QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE: TAKE NOTE OF ANSWERS

Senator WHITEAKER (Western Australia) (15:05): I rise to take note of answers given in question time. I particularly want to talk to the answers given by Senator Wong to the coalition's first questions, and then I'll get to some of the others. For someone from the party that talk endlessly about getting government out of other people's lives, Senator Cash seems remarkably interested in everyone else's.

She has once again stood up in this place and asked us to question who gets to count as a woman. I think it's really important to talk honestly about this issue in this place, because these are conversations that can cause real harm to people. The Sex Discrimination Act does not outlaw all single-sex spaces, and it permits special measures for the purposes of achieving substantive equality for disadvantaged groups.

And I think that's a really, really important point that we should talk to. I think if Senator Cash and the Liberal Party were genuinely concerned about women's safety, then their record might be very different. When Senator Cash was Attorney-General, her government refused to put a positive duty on employers to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace, and the Liberals voted against Labor's amendment to add a positive duty.

So I think the thing that's hardest to stomach for me is Senator Cash pretending that this is about women's safety. In coming to government, we made gender pay equity a central objective of the Fair Work Act, and Senator Cash and the coalition opposed that too. If the Liberal Party and Senator Cash want to talk about women's safety, then I think they should begin by explaining their own record.

While Senator Cash and the Liberal Party are busy dog whistling, this government is busy delivering for women. We are the first government in this country's history where women make up the majority of our caucus and the first with more women than men around the cabinet table. And you can see the difference that this makes in our approach to women and in the policies that we have delivered.

We are committed to women's safety. Minister Plibersek, Assistant Minister White and Assistant Minister Kearney have spent much of the last few months consulting around the country with hundreds of stakeholders on the second action plan, and that's really important work. When we came to government in 2022, we brought back the Women's Budget Statement to put gender equality at the core of our economic plan.

The gender pay gap is the lowest it has been. We've backed real pay rises for women workers in some of the lowest paid industries—many workers in those industries are women—and the minimum wage is now more than $12,000 a year higher than when we came to office. We have made child care cheaper for families, helping more women get back to work.

And we've delivered a record investment in women's health. I am so proud of our government's record on women. And I'll say again that if Senator Cash and the Liberal Party want to come in here and dog whistle about women's safety, they should explain their record first.