Foster-Bell PaulPAUL FOSTER-BELL (National): I understand the member Tracey Martin has made a wager that a man is not prepared to take a call but she will just have to make do with me on this occasion. In making a brief contribution on this Equal Pay Amendment Bill can I begin by congratulating you Mr Deputy Speaker. It is wonderful to see you back here in this House.The Equal Pay Amendment Bill in the name of Jan Logie amending the Equal Pay Act (EPA) 1972 is something that is worthy of this House's consideration. I congratulate the member on bringing it here and I know that her intentions in advancing this are absolutely genuine. I have got the pleasure of working with the member on the cross-party parliamentary rainbow network. I have genuinely enjoyed that opportunity to engage on issues including those of the transgender community. That is one of the aspects that does trouble me a little bit about this bill in that it requires employers to gather and collate the information pertaining to the gender of their employees.This is an issue that we have discussed in the parliamentary cross-party rainbow network because I had concerns about a proposal that came to the group that this information on gender identity be gathered in census format as well. The reason I have a concern about that—and I appreciate that it can be done with the very worthy motivation of trying to understand the problems faced by that community and devise social policies that can help people. But I also have a concern about the State employers or anybody gathering information that can be incredibly sensitive to the people involved. It may be information that they do not share publicly widely beyond themselves sometimes or maybe only with their immediate family or their very closest friends. So I do have a concern about requiring employers on one hand to be completely gender-neutral—and I agree that they should be when they are making their employment decisions—but also telling them they will have to inquire as to their employees' gender. Frankly I do find that a little bit concerning.This Government has a proud record on advancing gender equity issues and I would point to the recent achievement of 45 percent of appointees to Government boards being women. This is a measure that has been achieved by the very proactive approach of senior Ministers and I have seen this myself in their approach to appointing board applicants. They make sure that if candidates are of equal merit a woman applicant is appointed in order to lead to greater gender equity. We know that in the workplace and at the board level greater input and decision-making by senior women leaders leads to better decisions and better outcomes on those boards.So this is a Government that is in the process of updating existing Equal Pay Act legislation and amending the Employment Relations Act to implement a number of recommendations on pay equity with the goal of providing fair but also practical processes for women men and those of any gender in our workforce particularly those who feel they are not being paid what they are worth for the job they are doing where that feeling is due to gender discrimination. So I think we should not jump the gun on this. We should follow the process that this Government has sensibly been engaging in and this comes on top of a number of other initiatives that have been announced by Ministers over the last 8½ years of this very good very sound very sensible National Government.Turning to some of the other provisions of this bill increasing the maximum penalty for a breach of the EPA to align with the penalties under the Employment Relations Act—again this is something on which I sympathise with the member's intention. I believe she is trying to add real teeth and the message does need to get through to employers that it is absolutely unacceptable to discriminate on the grounds of gender or actually of anything else in my view. They should not be discriminating on race or sexuality or political preference. It should really come down to the ability of the person to do the job.But I do think the bill is problematic as some of the data that would be collated does not actually give a full and genuine picture. Basic earning rates for instance do not give a full and genuine picture of the amount of work being done at what level and of the equity of the comparative workloads. Thank you.