Telling stories of women’s history – draw from lessons of the past.

NFAW is developing a major initiative to create an interactive digital history wall of ‘Australia’s Gender Lens Champions through the Decades’ as a traveling museum exhibit to mark 100 years of Gender Lens Champions. 1922-2022. ( This will mark the founding of the Country Women’s Association which gave women the chance to fundraise for various causes, support local communities and of course socialise).

Drawing from the rich archival records maintained by NFAW, historic stories, journal entries, gender champions, historical moments and the women behind these amazing, courageous lives will be brought to life in a digital media wall. This wall will be built to enable a traveling exhibition that will tour around Australia for five years, providing digital education materials that can be downloaded to take back to the classroom.

We plan to start development work this year on scoping the first national Gender Lens digital exhibition and will seek sponsors and government support.

The digital exhibition will include both the project technologies such as High Definition, and the delivery technologies that make it interactive, engaging, and immensely enriching in its storytelling ability, with a flexible panel design that will allow it to scope up or down to fit within a variety of floor spaces in museums and art galleries around Australia.

Paid Parental Leave (PPL) affects women and men in different ways; it is not gender neutral. This submission responds to the terms of reference through a gender lens.

NFAW is a strong supporter of PPL, and was part of the coalition that promoted the policy prior to the Productivity Commission Report1 (Productivity Commission, 2009) that led to the introduction of PPL. In that report the Productivity Commission identified the following commonly agreed objectives (at p XIV):

• generate child and maternal health and welfare benefits by increasing the time parents take away from work. The Commission estimates that the average absence will increase by ten weeks. Many more families would have an increased capacity to provide exclusive parental care for children for six to nine months
• promote some important, publicly supported social goals, and in particular, that having a child and taking time out for family reasons is viewed by the community as part of the usual course of work and life for parents in the paid workforce
• counter some of the incentives against working posed by the tax and welfare system - potentially contributing around six months of net additional employment for the average woman over her lifetime
• increase retention rates for business, with reduced training and recruitment costs.

Paid Parental Leave (PPL) affects women and men in different ways; it is not gender neutral. This submission responds to the terms of reference through a gender lens. NFAW is a strong supporter of PPL, and was part of the coalition that promoted the policy prior to the Productivity Commission Report1 (Productivity Commission, 2009) that led to the introduction of PPL. In that report the Productivity Commission identified the following commonly agreed objectives (at p XIV):

• generate child and maternal health and welfare benefits by increasing the time parents take away from work. The Commission estimates that the average absence will increase by ten weeks. Many more families would have an increased capacity to provide exclusive parental care for children for six to nine months

• promote some important, publicly supported social goals, and in particular, that having a child and taking time out for family reasons is viewed by the community as part of the usual course of work and life for parents in the paid workforce

• counter some of the incentives against working posed by the tax and welfare system - potentially contributing around six months of net additional employment for the average woman over her lifetime • increase retention rates for business, with reduced training and recruitment costs.

The Attorney-General’s Department has issued a discussion paper on penalties for wage theft.

The National Foundation for Australian Women has made a submission in response, arguing that the government’s discussion paper significantly underestimates the extent of the problem and the scope of the response that is required.

What behaviour is covered by the term ‘wage theft’?

Wage theft is shorthand for employer practices which include

• paying a base hourly rate that is below the relevant award or minimum wage base rate

• ignoring obligations to pay penalty rates for hours worked in the evenings, on weekends or on public holidays

• failing to comply with obligations to pay overtime rates or other incentive-based payments, bonuses or loadings

• failing to provide or pay out leave entitlements or failing to pay superannuation entitlements

• ‘cash back schemes’ whereby workers receive bank transfers of correct legal wages and are then forced to give back a proportion of their pay to the employer in cash

• ‘off-the-clock violations’ where staff are required to work beyond their scheduled or clocked-off finishing time, or to complete training relating to their employment without pay.

While widespread, wage theft is not gender neutral. The behaviour involved most commonly and most significantly affects low paid employees in part-time and casual work—all groups in which women predominate. It is also commonplace in industries in which women predominate such as hospitality and retail (NFAW, 2017, 1). While it disproportionately affects migrant workers, among migrant workers it disproportionately affects women (Berg and Farbenblum, 2017, 32)

NFAW believes that a safe, high quality and sustainable aged care system is dependent on the workforce that delivers care.

This submission focuses measures that will enable the aged care workforce to grow and to adapt continuously, so that it can respond to current and emerging problems in the sector.

The principles underpinning our specific recommendations are:

• Social infrastructure is at least as important to national well-being as hard infrastructure. Treating social infrastructure as a cost and hard infrastructure as an investment distorts government decision-making and undermines the future of the sector.
• The aged care workforce is critical social infrastructure. At present there are significant shortages in aged care workforce, particularly in regional Australia and amongst higher skilled roles.
• Aged care infrastructure needs to be rebuilt. There is a need for a shift in focus from attributes of existing and potential workers to structural factors that underpin greater consistency across aged care and related caring sectors in levels of qualification and recognition of qualifications, in wages and in other working conditions. Uneven and fragmented reforms are counterproductive.
• Flexibility in aged care should not be focussed simply on filling rosters on a given day. Flexibility also requires the capacity to grow the sector and to respond to innovations to improve quality, such as mandated ratios of nurses to patients; accessible and effective complaints mechanisms for residents and family members, mandated unannounced inspections by those responsible for standards, and so on.
• Employees will enter and remain in the industry, embrace reform and sectoral change and invest time and money in new skills only if they are assured of a reliable employment foundation including stable and secure working conditions, a proper valuation of skill sets, and relevant, recognised and, wherever possible, portable training.
• A strong sector should not be built by passing the problems of casualisation, forced self-employment, and undervaluation of work on to other parts of the caring sector such as disability support.

NFAW has written to the NSW Premier and MLCs to express support for the Reproductive Health Care Reform Bill 2019.