Women Deliver Conference

Thank you so much for that warm welcome, and I too begin by acknowledging that we're meeting on the lands of the Wurundjeri of the Kulin nation and pay my respects to elders past and present. I also acknowledge the strength and leadership of First Nations women, the matriarchs of our country, who are and have always been the keepers of knowledge and tradition, healers, leaders in their communities, and constant advocates for equality.

To Dr Malia Khan, my friend and colleague and former Prime Minister, the Honourable Julia Gillard, distinguished guests, the Victorian Government, and to all who've been involved with putting this conference together, I can only imagine how challenging it has been in these times, but already so successful from the events that I've been able to attend.

To everyone joining us today, thank you for coming to Australia and to Melbourne. We deeply appreciate both your presence and your commitment to the unfinished business of gender equality.

It's an honour to speak with you today at the first Women's Deliver conference hosted in the Pacific. And as my friend, the Foreign Minister Penny Wong, always says, in the Blue Pacific, we are family: we share an ocean, and we share a future, and we share an ambition for a gender-equal world.

Now, I spent most of my time before politics, my career before politics, working in the community sector. Pushing for change, arguing for equality, whether it be for people with a disability or women's equality.

My path was forged in civil society activism, but in 2001, as a single mum with a young daughter, I was angry at our political system.

It didn't reflect my priorities.

It didn't look like me.

It didn't represent me.

No women in my local parliament.

Outrageous laws that sought to navigate and regulate women's bodies.

I'd had enough of that. I stood for election, and with the help of many, I won my seat.

One year later, we decriminalised abortion. In just 12 months of politics, I was hooked.

Politics, informed by civil society, could bring about change.

Politics has taught me to use the power of politics, but informed by community, to shape change and prove to women that their governments hear them and can respond to them.

Ahead of the 2022 election, if we just fast forward two decades, women across Australia had had enough.

They demanded safety, fairness, and systems that reflected their lives.

They made their continued fight for equality for women impossible to ignore.

There was momentum that had been built up over years from movements like the one I stand before today, building pressure, focus, and shared purpose.

The Albanese Government was elected in 2022 with a responsibility to meet that call, and I was appointed the Minister for Women and the Minister for Finance in that new government.

The PM put those two portfolios together to send a message that women's equality isn't something on the periphery of government, but for our government, it placed it right at the centre of decision-making and power.

Armed with that portfolio, we are driving gender equality across government with the full cooperation and support of every cabinet minister and every caucus colleague.

In 2022, we became Australia's first majority-women government.

And then in 2025, we became Australia's first gender-equal cabinet.

Finally, women were, for the first time ever, at the table in equal numbers.

Women ministers lead in foreign affairs, in finance, in law, social services, critical minerals and resources, communications and sport, housing, infrastructure, workplace relations, agriculture, First Nations policy, small business and multicultural affairs.

Now, this is something our sisters in the suffragette movement could have only dreamed about, even if it did take over 130 years to get here.

But in 2022 we knew that women wanted a better deal, because we asked them, and they told us.

They were sick of dealing with systems that simply weren't designed for them; systems built around assumptions that didn't reflect the realities of their work, their bodies, or their caring responsibilities, and economic inequality sat at the centre of that failure.

Violence against women and children was at crisis levels.

Social and affordable housing hadn't been built or funded.

Women were navigating a job market that was designed for men.

Paid parental leave was the only employment condition that did not attract superannuation.

Childcare systems failed to support women's participation in work.

Our social security system punished single parents.

And in the health system, women's needs were deprioritised, their pain ignored, and their choices constrained.

Our industrial relations system had no mechanism to consider gender equality, and the recommendations of Australia's Sex Discrimination Commissioner in the Respect@Work report, aimed at keeping women safe at work, languished unanswered.

These were just some of the issues that women raised with us, and so step by step, we have systematically gone about addressing these issues, budget by budget, decision by decision, guided by women's voices.

We started in the very first week of the new parliament, and with the new parliamentary term and a new government, our first bill was to implement universal paid family and domestic violence leave.

Now, I want to be clear that advancing gender equality isn't seen as just my job in the government.

We are taking a whole-of-government action, whether it be in workplace relations, access to justice, in economic policy and in social services, in education, health, housing.

In our first budget, we put in place gender-responsive budgeting, requiring that policy is tested against its impact on women before it lands, not after the decisions have been taken.

That analysis has assisted in some of our government's most important decisions.

It supported the addition of new contraceptive pills and menopause treatments to our pharmaceutical benefits scheme - for the first time for the pill in 30 years and for menopause treatment in 20 years.

It supported new subsidies for longer consultations for women at the GP and the opening of 33 new endo and pelvic pain clinics.

It underpinned the decision to scrap the punitive social security programs that punish single parents of young children, most of them mums, and to extend income support to single parents until their children turned 14.

Gender-responsive budgeting helped back in free vocational education and training, with women taking up about 60% of those places.

It drove the introduction of at least three days a week of subsidised early education and care, and we built upon the PPL scheme introduced by Julia's government, extending it and making it more flexible, with reserved leave for both parents, to drive the uptake of men or second parents' access to leave.

And after years of campaigning from women's organisations, we are paying superannuation on top of paid parental leave, as it should be.

We then turned our mind to women's wages.

We have systematically intervened to increase wages in the care economy.

Women are the backbone of the care economy, and yet they were amongst the lowest paid in Australia.

This is not right, so we have funded significant wage increases in those sectors to start the job of actually valuing the care economy.

And we have supported the Fair Work Commission in a national gender undervaluation wage case.

We are closing the gender pay gap, and we now publish the specific gender pay gaps of large employers, and are making them set targets to reach gender equality and meet them.

We've made it illegal for employers to discriminate against breastfeeding or on the basis of gender identity, and we've created a positive legal duty for employers to prevent workplace sexual harassment.

We've banned pay secrecy clauses that never seemed to work for women.

Now guiding all of our work is Australia's first gender equality strategy called Working for Women, which sets out our 10-year commitment to drive action towards gender equality and embed the reforms delivered already.

Now, all of these reforms that I've just run through have been put in place in just the last four years, and they're already showing results.

Women's workforce participation reached an all-time high last year.

The gender pay gap is at a historic low.

Women's average weekly earnings have grown by $300 per week since May 2022 and Australia has recorded its highest ever international ranking for gender equality, 13th this year, up from 43rd when we came to government.

But while the signs are encouraging, and we should celebrate those, particularly as a counter-narrative to some of what we're seeing around the world, we know that there is much more to do.

Working with the Minister for Social Services, we want to make sure our government programs don't hurt women and don't work against them.

Australia has one of the most gender-segregated labour markets in the world, so cracking that open is a priority, as is making sure that women are drivers and beneficiaries of our climate transition, including in the jobs and opportunities that come with that huge economic opportunity.

And as we all know in this room, there is still so much to do to end violence against women and children.

So today, I wanted to give you a sense of our government's focus on how we're approaching our drive towards gender equality.

Where we can pull the lever, we will.

In a sea of negativity and uncertainty, here in the Land Down Under we are methodically working through our list, quietly and not so quietly, reforming systems and programs to shift the dial and to create a better Australia that works for women, with our strong and loud women's movement holding us accountable.

But as we all know, neither the reforms nor progress we've made are inevitable, nor is progress secure forever.

When it comes to gender equality, progress is not linear, and progress made today can be unwound back tomorrow, so vigilance is required.

Progress towards gender equality has always and only been achieved and protected by the women's movement.

It is achieved when women make the fight for equality impossible to ignore, and it is achieved when governments choose to act to embed and entrench reforms that deliver for women and make our communities and economies stronger for everybody.

Thank you.