Mr LAMING (9:05 PM) —Thank you very much for the opportunity tonight to reflect briefly on a coalescence of events that I have enjoyed. The first of these was a visit from the Queensland Teachers Union to reflect on the events of last Friday. The second, which arrived on my desk, was the ACCI position paper Workplace reform: working for Australian women. Finally, and probably most entertaining of all, was a fascinating, signed copy of Imagining Australia: ideas for our future by the authors Andrew Leigh and Peter Tynan, who are two of the four authors who join us in the Speaker’s gallery today. I welcome them. I must admit that I have already had a sneak preview of this book, which came out before the last federal election. One part struck me:

but we must—

Nowhere is that more important than in combating long-term unemployment. A specific part of that is to make sure that women have every opportunity to join the work force if they choose and also to have the gender pay gap minimised wherever we can. I know that I have bipartisan support on the issue of narrowing the gender pay gap.

It brings me back to the visit from the Queensland Teachers Union today, when I was asked three questions, obviously after the events of last Friday. The first question was, ‘What will you do when the bad news stories roll in next year about employers who are doing terrible things to their employees and when the sky is falling in?’ The second was, ‘How will you answer the critics when all of the vulnerable find themselves out of a job in large numbers?’ The third was, ‘When you lose your seat, will you be prepared to negotiate an AWA?’ So you can see it has been an interesting day. I would like to take this opportunity to answer these questions in the next three minutes.

I am not going to start with an impassioned story about creating new jobs, because I know it is so much more than that. What we do know is that over the last 20 years we have seen substantial inroads into gender pay equity. That has continued under the most recent series of workplace reforms over the last four years. Evidence has it that the gender pay gap was 20 per cent in 1983. It has now fallen to under 15 per cent. There are continuing falls in that pay gap, even with the availability of AWAs. What I found even more compelling in this publication was not only that wages are higher for those who negotiate AWAs—and that obviously pertains to a certain selection bias—but that the gender gap narrows even more significantly for those who negotiate AWAs. That is going to continue to roll out next year and give my QTU colleague an answer, I am sure.

What we have also found—and this silences those on the other side—is that, while the general number of people in part-time and casualised employment has remained fairly similar over the last 10 years, it is not how many are doing part-time and casual work but who is doing it and for what reasons. I was referred to by the Leader of the Opposition in the last sitting term as a ‘child of privilege’. I certainly was the child of a mother who could not enter the work force, no matter how hard she tried in the early 1990s when she had to help to put me through university. But I am also the child of a mother who, once she found herself back at work and preferred to leave the workplace, was unable to because she had to pay the high home loan interest rates. So even for one family, for one single person, you can see that over that period where there was poor economic management there were people out of the work force who had chosen to work but who could not, and there were others who were working and who would have prefered the option of parenthood, training or further education.

The most compelling argument for the series of reforms upon which this government has embarked is providing people with choice—choice to work, educate or raise a family. Those options were not available 12 years ago the way they are now, and no amount of historical revision can convince anyone, apart from a few who sit on the other side, of that fact. The past reforms have now led to record levels of employment. Even as recently as a year and a half ago there was a reference in Mr Leigh and Mr Tynan’s publication as to how tough it is to bring unemployment down; there was the reflection on how tough it is to find employment for 15- to 19-year-olds. The very good news for the authors of this book, of course, is that only today we discovered that not 16 but 60 local government authorities now have unemployment rates under six per cent. (Time expired)