Welcome to the ACTU Women's Congress 2003.

The question of balance between work and family affects all of us at some stage in our lives, and affects us more profoundly than we often recognise.

The relentless struggle to earn a living, to maintain personal or job satisfaction, to repeatedly re-enter the workforce - all the while being an active participant in our family and community lives - these are issues that go to the very core of our community's wellbeing.

Whether we are the individual attempting to achieve this balance in our own working life, or the family of that individual, we all feel the impact of financial pressures, of the stress inherent in juggling work and family care, of the anxiety and insecurity associated with periods away from the workforce, or with working part-time.

I include myself in this collective because of the recent addition to my family. As you will all know, there's nothing like a new baby to review our perspectives on employment and family. As the parent of an 11 year old daughter and now an infant son, I must once again take stock. While I obviously speak from a fairly privileged position, nevertheless, I must evaluate how to strike the balance in my family that each Australian tries to strike in his or her own home.

I've got to say that one of the greatest hurdles in this debate is the way in which it is defined. Repeatedly we see male-dominated employers or governments begrudgingly acknowledging the need to 'accommodate' family responsibilities. We hear them reluctantly conceding the cost to the workforce of losing valuable female employees, we see the cogs grinding over as they realise that encouraging the fertility rate will foster a new generation of taxpayers to support the ageing population. Occasionally we may even hear a tentative mention of 'women's rights'.

However, nowhere in this debate is a discussion of the intrinsic worth of parenting, an acknowledgment that caring for family members is not just something to be 'accommodated' but instead an inherent good. Of course we must recognise that this responsibility still falls largely on women's shoulders, whether by choice or by necessity. But we must also acknowledge that it is an enormously important responsibility, one that benefits society as a whole. It contributes not only to the wellbeing of the individuals concerned, but also to the social and economic health of the nation.

Missing also is an acknowledgment that paid employment is not the only form of work undertaken by Australians. Every day, all over the country, Australians are performing hours of unpaid work - caring for and maintaining homes and families, and assisting others in the community.

Until we recognise this unpaid work, and its intrinsic value to the community, we will only be getting half the story across. From now on, we've got to make sure we pitch it in a different way.

It is, of course, stating the obvious to say that the face of the Australian workforce has changed over the last 50 years.

Most of these changes have impacted on the working and non-working lives of women - often not in very positive ways - and unions, now more than ever, have a critical role to play in supporting women's aspirations.

I found it interesting that a recently published report by the World Bank, no less, concluded that unions provided positive benefits to their members, and were associated with positive economic outcomes more generally.

Workers who belonged to trade unions earned higher wages, worked fewer hours, received more training and had longer job tenure than their non-unionised counterparts.

The Report also concluded that unionised women workers had a greater pay advantage over their non-unionised counterparts in comparison with men.

Unionised workforces were found to be more productive and countries with higher levels of unionisation were found to enjoy better economic performance, be more effective in reducing inequality and more easily adjust to global economic shocks.

So unions have had and must continue to have a legitimate role to play in our society, particularly to ensure that the economic position of the vulnerable is protected!

The Bracks Government is committed to undertaking practical action to improve the balance of work and family.

We have made a commitment to introduce a program to provide $1000 Return To Work grants to assist with the training of 10,000 parents predominantly women - to return to the workforce after caring full time for children.

In partnership with progressive employers, the Victorian Government will also provide $2 million to fund projects to assist women and men balance work and family, extending successful initiatives to other workplaces, and researching innovative industry practices.

I know that my college, Mary Delahunty, spoke at the ICFTU conference about paid maternity leave and lobbing the Federal Government to establish a national paid maternity leave scheme.

In addition, the Bracks Government, in the first session of Parliament, will introduce a Bill to provide funded payroll deductions for employers providing paid maternity or adoption leave.

But, apart from these very important measures, we need to modernise the legal framework under which relations in the workforce are governed.

Built on an outdated model of conflict in the workplace, an outdated model of male breadwinner and female homemaker, and an ideological view that work and family balance is achieved through deregulation of the labour market and industrial relations, the Workplace Relations Act or "WRA" is a dinosaur a creature of a long ago Jurassic age that somehow escaped the comet!

Well, Tony Abbott and his prehistoric pet have got to wake up and smell the 21st century. Abbott has got to realise that he's not Jeff Goldblum, that Jurassic Park was just a movie, and that the legacy of Peter Reith belongs in a museum, not in today's industrial and social reality.

Those of us not blinded by our panama hats know that the structure of work and the contemporary workforce has changed: that co-operation, rather than conflict, is the way forward. We know employers and employees want to structure workplace arrangements that fully harness the skills and capabilities of women as they move through various life transitions.

We need a better framework than that provided in the Workplace Relations Act. It must be built on co-operation, with individual states, unions and business supporting the whole, but permitted to deal with individual differences.

In Victoria we are doing what we can under our legislative powers to mitigate the effect of this legislative travesty on women and families.

I refer in particular to the 'Schedule 1A' workers left behind by the referral of most of Victoria's industrial relations powers in 1996.

These 350,000 low-paid workers - half of them women - were not at that time covered by Federal Awards. They were bundled into Schedule 1A of the Act, and given a safety net of only five minimal conditions.

The Victorian Government will push the Federal Government to establish a truly unitary system with a better safety net. I am meeting with Tony Abbott to discuss this issue soon, but with or without Commonwealth co-operation, we will legislate to provide award conditions for all Schedule 1A Victorian workers consistent with the Federal award.

Another vulnerable group of workers - again mostly women - are clothing outworkers. Legislation soon before Parliament will extend the protections enjoyed by other workers to outworkers by:

• deeming outworkers to be employees for the purposes of occupational health and safety and long service leave; and
• providing a simple and accessible system for the recovery of unpaid wages, including where a contractor somewhere in the supply chain disappears.

Hopefully this will go some way to redressing the scurrilous inequality of the past.

I may be new to the area of Industrial Relations, but I am no novice when it comes to voicing support for women in the paid workforce.

As Attorney-General I have strived to redress what is, frankly, an embarrassing imbalance in the number of women in senior positions within the law. I have been determined to ensure that Victoria benefits from a greater number of women in its judiciary, and law firms and the Bar are encouraged to distribute quality work more fairly.

I can tell you, it hasn't been easy. Some of the attitudes I encounter belong in a museum, next to Abbott's pet tyrannosaurus. However, with a lot of hard work and some good old-fashioned stubbornness, we have made fantastic progress and will continue to do so over the next term.

Now I am looking beyond the parameters of the legal profession and, to use a throwback to my racing days, I'm chafing at the bit. I will fight for a Victorian workforce that is truly representative of the whole of community - where women's full, equal and flexible participation is a given and where the legislative regime that governs it belongs in the 21st century.

Of course, we will have our work cut out for us, if some of my federal counterpart's comments are anything to go by.

Tony Abbott was spruiking for some sort of award when he said:

"If we're honest, most of us would accept that a bad boss is a little like a bad father or a bad husband. Notwithstanding all of his faults, you find he tends to do more good than harm. He might be a bad boss but at least he's employing someone."

Last time I looked, Mr Abbott, Menzies was no longer Prime Minister and not every house has a white picket fence, although sometimes we could be forgiven for thinking otherwise...

For its part, the Victorian Government operates in the 21st century and I'm looking forward to working hard to make sure we never return to the past.