Page 787 - Week 02 - Thursday, 10 March 2011
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expressed to me their dissatisfaction and concern at the revived discussion this week about the need for quotas in employment and quotas on boards.
I was interested to sit and listen to Q&A earlier in the week when this matter was raised by Mr Hockey. I was sitting with my eldest daughter who said, as the conversation elapsed, “He’s going to say that we need quotas. Gee, I hope he doesn’t say we need quotas. Because every time somebody says we need quotas it means that when I succeed in a job, it doesn’t look like I deserve it.” This was echoed over and over and over again. I think it is about time that people started to realise that not every woman in the community wants to get on by virtue of quotas.
To add insult to injury, a day or so after this the Minister for the Status of Women, Kate Ellis, made an extraordinary announcement in a Press Club speech about how they were going to impose rules and regulations on companies to ensure that they had right-minded practices in relation to employing women and that their practice was such that they were now going to create a workplace gender equity agency, which would also have some sort of inspectorate at a cost of $11.2 million, to go around and inspect organisations to make sure that they were complying with the government’s new rules. She went on to say that government contracts would only be directed towards those organisations that complied with these new rules.
I was flabbergasted at this. I thought this was a classic case of policy on the run. I actually heard a commentator, I think on Insiders during the week, saying, “The trouble with the current federal Labor government is that they never actually war game anything out. They never actually play it out to the end to see what the results would be.” After two or three minutes contemplation of this policy, my immediate reaction was that I was opposed to it—and I put it on the record that I am opposed to such a policy. But just think about what would happen.
The commonwealth government is going to say that unless you meet the requirements of having a certain number of people in a certain number of positions high enough up the organisation, you cannot get a government contract. I would like to draw the attention of the Minister for the Status of Women to some building sites around this town. Take the ASIO building down the road. There is a head contractor there and dozens, if not hundreds, of subcontractors of a particular size. Anyone who has employers of more than 100 will have to start meeting these requirements.
So is Kate Ellis seriously saying to the electricians, the plumbers, the formwork carpenters, the chippies and the plasterers that their jobs will have to go to make way for a whole stack of women who do not actually want the jobs? We heard Ms Burch this morning saying that it was a real problem that women did not seem to want to work in some of these trades, even though it was easier than used to be the case, because sometimes you just have to have physical strength. As someone who does have some idea of what goes on in the building industry, I think that the average young carpenter or electrician who is currently on that site would feel somewhat threatened by Ms Ellis’s suggestion that he should give way so as to meet some quota for some federal minister for some not very well thought out policy.
What does this do to the blue collar trades—the people that the Labor Party say that they are there to look after? It would adversely affect, as I have said, the current ASIO
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