It is unfortunate that the campaign is necessary, but even today the federal Labor government, under Julia Gillard, is unwilling to commit to these basic principles of equity that should underpin our workplaces. In a submission to Fair Work Australia, the Gillard government effectively stated that equality for women in the community sector is just too expensive to do right now.
And this is coming from a government that does not find it too expensive to subsidise diesel fuel for the coal industry, that does not find it too expensive to maintain phenomenally expensive offshore asylum seeker detention centres in violation of the principles of the refugee convention and that does not find it too expensive to maintain a multimillion dollar building and construction commission that is designed to strip workers of basic rights. It has to be asked how far down the commonwealth Labor government’s list of priorities is equal pay for women.
In the submission to Fair Work, the government claimed that, if an order was given that granted equal pay, as a major funder of the sector the federal government would respond by cutting jobs and support for the sector. The ASU is correct in saying that this is an outrageous attempt to hold those workers to ransom for seeking fairness in pay. Responding to years of underpayment by threatening workers with the sack is not a tactic I would expect from the government.
The ACT Greens and our Australian Greens colleagues continue to stand proudly in support of the national campaign for equal pay for women, and we call upon the other parties here in the ACT Assembly to also support that campaign.
Another thing we need to take seriously is the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Australia has committed to CEDAW, and we need to take action to ensure that we achieve equal representation of women and men in public life. We want women to be able to live their lives free from violence. To value women, we want equal pay for equal work, as I have said. And we want family-friendly workplaces and public spaces.
We also need to see that we have a role to play in the international context to make sure that women from other countries also will enjoy equality and opportunities that we take for granted. I was reminded of this just last week when a Greens colleague who is the president of the Papua New Guinea Greens party, Dorothy Tekwie, was in town.
Dorothy was talking to us about the state of play in the Papua New Guinean parliament, where there are 109 seats and only one is held by a woman. There is a bill
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