I’m going to come out and just say it: Peter Dutton and the Coalition don’t care about working women and families.
Their record is clear. And now on the eve of an election, Peter Dutton is doubling down.
This week on Tuesday – just four days ahead of International Women’s Day – Peter Dutton said women who couldn’t work from home could always just job share instead.
When asked if he thought his plan to force people to work from the office would disproportionately impact women, his response?
“There are plenty of opportunities around job sharing”.
With eight words, the guy who wants to be the next Prime Minister – Peter Dutton – just found another way to make things harder for working families.
For the record, job sharing can be and is a fantastic flexible tool for those who want to take it up and who work in organisations who offer it.
If job sharing is right for you and your family, that should be supported.
But Peter Dutton wants women and families to no longer be allowed to work from home and his solution is for women to just take up a job sharing role – essentially reducing hours of work.
When women still get paid on average $28,000 less than men, this is outrageous.
And we know there is a part-time promotion cliff limiting career progression for Australians who work part-time, or want or need to move to part-time work.
According to analysis by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency while 21 per cent of employees work part-time, only seven per cent of managers are employed part-time.
And the share of managers working part-time drops with seniority: just five per cent of Key Management Personnel and three per cent of CEOs work part-time.
So Peter Dutton wants to end working from home and then also ensure that working families face even less chance of promotion to get ahead.
Working from home for women and families isn’t about not going into the office for the sake of it. It’s having the flexibility to do school drop off and pick up – times that aren’t particularly friendly to 9-5 business hours.
It’s going to after school sport and finishing your work later in the evening from home after the kids go to bed.
It’s having one or two days where you don’t have to commute so you can spend more time with your children and family.
This is flexibility that we know actually improves productivity and allows more women to take up full-time roles.
It’s not just good for families – it’s good for our economy.
Peter Dutton wants all of that to be harder for everyone.
He wants to end work from home – full stop.
This is the same guy who voted against cheaper childcare.
This is the same guy who rallied against expanding paid parental leave so new parents could take more time off to be with their newborn baby.
Only Labor is committed to building a better future for all Australians – including working families.
Peter Dutton instead wants to keep us in the 1950s.