Kimberley Caines: Aus government found money for nuclear submarines but can’t afford to address gender pay gap

Just imagine that I have a male colleague who is the same age, with the same journalism experience and we retire on the same day. He would end up earning at least $1 million more than me across his career. Why? Because he is a man. That’s it! During our careers, I would no doubt take time off to have children and then have to care for those children — meaning time out of the workforce and not continuing to climb the career ladder. And my pay packet would be reduced by 55 per cent on average across the first five years of parenting my first child. But apart from that, data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in August showed the national gender pay gap has dropped to its lowest level on record at 13 per cent. So for every dollar on average my colleague would earn, I would take home just 87 cents. Women make up more than half of Australia’s population — 51 per cent to be exact — and if we were treated like equals with more Federal Government support during childbearing years, an extra $128 billion could be added to the nation’s economy each year through workforce participation. Why then has the Albanese Government promised to help close the gender pay gap and make women’s economic equality a priority but after commissioning a report on how to do this, it now says it depends if it can find the money in the Budget? It has found the money to boost defence spending for the acquisition, construction and operation of nuclear-powered submarines because that is important. Minister for Women Katy Gallagher conceded that the Budget was under a “fair bit of stress” and that her Government was looking at the most effective approaches. As the report released on Monday suggests, this can be done over 10 years by extending paid parental leave to 52 weeks and paying superannuation on top of this, and by scrapping the activity test from the child care system, which currently requires both parents to be working to access the subsidies. Labor has the power to make real changes to the lives of women in Australia and now is the time to start making that happen.