Thank you very much Teresa, Lyn, ladies and gentlemen.
As a Prime Minister, you have some interesting experiences and one of the more revealing and interesting experiences I have had is to go on to the floor of the American Senate and to meet the members of that chamber, and Theresa's reference to the large number of women in Federal Parliament now brought that experience to mind, and the astonishing experience of going onto the floor of the Senate in the United States is that you are hit by two things - the very small number of women in the Senate in both parties, there is a lot of publicity given to people like Senator Hillary Clinton from New York but she is very much the exception rather than the rule, there are vastly fewer women in the American Senate than there are certainly in our Senate or in our House of Representatives; and also relatively speaking the advanced age of the members of the Senate. Now I'm not criticising that, let me make that sure - I'm less critical, we all are, of advancing age each year. But to be confronted with a reality that we have achieved a great deal, and I'm very pleased to say as far as my party, the Liberal Party, is concerned, without the patronising use of quotas for the choice of people, but simply on the basis of merit, and we have come a very long way in having a more representative Parliament.
And the purpose of course, if I can finish this little reference to the number of women in the legislature, the purpose of having more women is to ensure that they are more representative. I am not addicted to any particular percentage. In the fullness of time, if all the political parties retain, and all are a bit guilty sometimes of not doing this, retain open and merit based preselection systems, it is only a matter of time as society changes, that we do have a larger number of women in our Parliament. It is true that as far as the Liberal Party is concerned, 1996 was something of a watershed year for us. We saw a huge influx of women into the House of Representatives, including Theresa Gambaro and Ricky Johnston who is behind me - unfortunately she wasn't able to retain her seat, it was a miracle win in 1996 and it was a tough contest for her in '98 - but in fact I have frequently said that the Government's success in 1998 in rather more adverse political circumstances than we had in 2001 or 1996, was very heavily due to the quality of the women Liberal Members of Parliament who held marginal seats all around Australia. And they made an enormous difference because they brought to their representation a capacity to deal with a broader range of community issues than often men do, and I think it has been one of the lessons that all of us have learnt over the last few years - the capacity of women Members of Parliament to relate to a broader range of the community's concerns than is often the case with men.
Theresa has told me something about this group and I can say to you Lyn, I've been accused of enjoying being in front of a microphone and wanting to talk on endlessly, and I'll try and avoid that temptation. But balancing work and family responsibilities I find is one of those things into which so many conversations around Australia naturally wander. I've called it a barbecue stopper. In other words, it's an issue that people come to very naturally because at various stages it concerns all of us. Our society is now very different from what it was 50 years ago. I mean I often think of the circumstances of the three women who have most influenced my life - my mother, my wife and my daughter. My mother was born at the end of the 19th century. She was a highly intelligent woman but as so many of that generation did, she left school at the age of 14, and she stopped work when she married and never went back to work. My wife was a schoolteacher, a high school teacher, very well educated woman. Worked until our first child was born and then has not been in the paid workforce since then because of my career circumstances. But if they'd have been different, then she undoubtedly would have returned at least part time in her profession of teaching. And then of course my daughter, who is 28 and who is a qualified solicitor and works with a law firm in Sydney, her future and the balancing of work and family if she marries and has children, would be a wholly different consideration again. And that is really in a sense a snapshot of how society has changed.
One of the things that is interesting when you look at the statistics, and they're always important, although they're not the final word on the subject, is that the female workforce participation rate as far as fulltime work participation rate has virtually not changed very much at all in the last 40 years. The number of females in the workforce full-time, the percentage has not varied very much. And that may surprise you. But what has happened is that there has been a very, very dramatic change in the participation rate of females in the part-time workforce. And what I think is the most important thing when you're thinking about this whole question of balancing work and family, there are a couple of rules I think you have to follow. And the first and most important is to recognise, as Theresa said, that one size does not fit all and that the idea that the Government should decide well, this is what the women of Australia want and we're going to set out to provide it, I think is a very fundamental mistake. Years ago, there used to be some outdated stereotypes about the roles of men and women in our society, and they have of course changed completely. But in the process of observing that change, we don't want to make the mistake of replacing one stereotype with another stereotype which is completely inappropriate to the fact that we live in a very diverse society.
In examining some work and family policies recently, we had a little bit of work done about how the various percentages of different family arrangements, working arrangements, broke up. And we discovered that families, couples with children, dependent children, broke up into very interesting percentages. That for those that had both parents working full-time with dependent children, that represented only 17 per cent of the total workforce. Those where one parent was working full-time and the other parent was full-time out of the workforce, that represented about 22 per cent of the workforce. And those of what I call the one and a halfs, where one parent is working full-time and the other parent is working part-time, be it the husband or the wife or whatever the combination might be, that in fact was 27 per cent. And then of course you had percentages when you add them all together of where neither parent was in the workforce and there is still even in affluent Australia 2003, there are still too many circumstances where both parents are unemployed. And then of course you had a significant percentage of sole parents which comprise a growing cohort, but nonetheless certainly a significant cohort in society. But what I think those things demonstrated to me is that in developing work and family policies, there is no one simple answer.
People say well you've got to have paid maternity leave. Well I think Lyn made a pretty good observation about that. For many people in this room, paid maternity leave would be completely irrelevant and in any event I am totally opposed to the situation where paid maternity leave is forced upon businesses, quite unacceptable. I think maternity leave is part of the mix but the idea that you solve all the problems of work and family, and you solve all the problems of a falling fertility rate by introducing 14 weeks paid maternity leave, is really quite intellectually insubstantial and really quite insulting to the commonsense experience of both men and women.
I think there are a number of areas of flexibility that you need. You need to have the most flexible workplace relations policies that you can possibly find. And one of the things that I'm most proud of is that over the last six or seven years we have been able to get away from some of the old stereotypes in workplace relations, particularly in small businesses. You all know, and most of you are in one way or another connected with small businesses, you all know that if you've got a good employee, the last thing you want to do is lose that employee and you will make the most flexible arrangements under the sun, you will turn yourself inside out to accommodate the needs of that person if that person is valuable to you as an employee. Now that's commonsense. You don't need to be told that by the Prime Minister or by the Government, it's something you know instinctively.
And therefore the most important thing is to have flexible workplace relations. Why I was such an opponent of the old industrial relations system that we still have too much of in this country, was that a rigid awards system prevents people developing that kind of flexibility. I used to years ago when I was in Opposition quote the example of a textile factory in Marrickville in Sydney, that had a lot of female employees, many of them were from a migrant background, and they all wanted to rearrange their hours so they could meet their children at the local school gate and take them home. And they were quite happy to start a bit earlier. They were quite happy to work a bit later on some occasions and perhaps even work for an hour or something on Saturday morning. But because of the awards - they were so rigid then - that couldn't happen. And you had a disgruntled workforce, you had less well cared for children and minded children than should have been the case. Now those sorts of situations are less common now than they used to be 10 or 15 years ago, but they are still far too common. I think that is the first thing you need.
I think the second thing you need is to have taxation policies that recognise, as far as any Government can afford it, recognises that the different women and men are going to make different choices about how they organise their lives. I have been quite impressed with some work by an English academic called Catherine Hakim, who developed what was called a preference theory. And it focused particularly on the attitudes of women, but it's very relevant also to men. And she tended to divide women who wanted to have both work and family into three categories - what you call home-centred, in other words women who saw their main interest, in fact their overwhelming interest, in full-time or as far as possible, full-time care of children; another group who were what she called work-centred who saw their main driver in life as being their careers, although they nonetheless aspired to have families, to have children; and then a much larger group in the middle that she described as adaptive, who were really like most people, a combination of the two. And once again it's a theory that passes the commonsense or the pub test, that when you think about it is so logical, that we all know from our own experience with our friends and the people we encounter, that that more or less describes the range of attitudes. And what Governments need to do is to develop a set of policies that accommodate the three of those.
It's not the Government's role to say well, you shall for a certain number of years be full-time out of the workforce to care for your children, because that is what we the Government have decided is good for you, is good for the children and is good for the nation. Equally, you don't want a Government saying - we've got to go flat out as soon as a child is born to get that child into childcare so their mother can get back into the workforce full-time. That is equally offensive and equally unacceptable. You have to develop a set of policies that try and accommodate that. Now, we've tried to do that. We haven't done it perfectly and we can still go a further distance, but we have made some changes to taxation policies which will allow and have over a period of time, I think particularly for people in the middle to lower income brackets, to exercise a little bit more choice as far as their work and family arrangements are concerned.
And we will continue to work on those things and we will continue to try and develop those things even further because our society has changed very much from what it was when I left school in the middle of the 1950s and went out to work. It has changed very much from all the experiences that I had as a child and my parents would have had. But equally, it hasn't changed so much that people's main aspirations generally speaking, and one always generalises cautiously about these things, is still not the aspiration to have a family and to care for their families properly and to try, if that is their aspiration and it is so obviously the aspiration of the great bulk of the people of this gathering, to combine that with a successful business and professional career. And I think we have to build a society where you allow people to calibrate those arrangements in whatever way best suits those circumstances.
So I'm sometimes typecast as somebody who likes the white picket fence. If that means that I think that family life is very important, well I plead guilty to that. I think most of us would want to plead guilty to that. If it means that I think home ownership is a very important part of families' security and stability, and is also important to the material well being of a number of people in this room who are in the building or real estate industry, I'd be very happy to plead guilty to that as well. But I think we live in a society where the name of the game is adaptability and flexibility. We have a very strong economy at the present time and it's probably the best performing economy in the developed world, and most of the statistics will bear that out. And the main reason why it's doing so well, in my view, is that of all the capacities that Australians have, the capacity they have in greatest measure is the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances. Because we are a relatively classless society, we adapt far more readily than do the people of other countries. I had the experience recently of talking to the world boss of one of the largest banks, and he said that of all the people he wanted to employ most, he wanted to employ Australians he said because Australians adapt. He said that Americans and Englishmen have great skills, but he said because they think their way is the best way of doing it, they are not as adaptable as Australians are. He said, you Australians, he said, you understand what is the best way of doing it, but you also have a great capacity to adapt because you don't presume that yours is the only way of doing it. And I thought it was an interesting insight from somebody who has employed people from all around the world.
Now I think we have demonstrated that as a community. When you think of what our economy was like 20 years ago... I was out in Peter Dutton's electorate taking part in a little ceremony for a business that had been in existence for 20 years. And it was a building construction business and had been very, very successful - 70 employees now and sort of very, very high turnover in the millions. And over a 20 year period, and it hasn't been the easiest 20 year period although it's been very good for small business the last few years, but in the '80s with high interest rates, and I said that when you think what the Australian economy was like 20 years ago, we had high tariffs, we had a fixed exchange rate, we had a suffocatingly restrictive industrial relations system. We had all of those things.
Now all of that has changed and we have adapted, and adapted very well. And nowhere has that change and capacity to adapt been more evident than in small business - 33, 35 per cent of small business proprietors are women. More significantly of course, in the last 10 years the volume of new entrants into small business, particularly in the areas of community service and the burgeoning areas like recreation and so forth, has been overwhelmingly amongst women. And it really goes back to one of the things I said about the capacities of women Members of Parliament, just as they have particular capacities, then so the same applies in relation to business.
Now I won't be as good as my word and be addicted to this microphone. I just leave you with some of those thoughts. I think the networking that you spoke of earlier Lyn and Theresa, is very important. I'm always sort of encouraged to find evidence of that and to find the practical interaction between women in business which is designed to help each other, but is also a recognition that we live in a society that enables women more than at any time in our history, to contribute and to be a total part of society. We all know that if you, in my lifetime if I think of the great events and the great changes, obviously the dramatic change in the role of women, the dramatic change for the better, is socially the biggest single transformation that has come over our society in my lifetime. And I think the expression through your network of the desire of women in business to interact with each other, to help each other, to learn from each other's experience, and through that to make a big contribution to society, I think it's very, very encouraging and very important. Small business is the heart of the Australian economy. I came from a small business background myself. My father was a small businessman and I have always had a special affection for people who start with nothing and build something up and get an enormous amount of personal pride out of it as well as contributing something to the economy. And it's happening increasingly now amongst women. I think that is a wholly desirable development and something that is very much in Australia's national interest.
And thank you very much for having me.
[ends]