SENATOR THE HON KATY GALLAGHER
MINISTER FINANCE
MINISTER FOR WOMEN
MINISTER FOR THE PUBLIC SERVICE
MINISTER FOR GOVERNMENT SERVICES
E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
RN BREAKFAST
TUESDAY, 4 MARCH 2025
SUBJECTS: Better pay for aged care nurses; gender pay gap data; flexible work; bracket creep; budget process.
SALLY SARA, HOST: In yet another election funding announcement, the Federal Government has committed $2.6 billion to fund a pay rise for aged care nurses. The increase was ordered by the Fair Work Commission in a case brought by the Health Services Union, which argued that care work has been undervalued partly because it’s sometimes considered as women’s work. It comes as the Workplace Gender Equality Agency has published its second annual report showing just one in five businesses has eliminated the gender pay gap, but there are signs of improvement. Katy Gallagher is the federal Finance Minister and the Minister for Women and joins me now. Minister, welcome back to Radio National Breakfast.
SENATOR THE HON KATY GALLAGHER, MINISTER FOR WOMEN: Thanks for having me on, Sally.
SARA: There have been pay increases across the board in aged care, but this $2.6 billion you’re announcing today is for nurses in particular. Why is the Government stepping in?
GALLAGHER: Well, this is an area where we all recall the Royal Commission, which found that the state of aged care in Australia was in a terrible state. In fact, their interim report was titled Neglect. So, that gives you a bit of a picture of how aged care was faring. And since we came to government and under Anika Wells’ leadership, a lot of work has been done to try and address all of those failures and part of that was the recognition of wages for workers in that sector. So, we had certainly the aged care workers themselves, they’ve had a significant pay rise which the Government has funded. And again, nurses in aged care, who were paid less than nurses in hospitals and that had an impact on the clinical care being provided in aged care facilities. So, this addresses that as well. We are a big funder of aged care and we recognise that in order to address some of these inequalities, the Government needed to find room in the Budget to support those wage increases.
SARA: Having a look at the aged care provider survey, that’s showing a prediction of a shortage of registered nurses in aged care of almost 1,500 for 2024-25. Does the Government need to do more to attract nurses to this field, which is growing with demand every day?
GALLAGHER: Exactly, well, this is a big reason why wages are so important. And we saw from really in very quick time, the minute that aged care workers themselves’ pay increased – it increased pretty significantly – the separation rates and the retention rates really responded very quickly. So, I was speaking with aged care providers who were saying that for the first time they were seeing staff remain in those jobs, they were retaining trained staff, and they were able to attract staff into vacancies. And again, when you’re competing for nurses, and we know there’s no shortage of competition for nurses, you have to have attractive conditions and wages that compare with what nurses can earn in other settings like hospitals. So, this deals with that, but sure, we’re going to have to do more in the care economy, more in aged care, I imagine, as we see demographics change and more demand being placed on the system.
SARA: You’re listening to Radio National Breakfast and you’re hearing from Finance Minister and Minister for Women, Senator Katy Gallagher. Minister, let’s talk about the latest data on the gender pay gap. It’s showing that for every dollar earned by Australian men, women are paid 78 cents. That’s a difference of around – a significant amount of money each year. If promoting women is the sticking point here, what needs to be done, do you think?
GALLAGHER: Well, this WGEA data, and I just take my hat off to the staff at WGEA who do an incredible job at collating all this and making sense of it for people to understand, but I mean really the take home around this is transparency. So, raising awareness. I think the big change came with individually reporting against employers so that people who were thinking about where to work were having a look at this data and could see really what was happening within individual businesses. And that’s shown in even just a year, to shift the dial. We’ve seen more employers reduce their gender pay gaps this year, we’ve seen the size of the gaps come down, and we’ve seen that more analysis and more consultation is being done within individual employers to understand what’s going on and to take steps to address it. So, this is all really positive, but yes, you are right, there is more to do to make sure that women are getting a fair crack at opportunities in the workplace. And part of that is understanding really what’s happening at the most senior levels, which is where obviously we see in those highly male dominated industries, where the biggest gaps are and a lot of that is being put down to, you know, women in senior leadership or lack of women in senior leadership.
SARA: Minister, there is a Coalition push to cut working from home for public servants. Working from home has been seen as helpful, particularly to keep women in the workforce in senior roles. What’s your response to this proposal?
GALLAGHER: Well, Sally, the only new ideas they seem to have are cuts to services and a $600 billion nuclear reactor. It seems that every other idea is being stolen from the United States. And they clearly have no idea about how working families manage modern life. I mean, across the economy working from home arrangements are in place. They are a feature of modern workplaces. And as you say, they allow women in particular to manage some of the other responsibilities they have outside of the workplace. And so, I would see this announcement, if you can call it that from the Opposition, as certainly a step in the wrong direction for working women. And we’ve seen that when they decided all of a sudden to not support any further changes to the WGEA Act about improving women’s equality at work. So, it seems there is a lot of ideas being stolen from the United States at the moment when it comes to Peter Dutton and the Opposition.
SARA: Independent MPs including Allegra Spender, who I spoke to this morning on Breakfast, have written to the Treasurer calling for income taxes to be indexed to inflation. They say that younger working people are being unfairly burdened by the tax system. Would you consider implementing that?
GALLAGHER: Well, we believe we’ve got a better way of approaching dealing with bracket creep and making sure that people on middle and lower incomes get a fair rate when it comes to tax relief, and you saw that with our tax cut for every taxpayer. That allowed – those changes to the Liberals’ tax plan – allowed 2.9 million people earning less than $45,000 to actually get a tax cut, who wouldn’t have had one under the Liberals. And we also dropped two tax rates and lifted two thresholds, which allowed, really, when you look at it over the medium term, the average taxpayer will pay less tax, less of their income in tax, for at least the next decade. So, we accept that people have different views on this and Allegra Spender does a lot of good work in this space, I’m not doubting that, and in her advocacy. But we believe through our tax plan that we’ve found a better way to provide that relief to particularly middle and lower-income workers.
SARA: Just finally, Minister, there are media reports that Budget meetings that were scheduled for this week have been cancelled. Is that correct?
GALLAGHER: Well, the Budget, we’ve had ERC meetings I think for the last three months, really. But we’ve reached the final stages of that, as you would expect with a Budget scheduled for 25 March. A lot of those decisions have been made, so it’s been a normal ERC process as far as I’m concerned. We’ve broken the back and we’ve had a lot of meetings, I can assure your listeners, to make sure that we’re making all of those decisions that need to be made to make sure we’re dealing with cost-of-living pressures for Australian households.
SARA: So, have any Budget meetings for this week been cancelled?
GALLAGHER: Look, not as far as I’m aware, and I go to all of them. We’ve really, because of the Budget scheduled for 25 March, you would expect a lot of that work would have been done by now in any normal budget cycle and that’s exactly what we have followed.
SARA: Minister, thank you for your time this morning.
GALLAGHER: Thanks very much, Sally.
ENDS
