I begin by acknowledging the Ngunnawal people, the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet, and I extend my respects to elders past and present, and also acknowledge the very significant role that First Nations women play as custodians of culture and communities and constant advocates for equality over tens of thousands of years.
It's really lovely to have the opportunity to speak with you briefly today and to open this important conference. It's right in the middle of two sitting weeks, so it’s always lovely for me in those two days to remember and bring some focus and centre into what we're trying to do here, outside of the theatre of the parliament.
I think about this incredible achievement of the National Council of Women - 130 years since your first meeting - and you've grown bigger and stronger since then. But to remember those women 130 years ago, who took the decision to organise and to meet and to campaign and to advocate for women and girls and just imagine where we would be if some of that organising hadn't happened back then.
So we have a lot to acknowledge and thank for organisations like the National Council of Women. Because really you were at the forefront and at the head of the organised political movement. And it’s unsurprising that here we are on a Sunday and all the good women in this room are working and organising just as they did 130 years ago.
For me, my role as the Minister for Women in the Albanese Government is to really build upon over 100 years of work, of women's work, that fight for equality, for women's rights, for respect for women, and to do what I can, along with my colleagues, to embed that into government thinking, policy making, and decisions.
I am forever thankful for all of the work that happened before me and I know the work that will be done in my time in this role, that I'll be looking to women to hand the next tranche of work onto. I’m constantly impressed and invigorated by women who I meet in the performance of my role, particularly younger women who are coming through and who maintain a similar commitment to all of us in this room.
I think also of the women that were first in the job that I occupy - women like Enid Lyons and Dorothy Tangney, who were not only the first in the parliament, they're also the first women to be made into statues in the parliamentary zone and forever immortalised for the contribution they made. It’ hard to believe that it took till 2023, and we had a lot of statues of men before then, but we now have these incredible women who walked these halls and participated when there weren't even women's toilets in the building. It wasn't built for them. They weren't really wanted if we are entirely honest. But they persisted, they showed up and they took their rightful place, not only for them, but for the women who came after them and they knew what they were doing.
When I look at where we are today, I can't imagine that Enid and Dorothy would look at our Caucus room and imagine that we would now have the first gender equal parliament.
We have the first gender equal Parliament. We are the second government that's got a majority women membership and that built on 2022, which was the first. And we've got the first gender equal cabinet as well. It's not only that we're in the party but we're actually in the room where decisions are taken. And so when you think about the firsts of Dorothy and Enid, there are still a lot of firsts happening now.
The first gender equal cabinet, we now have women leading the government in foreign affairs, finance, law, social services, housing, infrastructure, critical minerals and resources, communications and sport, employment and workplace relations, agriculture, indigenous affairs, small business and multicultural affairs. It’s not an insignificant range of responsibilities there.
I'm, of course, helped in my work that I do with Tanya Plibersek, with Ged Kearn and Rebecca White. We work really closely as you do. I look around the room here and it's very similar to our status of women committee meeting, where we meet regularly in the parliament for women, including women's staff, to come in and have meetings like this, where we're constantly talking and thinking and organising about what needs to happen next.
But when we look beyond the Parliament, we've also got a lot of firsts happening out there. This really gives you a sense of hope against all the pushback and misogyny and rubbish that we're all putting up with in our daily lives.
We have Michele Bullock running the reserve bank. We have Jenny Wilkinson running the Treasury. Danielle Wood running the productivity commission. Sarah Court running ASIC and Gina Cass-Gottlieb running the ACCC. So our five key economic institutions are all now being run by women.
Solicitor General Ruth Higgins, alongside our Attorney General Michelle Rowland, means that for the first time in history, Australia’s first and second law officers are women.
We have Lieutenant General Susan Coyle, who's the first woman to lead the Army, or indeed any arm of our military. And, again, this is not an insignificant appointment and has taken a long time to come. So she's the first but won't be the last.
Meghan Quinn, who's running the Department of Defence, and we've got Krissy Barrett, as the first woman AFP Commissioner.
So both inside and outside the Parliament, you're seeing a much more increased representation of women. And like your survey and the work that you're doing, which is aligned to the gender of quality strategy, those 5 key pillars, representation and leadership matters, as we all know. And for the young women who are coming behind us, I think seeing women in all of these jobs and normalising women in all of these jobs is incredibly important.
I thought I'd just take you through how we're thinking about a whole range of things in my portfolio. So as Minister for Finance and Minister for Women, I've got a real opportunity in the way that governments make decision - and this is not just Labor governments, it's the way governments of all persuasions make them.
I see that as my role as Minister for Finance, but I also obviously cannot separate my role as Minister for Women from that. And it has really changed both the way the public service work, but also how government thinks about these things.
So we reintroduced gender responsive budgeting. If we're making big policy decisions, they're coming with gender analysis. We're requiring that to be done at the departmental level, not in the office for women, to look at how policy works for different groups in the community. So that's being done and that's helping make better decisions.
Decisions like the single parenting payment, when we increased the age for you to get that higher payment, that was informed by gender analysis. As was our increased pay rises for age care and early educators. An industry that is 90 per cent women, they've been left at the bottom end of wage outcomes due to a whole range of factors, but also no one being prepared to pay it, so the government is inserting ourselves there.
It's not separated from the priorities that your members found in their survey. Whether we're looking at housing, tax reform, superannuation, climate policy or how we manage these big economic shifts across our economy, it’s not separated from trying to deal with violence against women and some of those other areas that we know have been and continue to be such a problem for millions of women and children in this country.
Everything we're thinking about is interlinked. If we can drive better wages, better super, better economic security and more housing options, then obviously we're helping with Tanya’s side of the portfolio which is dealing with violence against women and children.
And so, I just want to leave you with that message about how we do think about women's policy. It’s not on its own. It's not an afterthought. It's not done. There's no assessment of impact on women after all the decisions are taken, but before it lands.
And it's helped us make a number of our government’s most important decisions and deal with a number of long forgotten, never addressed issues, like putting super on PPL, for example.
The only workplace entitlement, industrial entitlement, that didn't have super placed on it. Why do you think that was the case? Well, I have no doubt that it was because it was seen as a woman's entitlement.
We’re also changing the nature of that entitlement, informed by gender analysis, so that we're encouraging more men to take up shared caring arrangements.
When we look at women's health, we’ve introduced longer consultations, which had never been dealt with. Menopause treatments, no new modern menopause treatments had been listed on the PBS for 20 years. On the modern contraceptive pill, none had been listed for 30 years. So if you wanted a cheaper pill or a PBS pill, you had to accept the pill that had more side effects and wasn't as effective as these new drugs are, because they hadn't been prioritised within our health system. That change also goes to trying to put a bit more money in women's pockets.
It's all interlinked with other parts of our thinking driving gender equality across government. We're thinking about it in an industrial space. We're thinking about it in climate and energy, in the jobs and the opportunities in those industries so we're not retrofitting and instead asking; how do we work women into these big shifts, when there's plenty of men at the table.
Even our free TAFE, making sure that at least 50 per cent of those free TAFE places go to women. That we're focused on gender segregation in the workplace and how we deal with that and make sure we're removing barriers. So, we've introduced programs with small business, with the unions to try and deal with that.
At the end of the day, I hope that by the time I'm finishing this job that people will be able to see that we made a real effort. That when we came into government we made a decision to put women and driving gender equality at the centre of our decision making, despite and regardless of all the pushback and the nonsense that's happening around the world, including in our politics here, where gender equality suddenly has become a “woke word" that nobody's allowed to say anymore. And things that we've been fighting for - like gender pay gaps and PPL and better childcare – have all of a suddenly become something that we should be grateful to have and something that's continues to be under threat.
So my job is to cross things off our list. We had a long list when we came to government. There has been a few things added to that list, and we'll keep adding and subtracting as we go. But we want progress, and we think we've made a fair bit of progress in the first four years but we've got a lot more to do.
But it's not just progress. We've got to protect what we've done as well because progress isn't linear. We've seen that, you've all seen that. We take a step forward, we get 10 steps back for different reasons and we're determined to not have that.
So where I can embed it, where I can make it really difficult to unpick, I will be doing that. But we'll also be protecting the gains that we've made.
Thank you.