Thank you for asking me to speak tonight.
I’d like to begin by paying respect to the ancient Ngunnawal people, upon whose land we gather this evening and I thank them for their custodianship and care for this beautiful country. And I extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders here tonight. And I genuinely look forward to the opportunity later this year through a national vote that will bring our country together to proudly enshrine recognition of Australia’s first people the Constitution and to establish a voice to our nation's parliament.
Thank you to all the future women crew – thank you for inviting me to speak tonight. It’s a bigger event than it was the October event and it is fast turning out to be the place to be on Budget Wednesday, here in Canberra.
I’d like to acknowledge my Parliamentary colleagues here tonight. I feel really fortunate that you are here to support me tonight. There are some wonderful women, here tonight. My colleagues Michelle Rowland, Communications Minister, Claire O’Neil, Minister for Home Affairs, Annika Wells, Minister for Aged Care, Kirsty McBain, the Minister for Regional Australia and Local Government – and my amazing Senate partner Marielle Smith and Senate Estimates Committee Chair extraordinaire.
I feel really fortunate to work with these amazing women, the future of the Labor Party. Who sacrifice so much for their work, and who work so hard and are so talented and it’s an honour to be part of the team.
I’d also like to welcome my cross-bench colleagues and friends here tonight – Kate Cheney, Sophie Scamps.
Can I also acknowledge the public servants here tonight. I’ve looked around the room and seen many a tired face from Treasury, from Finance, from Office for Women who have just done the most incredible job. And I am sure there are public servants from other departments. I don’t mean to exclude anyone.
The machinery of government has been locked and loaded behind the Budget process for many months now and I thank you for everything you have given up to deliver this documents that Jim and I released just 24 hours ago – though it feels a lot longer!.
It’s lovely to be at an event like this during Budget Week in a room full of incredibly amazing women –I’m honoured to be with you tonight and I acknowledge the incredible advocacy and campaigns you’ve been waging for years which have helped secure significant investments for Australian women in the Budget that Jim and I handed down last night.
Can I acknowledge Sam Mostyn, chair of the WEET, she’s shaking her head but I’m going to do it anyway. And acknowledge the members of the Women’s Economic Equality taskforce that are here.
Kate Jenkins congratulations. It’s been an honour to work with you as well.
I hope you enjoy Hawaii. I gave Kate instructions to get out of town.
There’s others in the room who have supported me and assisted me in the last 12 months. It’s been a very steep learning curve and I greatly appreciate it.
So when I’ve had time to read for pleasure in the last few months, as opposed to the Finance green briefs, familiar to many of you in this room, I found myself going back to the 1970s to unpick and understand exactly how the campaign for women’s equality developed and unfolded. Ultimately - how it brought about social change and influenced decisions which changed women’s lives forever.
One of the books I just finished was Women and Whitlam (edited by Michelle Arrow with lots of great contributors).
It filled me up with stories of campaigning, of success, and of progress.
For those who despair that nothing ever changes for women, going through the budget process over the last few months, it was a useful reminder of the work that was done, that nothing ever came easily for women.
A women working with government, persuading, cajoling government, constantly pushing and prodding, and never giving up, brings about positive change in the end.
I needed this to rebuild my optimism levels. This reminder of the power of women to bring about change, after I went back and looked at the first ever Women's Budget programme as it was called in 1984 - 85, which was released by the Hawke government on the 21st of August 1984.
The Parliamentary Library has the original paper, discoloured and hand typed with a very tiny font as it turned out, and - for an old lady like myself, very hard to read.
But the priority areas that were outlined included access to employment, access to training, taxation and income security, services for women, information and research.
That sounds familiar to everyone?
My heart sank because I realised that the majority of these priority areas remain priority in this day and are featured the 2023 - 2024 Women's budget statement as well.
I read on:
Women at Work, women with full time childcare responsibilities, unemployed women, sole parent women, women in a crisis situations, women in rental accommodation, migrant women, Aboriginal women.
This speaks to all the unfinished work before us in 2023.
I’m glad I reread it.
Because it focused me, and it reinforced in me the urgent, unfinished business before us all to create an Australia where all women are treated equally.
Which brings me to the budget that Jim and I handed down just 24 hours ago. I think this is a really significant budget for women.
I’m not trying to overdo it - but I think you'd be hard pressed to find another budget, where women are front and centre of the government's decisions as much as this one is.
It builds on October's Budget, it builds on our legislative agenda, it builds on our gender responsive budgeting that we've implemented and implementing in full in 2023-24 MYEFO – I’m looking forward to that.
We've got Respect at Work, we've got paid family and domestic violence leave, the gender pay gap legislation, the Set the Standard following on from Kate Jenkins’ report.
So you get the picture. Maybe I am overdoing it!
I just want to acknowledge the Prime Minister and the Treasurer. And in fact, the whole Labour caucus, the cabinet, the ministry, and the Labor team. And one of the reasons my job and the job of other females in this Ministry is so much easier, is because we don't have to convince our male colleagues that there are benefits to perusing equality for women. We have taken that, we’ve banked that - and we're moving on.
And it's a really important difference, I think between the approach that we take as the government and the approach that the former government has taken.
And when I look at it, I think the fact that 55 out of 104 of our caucus are women makes a difference, it genuinely makes a difference. And I know how much of a difference it makes to all of us by having other women around us as we do our work.
I was just reminded by Amy, who I work with that our 55 out of 104 in our caucus is was actually just one short of the entire opposition in the House of Representatives, which is 56. So we're almost at the point where we could start the ALP women's party and take over.
There are some important measures in this Budget. And I think people have touched on some of that today.
We've really tried to focus the investments that we were able to afford within a pretty constrained environment to deliver the best outcome we could with the resources available.
So the extension on the Parenting Payment Single from eight to 14, the increase in Commonwealth rent assistance, an increase to the base rate of JobSeeker and I know there are a lot of views about that. But importantly, the lowering of the higher threshold from 60 to 55 was an important measure.
There's also money to end violence against women and children. And that's been talked about tonight. And I take my hat off to Amanda Rishworth and Justine Elliott for the work that they've done, and to Linda Burney, as because of the important First Nations focus in that.
But I think you need to see these investments in conjunction with others that we've done over the last Budget – Jim and I are crazy – two budgets in 7 months has really stretched friendships.
When you look at it, you can see at the scaffolding, that we're doing a whole range of measures. So the cheaper childcare, entirely abolishing the parents next programme, increasing wages for aged care, investment in the National Plan to end violence against women and children, investments in women's health, which Ged Kearney spoke so passionately about tonight with our Status of Women committee, making our workplace relations system work better for women, some of those legislation changes that I've already talked about, putting in some targets for women inside those skills programmes, like in Australian Skills Guarantee, which has come up tonight. We are serious about that and, we want to lift those targets and we've got a bit of work to do. I’d like 50/50 straight away but people tell me I’m nuts we’ve got to go a bit slower than that
So you can in construction we have a target of 12%. And in ICT, we're going to work with successful proponent to negotiate targets in ICT.
And I think there's some room to develop further strategies in relation to defence and some of the investments we're making the defence through the Defence Strategic Review, and also the AUCKUS arrangements to make sure that women get a fair share of those opportunities as well.
These investments, and many other initiatives supporting women, are not just a two-Budget exercise but, rather they part of Labor’s long-term strategy to achieve a gender equal Australia.
As a Labor Government – we differentiate ourselves from our opponents.
Because we want to do things.
We want to unite the country rather than divide it.
We are capable of acknowledging problems and pressures - and working to solve them.
And I think for all of the Ministers here tonight they have been working in their different portfolios identifying problems and looking for solutions.
We want to grab the opportunities and help shape the future of the
Country. And there are big opportunities to make the lives of women in this country better and we should be working on fixing them.
We make these reforms and investments because they are the right thing to do and because they have been left dormant for too long.
I’d like to thank again the Women Economic Equality Taskforce (WEET) for identifying many of the barriers that women face that and also providing Government with practical advice about how to tackle these. I think for anyone who hasn’t read their letter to me, it is essential reading. I’m calling it the budget letter and I know that the full report is coming to me soon.
It so eloquently expresses the needs and ambitions of Australian women and what measures we can take to get there.
In this Budget you have seen that we have taken action in response to WEET recommendations:
- On parenting payment single
- on Abolishing ParentsNext
- on Raising Commonwealth Rent Assistance
- And funding a pay rise for aged care workers and investing in our early childhood care and education work force.
And we are ensuring policy for women is elevated to the centre of government decision making process.
There has long been a sense that women’s policy has been an add-on, the After Dinner Mint – perhaps – after a feast of photo ops in the high vis gear and factory floor visits.
I was particularly pleased about Annabel Crabb’s story today. I haven’t read a lot of the commentary on the budget – I’m too close to it, I get too defensive! But Annabel Crabb’s story of how she worked through the glossies and couldn’t find any high-vis, rather its women in all the pictures, was really heartening to me.
Don’t think that’s accidental, that is part of what we are trying to do, working through the budget and decision making, ensuring the investing in women is just a core function of good government and good budgeting process.
Because I think when we do look back over past years, hi vis gear was pretty high up there, as were factor floor visits and I think we all remember that photo of Joe Hockey and Matthias Cormann smoking a cigar outside celebrating a budget that savaged women.
To put it politely – as a government we are changing that Vibe!
Jim and I – as we worked with the ERC to finalise this budget – we traded in the cigars in for a nice cup of green tea – lots of them!
And we’ve moved beyond where a good budget measure for women was a baby bonus.
Or when our Minister for Women Tony Abbott abolished the women’s budget statement entirely! (true story)
I still have to get to the bottom of the rumours that go around Canberra. There’s a lot of chatter – some authorised, some unauthorised – I heard that they just forgot the women’s portfolio when they put together the first Abbot ministry and a journalist rang the PMO and asked “who is the Minister for Women” and they just said ‘Tony is the guy’. I have been told that four or five times but I haven’t worked out whether it is actually true – sounds true.
Under the former government often women weren’t mentioned through the budget papers, or policies were highlighted as “for families”, with no recognition of how women experience them, or that women have lives and ambitions beyond child rearing.
It did feel a bit Handmaidens Tale to be honest. And I hope that you can see that the Albanese Government doesn’t see women’s policy as an add on or a nice to have as you are printing the glossy pages and the budget, when you try to retrofit the budget once all the decisions have been taken.
That can be the only excuse when Morrison spruiked a highway upgrade, when he was asked about women giving birth in regional communities!
Which I have to say Kristy McBain has a lot of fun with!
This budget and the decisions behind it influenced by the work done on assessing gender impact ensures that consideration of women are actually considered before decisions are made. Who would have thought that that might impact or influence the decisions that actually are made. When the Prime Minister made me both Minister for Women and also the Finance Minister, this catapulted the concerns and advancement of women right into the centre of the economic portfolio.
And that is where it should be.
I won’t rattle off all the numbers to you. I’m sure most of you watched the Budget last night and are aware of some of those important investments.
But I just quickly want to talk about one measure = or a couple of measures really, that I’m particularly proud of (although as Finance Minister, being asked to pick my favourite Budget measure if like being asked to pick my favourite child. I really shouldn’t have a favourite! They are all special and they have their own stories as well. Everyone is different. Some hurt more than others.)
But I think you will all agree the abolition of the ParentsNext program and extending Parenting Payment Single are long overdue moves.
We have invested $1.9 billion to provide additional support for single parents who are the principal carers, the vast majority of whom are women, through an increase to the eligibility age of for Parenting payment (Single) which has been advocated for through the WEET and through community advocacy and many organisations.
And I can bring a personal perspective to the payment. I did live on that payment. It did change my life. And it did save me. It gave me the support I needed to get myself together, to look after my baby and to get back into work. And I think I bring that perspective to the ERC table.
As did everyone else. Everyone brings their personal perspectives to these decisions and they are part of the decisions.
On ParentsNext, a program, of which 95% of participants are women, we did take the decision to abolish it. And that was the right decision and we will ensure that that the proper support are put around that vulnerable cohort of parents to ensure that they get the support they need without the threat of having their money taken away. And it was after we took this decision and we announced the decision last Friday that
I’ve received a lot of messages. For a program that only has around 98,000 people on the program, it was a disproportional amount of correspondence that I got about being on the program and who felt this would change their lives.
. And there was one in particular, and it was a young woman with three kids under four who was actually driving home and heard on the radio that the programme was about to be abolished just after she was told she had breached and was going to lose her fortnightly income. And she sent me a very long email, almost an essay about what it meant to her, and what finding out her payment would continue for her and her family.
And I think, and this would apply to every member in the Ministry and the team that’s here tonight, this is why we’re in politics. Because it’s a place where decisions can change the lives of others for the better.
It’s what motivates me and my colleagues as we endure the less positive
sides of politics - that together with your help, with all of the work that you do, we can change the lives of Australian women and ensure that the Women’s Budget statement released that might be released in 20 years times isn’t really needed anymore. Because ultimately its where we want to get to.
And I look forward to working with you all to achieve that.
Now before I go, I want to end on a lighter note – it get a bit heavy towards the end, I want to share a story.
So picture this, we’re in the lock up Jim and I, we've been doing the corridor walk, because now people don't go into the general committee rooms since COVID. They can all stay in their little corridors, they have all their mobile phones taken away.
And so we walk in, and we sort of start at one end of the corridor and we work to the other end.
So we’ve done channel Nine and channel Seven and all the rest of it, just working through straight. Just usual budget night questions, not very much on women side, but you know, the usual stuff that you'd see.
And then I'm in News Corp. And it's a pretty testing environment, as you can imagine, you know, lots of questions, lots of men – a few women. And one of the women right at the end, asks a question about menopause.
Well, that testy environment just evaporated. Everyone's head went down and they started typing on the computers.
And it showed me there's still a lot more work to do, particularly in the area of women's health to make people feel more comfortable about that. But it's an image that will stay with me forever. I enjoyed it enormously, too much I think. And it showed that there’s still work to be done
Thank you for having me speak tonight.