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Innovation and Social Policy: How Social Policy works in the New Economy

Sex Discrimination

Innovation and Social Policy:
How Social Policy works in the New Economy

Speech delivered by Pru Goward,
Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner at the Canberra Business Council
Annual Gala Dinner, Hyatt Hotel, Canberra, 17 October 2002

Thank you for inviting
me to speak at your Gala night this year - I am very excited to be here
and pleased to catch up with so many Canberra friends and colleagues.

Gala nights are wonderful
opportunities to not only catch up with friends but to celebrate the successes
of the past year.

They're also a time
away from the daily stresses of actually running a business to think about
our future.

The future of Australia
is in the hands of us all, but it will only be as great as the foresight
of today's leaders. As employers and leaders of the business community
in the nation's capital, that includes all of you here tonight.

Of course, the future
is already here, beginning in the "now".

The "now"
is about three key changes. Three tides we cannot turn back, three movements
we cannot slow, three directions we cannot reverse.

Change one, the epic
struggle between brains and brawn is over. Brains have conquered.

Ever since homo sapiens
stood upright, this has been humanity's path- away from the rule of the
jungle, from the dominance of physical strength, towards the dominance
of the human mind.

Information technology,
from which have flowed the extraordinary advances in genetic engineering,
biotechnology and, unrelentingly, mechanical engineering, have been responsible
for the rapidity of this movement throughout the past century and for
the increasing rate of change we are witnessing today.

But with change comes
opportunity.

Physical strength
is not as valued, good brains are more valued. This is more
than the revenge of the nerd.

This is the revenge
of the people with brains, people with enough emotional intelligence to
manage complex groups, people with highly developed oral skills, and a
keen sense of group politics - practice in organizing small disruptive
groups of people under the age of 18 is also useful!

No, we are not talking
about teachers here, we are talking about women - in particular women
with children.

The road to gender
equality still stretches far into the horizon but there's no doubt, womankind
are further along it than at any other time in our history, thanks to
this one fact.

Obviously it is not
women only whose professional lives are enriched by these changes, but
they are relatively more favoured by them.

But work in the new
economy has threats as well as opportunities. There is a price to be paid.

IT and economies
based on high tech are economies that require skilled workers.

Today, one third
of people between the ages of 20 and 24 undergo post secondary education
and training, the highest proportion in our history.

Likewise, the numbers
finishing secondary school have never been higher.

Where once a teenager
could leave school at 15 and knock about doing a bit of physical labouring
and unskilled factory work, a teenager today has more options for skilled
work, but fewer for unskilled. Teenage unemployment rates bear this out.

This training requires
considerable financial investment by the state and the individual, and
also delays the entry of people into the labour market.

Change two - Globalisation
dictates today's world order.

Globalisation is
more than free trade in goods and services, including government services,
it encompasses the global movement of labour.

Again, we have IT
to thank for this free movement of labour.

The implications
of globalisation for the nature of government are significant.

The pressure is on
governments to ensure their countries are internationally competitive.
That means they need to provide a social, economic, industrial and security
environment that is able to attract and keep investment, and hang on to
these new international globe-trotting workers.

Basically, the western
world is dealing with these new international forces of competition in
two ways, and there is some tension between them.

Through international
treaties, such as those developed by the United Nations, they are continuously
establishing and developing minimum human rights standards for the world.

The European Union
has done much the same thing for its member states.

Domestically however,
these same governments are deregulating, and have been for the past twenty
five years, to allow themselves to become more competitive.

The net effect of
this is to lessen the competitive advantage currently enjoyed by developing
and low wage countries while significantly improving working and living
conditions in those countries.

Meanwhile in the
west, industrial deregulation has meant greater flexibility for employers
and employees but also greater risks.

The number of people
in the Australian work force today who are not in permanent work has risen
steadily since the 1980s.

Reduced job certainty
has profound implications for the way people plan their lives, not least
of which is the need for two income families to make sure there is always
one income coming in.

Governments and employers
ignore this at their peril.

Change three - Western
society is aging rapidly.

With the exception
of the United States, all western countries, including Australia, now
have birth rates lower than the magic figure of 2.1 children per woman
required to maintain our present populations.

While this doesn't
convert to declining populations for another decade or so, in the mean
time Australian society is rapidly aging.

More pointedly, there
are fewer young people entering the workforce than a generation ago. This
means we have fewer people starting off with up to date skills and education.

When globalisation
interacts with a relative shortage of skilled labour, you produce a highly
competitive world market.

That's happening
to our teachers, nurses, our doctors and scientists already. The best
and brightest will be wooed by the companies prepared to pay and countries
prepared to pay, the rest of us lose.

So there we have
it - a future requiring more and more skilled workers, drawn from a decreasing
domestic pool and with Australian employers subject to increasing competition
from foreign companies. There will be trickle down effects to low skilled
people.

Unemployment in Australia
is now just over 6%, the lowest it has been in well over a generation.

BIS Srapnel forecasts
unemployment to fall to 4% in the next two years and remain low for the
foreseeable future, thanks not just to the competitive conditions of the
moment but also the long run shrinkage in numbers.

Low unemployment
is a source of great industrial strength for employees.

You don't have to
be Einstein to predict that workers entitlements are set to take great
leaps forward. If history is anything to go by this will either be the
result of direct action or government re-regulation.

How Australia maximises
its labour force, ensures it is internationally competitive and then retains
it will be a challenge we have not had to consider in the modern era.

The tyranny of distance
coupled with a high tariff wall and a healthy export trade reliant on
commodities have protected the Australian economy for a long time. Among
other things, they enabled us to have the sort of industrial conditions
and protections we believed in, as well as social norms like one income
families.

But no longer.

We paid a huge price
for these privileges and the economic reforms from the 1980s onwards have
all been about ensuring that Australia is equipped to take advantage of
world economic development.

With the future we
are now facing, more change is now necessary and it is not entirely about
further commercial alignment. Social change will play a big part and be
much more contentious.

This brief analysis
of where we have come from and where we are going is the easy part; identifying
social policy innovations that accommodate this future is much more difficult.

But we can make a
start tonight.

First, for you as
employers, in the future we're headed for there are probably three main
goals of social policy.

  • Goal One
    - we need policies that will maximise the size of our labour force
  • Goal Two
    - policies that will keep them here and
  • Goal Three
    - policies to ensure our workers are high standard and competitive with
    those of other countries.

I am here tonight
because those three goals fit in exactly with the expectations of many
Australian women and the choices they both want to make and are entitled
to make.

The stars are in
alignment.

Human rights and
economic progress make common cause.

In my view, we can
only meet those three goals of economic progress if we have genuine equality
of opportunity between the sexes.

This means an industrial
and social environment in which women can choose the combination of job
and motherhood that best suits them. It never did make sense to squeeze
women into the Motherhood Box and pay them to stay home, or the Career
Lady Box, where we pay them to go to university, but provided no boxes
for women who wanted to do both.

As the Swedes have
found, the quickest, cheapest and best way to expand the size of their
workforce is by keeping more women in work for longer. Currently the overall
participation rate of women is 54.5%, almost twenty percent lower than
the male rate. This largely reflects the departure of women from the workforce
to have children.

As a nation we have
prided ourselves on our tradition of one income families and seen them
as a source of stability and community strength. The international changes
we are facing today, however, increasingly make this tradition a luxury.

What's more, there's
been so much investment in the education and training of women and girls
since the 1970s, we have to ask whether it makes sense for them to stop
work after a few short years to stay home.

But if we keep more
women in the workforce (and that trend's already there) then we don't
have to throw away the stability and strength of our families.

It's not an either
or or.

We have to find ways
of doing both.

We have to plan ways
of ensuring our families stay strong despite the absence of a primary
home-maker.

Up until now, there
hasn't been much planning - women are still expected to work the same
hours as men and family needs have often been ignored.

Paid Maternity leave
giving women a chance to be full time mothers for at least the first three
months of a baby's life, flexible hours, working from home, permanent
part time work at middle and senior ranks, are all necessary if we want
to keep women in the workforce. Remember, allowing them to drop out of
the workforce is no longer an option.

There are probably
many other measures that would make work life balance easier for parents
and better for their children, that would keep Australian families strong
and the workforce full.

Offering free university
and TAFE places to parents seeking to return to the work force is one
option suggested to me. Extensive industrial re-regulation might be part
of the package. In the UK they have begun to require employers to reasonably
consider part time positions for parents of pre schoolers, for example.
I do not endorse or condemn any of them, but leave them with you to get
creative.

Not surprisingly,
the sorts of measures that increase the numbers of women in the workforce
are also likely to keep them here.

People don't pack
up shop and move countries easily.

Women don't often
leave workplaces that allow them to live sane family lives. That's goal
two.

Goal Three - making
sure we have the best and most competitive workforce we can- is also by
ensuring we appoint and promote people on merit and from as large a pool
as possible. That pool must include women with children.

The question is who
pays?

At the moment, you
are paying.

All of these measures
are either there as award entitlements or included as part of enterprise
bargaining - well and good you might say, there are trade offs in there
and it is efficient.

Well yes, to a point.
But it is inevitably an additional cost for the employer and makes employing
females slightly less attractive. What is more, you are at a disadvantage
compared with your international western-world competitors.

Why?

Because in those
countries, business does not pay directly for measures like paid maternity
leave, there is no full- cost addition to the price of a good or a service.
Instead, the community pays, Governments pay.

They spend a lot
more on paid maternity leave than anything being contemplated in Australia
- most Europeans provide it for 6 months, some for a year and for as much
as 90% of full salary.

Compared with this,
our Government will be asked to fund a more modest scheme for 14 weeks
at a minimum rate of pay. Sure, this can be funded through increased taxation,
but it might also be done through a reworking of existing payments or
a reassessment of spending priorities.

(As industrial pressure
mounts for paid maternity leave, particularly today with the ACTU's announcement
of a test case in the absence of a government-funded scheme for paid maternity
leave, you might have thought business would be clamouring for a national
government funded paid maternity leave scheme to head this off. Instead,
the silence is deafening).

Australia may be
an island, but it is no longer at the a-end of the earth, as a former
prime-minister so inelegantly once put it.

We are not immune
from the pressures that are reshaping the rest of the industrialised world
and in many ways, we would not want to be.

But we need to face
this, face what it means for us, make sure we can harness these changes
together with our great Australian values so they work together, instead
of against one another.

This is a new challenge
for social policy - social policy is not just welfare policy, it is not
just about helping out the poor and making sure the middle class doesn't
get to double dip.

Social policy is
any policy that makes society work better - for us, this means making
sure that families and work are better integrated.

Let me finish on
a word of warning about what will happen if we don't face up to the new
world of work and family.

We promised the first
generation of Sixties Feminists the world - they got their degrees and
their financial independence, but they also got a double-shift and a double
dose of guilt. Many are bitter.

This new generation
of daughters is their revenge.

These young women
are not interested in guilt or double shifts or being super women. They
think we were crazy! They are right!

This time, they won't
be cheated. They won't back off, the force, they know, is with them.

If we don't give
them what we promised their mothers, they will make their own choices,
and we may not like it.

They will take off
overseas. Go work in countries which are genuinely committed to making
it possible for them to work and mother.

Or, they will choose
not to have children - "Someone else can do that, I have worked too
hard for this" says my twenty something pedicurist building up her
beauty business.

Ladies and gentlemen,
while our generation is still in charge, it's up to us. Leadership never
was about making easy decisions.

Thank you.

Last
updated 17 December 2002