E OE PROOF ONLY
TRANSCRIPT OF PRESS CONFERENCE, 5 JUNE 1984, ON THE TABLING
STATEME-NT'' ON GOVERNMENT POLICY DISCUSSION4 PAPER ON AFFIRMATIVE
ACTION PM: I only want to make a very brief statement. Firstly, I
want to express thel gratitude of the Government to Susan Ryan.,
who has been the Minister assisting me, Dr Summers and the
other people in the Office of the Status of Women who have
put so much work into this. And the second expression of
gratitude of course is to the business community and their
organisations for the whole hearted support. which they have
given to the Government in its approach on this matter,
And to the trade unions. -;.' Without'-the support of all those
people and all the hard work of those people we would not
be able to be in a position now where together with the
support of the Opposition indicated to me today that we can
go to the people of Australia with a widely agreed basis for
remedying what has 4~ en for too long a very substantial
deficiency in our societ i.
As I said in my speech, we have luxuriated as a society I
think for too long in saying that yes women have equal rights,
they are not second class citizens but we haven'. t matched in
practice that assertion of principle. And this has been
particularly clear in the area of employment. And the
fact that so many women are concentrated into relatively
few occupations and to be denied the opportunity of access
to positions of responsibility in all the ranges of occupations,
both horizontally and vertically if you like, in the labour
market, has been I think a stigma in society and a contradiction
of our assertion of principle about equality.
Ultimately, the rectification of these inequities is going
to require more than just a program of affirmative action.
It is going to require a gradual reform of our education
system so that from the time young boys and girls go into
the education stream there is not going to be any differentiat-', onon
a basis of sex between the opportunities that will be
available to them to go into the occupations of their choice.
That sort of thing in the education field will take longer.
In the immediate term we believe that under the program of
affirmative action there are things that can be done. I
have indicated that we are not rushing this and this approach
is one that is going to enable a wider base of community
support. You are aware that we are going to have a pilot
program and I particularly thank those 28 companies and
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institutions in the educational field who have given us
their support. They are obviously significant institutions
and the fact that they are cooperating in this pilot program
will be of importance in us getting the concept effectively
into action.
I also thank those who;:. are going to work with us on the
working party to monitor the pilot program and to advise
us as we move later on towards a legislative program which
will be directed towards those enterprises with more than
one hundred employees-.
And I am certain that given the basis of approach that we
have adopted, with the cooperation through.. the business,
industrial and political communities, that it will mean
that we will be able to come up with legislation which will
have equally substantial support and will mean that there
will be effective results.
And so I repeat the gratitude of the Government to all those
concerned and I believe thAt we have today initiated a major
reform which.-is going to be of enduring importance to
creating.. a better, more prosperous, and more equitable
society-in this country.
Susan, perhaps you'd like to make some comments and then
we'll be available for questions.
SENATOR RYAN: Yes, yell thank you Bob. I'-d just like to
say that it is:: , immenbly satisfying to beadble to deliver
on such amajor commitmen to women and the fact that we'll
be able to deliver in wa) that will be effective and practical
makes it even more satisfying.
The way in which. the program will be implemented, that is
with a pilot program and a working party to develop the
legislation, means that we will avoid the kind of mistakes
and major problems that other attempts to provide equal
employment opportunity in other economies have run into.
This will really be an Australian development, a homegrown
affirmative action plan, which will take account
of our unique industrial history and our unique business
situation. I'm very gratified that there has been such a degree of
cooperation from major employers because without the cooperation
of major employers legislation doesn't really work.
We wanted to avoid a tokenistic approach or a confrontationist
approach-because we really want to change and improve
employment opportunities for women and I believe that the
approach. we have taken will do that...* And of course in terms
of timing our approach really offers something better than
an earlier approach which I had foreshadowed when we were
opposition. This way we a quarter of a million workers
covered by the pilot program immediately with the prospects
of a very-large proportion of-the work force being covered
after about 18 months of discussion and development. The
earlier proposal that we had in opposition would have taken / 3
W3*..
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over 2 years to come into effect. So this is on the one
hand a very immediate approach, because the pilot program
will cover a quarter of a million workers, but it has the
benefits of being a gradual evolutionary approach which
will ensure that when we do get legislation it will be
legislation that works for the benefit of all parties
concerned and that the pilot program will give us the
opportunity to change and develop our concepts to make
sure that they are practical and that they benefit everybody
and not just some parties to it. So I think it's a-really
extraordinarily progressive step and one that I have total
confidence will be a real improvement in women's employment
opportunities in this country.
JOURNAL IST: Senator Ryan, what does it mean on the ground.
to.: people employed in these 28 companies, for instance:
John Fairfax and Sons
SENATOR RYAN: Well, the merit principle will continue to
apply-, but I'm sure Amanda-that you have no worries about
that. And I think it is important to say that the whole
program is-based on giving women the opportunities..-to be
judged for a job-on their skills and experience and not on
irrelevant criteria such as whether you' i'e likely to get
married or have children. So, it will involve Fairfax
appointing a senior pers-on to coordinate the operation,
analysing the workforce in Fairfax, seeing were women are,
what obstacles there are to women advancing, and then what
kind of training prcArams or extra experience women would
need in order to be in a position to apply on the basis of
merit with a fair chac of success.
JOURNALIST: Senator Ryan, how confident are you that the
business community sees the economic climate now as beingright
for a program which at least in the short run might
involve some inefficiences.
SENATOR RYAN: Well, I think the Prime Minister has in his
hand a number of press releases put out by business organisations
welcoming the step. And because there has been such lengthy
consultation with. individual companies and with umbrella
organisations, we are confident that there will not be any
dislocation at a time of economic pressure for the companies.
The costs involved are not great of course.-They really
involve mainly-the appointment of a particular person to be
responsible and then the process of data collection. The
Office of Status of Women will have an affirmative action
res-ources unit which will assist all the participant
companies and institutions advise them and we have this
affirmative action implementation manual, which sets out
in a very practical and sensible way the steps a company
wbuld go through., certainly concise. So that it'. s a
management approach and major corporations are interested
in improved management. They are interested in improved
productivity-. They are interested in getting . better
out of their workers and having better staff morale and
this is just a way of doing all of those things. / 4
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PM: Could I just refer to the statements that have been
released today. Susan mentioned, just referring very
briefly to extracts from them, which make the point. . From
the Australian Chamber of Commerce, Mr Alexander Downer,
" We welcome the constructive and cooperative way in which
the Government has approached the issue of broadening
opportunities for women in the private sector. Most
business people will support the goal of eliminating
anachronistic discrimination against women, will be
satisfied with many if not all aspects of the Government's
Green Paper". From the Business Council of Australia.. is
a statement by the Chairman of their business law
committee Mr John Wilkes, " The Business Council welcome
the release of the policy discussion paper Affirmative
Action for Women. The Council is prepared to cooperate
fully with the study program". From the Confederation of
Australian Industry, " The Green Paper released today by
the Prime Minister is a welcome contribution to the debate
on equality of opportunity in employment. The Government
can be as-sured-of CAI commitment to work constructively
with-the proposals canvassed in the Green Paper". You
can take that as a-pretty broad spectrum of the free
market business organisations.
JOURNALIST: Prime Minister, isn,' t that so because
business would assume that it wasn't discriminating
against one section of its work force, and the problem
for you is to-get beyond their assumptions as to what
they-Ire really t in]* ng-and the way they really see
PM: No, I think the di. 1cussions that have taken place, in
which-I haven't been directly involved but I have reports
back on them, there is an acknowledgement on the part of
the business community that discrimination if not conscious
has in fact operated. They are not coming into this
on the basis that they are perfect in this respect.
Quite the contrary-. And they recognise that there is a
lot of work to be done. And may I make this point in
regard to the business community, that I think they
approach it very-sensibly on two grounds. one, I think
they-believe that it's the right thing to do. Secondly,
I think they can also the benefits in it because
it's a simple matter of, it seems to me, of proper
utilisation of resources and if you approach the fact
that a significant proportion of work force, getting on
for forty per cent, is female, then it just makes sense,
it makes economic s-ense, that you should try and maximise
the talent that is there.
JOURNALIST: What was wrong with the American system,
accoraing to those quotas?
PM: Well, let me make an observation and Susan may like
to add to it. There are at least two observations that
I would make about it. Firstly, it goes against the
basic merit principle which is foundational to our approach
and which women themselves and their organisations insist
upon. They do not want a situation which is not based upon
merit and I think the second point flows from it that the
concept of imposition goes against the merit concept and
imposes unreal consideration and means that you don't get
the constructive co-operation from firms and enterprises
that we believe is necessary to make the system more fair.
So, they were the two points I would make. I don't know if
Susan wants to add to that.
RYAN: They are the main points. The quotas have been
counterproductive in some areas. And of course the United
States has such a different industrial and legal set-up from
us anyway. They like to legislate for everything. They
are legislation happy compared with us. I think we are a
society where we prefer to do things by negotiation, discussionL
and particularly with the trade union movement which is, of
course, much more integral to the development of the economy
here than it is in the United States. So the whole thing
didn't seem to be an appropriate operation to transfer here.
But the basic proble~ A is the one that the Prime Minister
pointed out that it set 7side the principle of employing
someone and their skls n qualifications an artificial
quota. JOURNALIST: Senator Ryan, there are some appalling figures
in thi'sdiscussion paper relating to migrant women. In August
last year they were 25% of the total female workforce, 30% of
unemployed women were migrants, 40% of the unemployed married
women. Do you think within this nation the concept of
affirmative action there exists a case for sort of affirmative
action for migrant women in isolation?
RYAN: I don't think they need to be dealt with in isolation
because I think their circumstances are so disadvantaged and
you have just read out some statistics to demonstrate that,
but they would automatically receive a pension as any major
company looks at the people or the women at the bottom of the
work heap they will find many migrant women there and so
they will automatically be incorporated in-to the program. One
of the things about migrant women is that many of them start in
a very unskilled job because they don't speak English, they
don't know the situation and that is all they can get, but they
may have many other skills and other expertise from their home
country that they can't manifest while they have the language
problem. Now in a stultified occupational situation they
always stay at the bottom of the heap. Because affirmative
action means that the company will be reviewing the abilities
and the circumstances of all of its workers, it will give
migrant women with other talents the opportunity, once they have
ly: o.,
learned English and become familiar with the workforce to
have any other skills and experience they might have
acquired in their home land countries the chance to have
those skills and experiences recognised by their employers.
So I expect and hope that migrant women will be a very
large beneficiary group of the whole program.
JOURNALIST: Prime Minister, what sort of checks does the
Government propose to have to see that people are working
towards affirmative action in the workforce?
PM: Under the pilot program and the establishment of a working
party I think the concept is a two way interchange that the
companies operating the pilot program will thepiselves be
reporting to both the working party and secondly there will
be the provision of assistance from the unit to be established,
3 so that they can work back in and see how the programs are
going. It is obviously a voluntary monitoring program and I
think the 28 companies and institutions have entered into it
on that basis. I understand it and again Susan may add to this,
but I understand from the discussions that have taken place
that there is an expectation that companies won't simply be
left to their own resources, but will get the benefit of the
experience of others and the opportunity to learn from how
others have coped so that they may be able to make their own
operation more effective, so it is basically a co-operative
two-way process rather than by definition anything more than
that. We are not some time down the track into a legislative
situation.
JOURNALIST: Prime Minis r, does business support for the
affirmative action of the Government extend to the longer term
goal of introducing legislation for companies with over 100
employees. PM: Yes, let me make it clear that they will be represented
on the working party which is both going to review the operation
of the pilot program and prepare options for consideration by
the Government. Now, obviously in that process of preparing
options for the Government there may come to be some differences
of emphasis into what they would regard as the most appropriate
legislation, but I express the hope now that as a result of
the experience of co-operation we will be able to reach a
position of consensus on the legislation.
JOURNALIST: Prime Minister, were any companies or tertiary
institutions approached which declined to join the pilot
program and do you think that tertiary institutions are
under-represented with only three of them on it?
PM: I understand that there were some who declined and it is
a matter of confidential relationship that we gave an
undertaking that there be no disclosure of names of those who
declined. As far as the question of the educations institutions
being under-represented, I don't think that is the case and
at any rate you will see on the working party that the Vice
Chancellors and the committee which covers all the universities
plus the association ' of the principles of the other
advanced education institutions are represented on the
working party so I think that there will be, if you
like, an enmeshing of the institutions of the
educational institutions in this process.
RYAN: Yes, and it is important to have a whole range of
companies and, as you can see from the 283 companies that
we have got we have got some of the largest and most
acceptable companies. We have got some of the smaller
companies. We have got companies that operate in remote
areas such as mining. We have got urban companies. We
have really covered the workforce as extensively as possible
because there are so many different circumstances in
different parts of industry. But with tertiary institutions
the kinds of problems that affirmative action is going to
address wouldn't be as diverse as they are in industry. Most
universities are run along similar lines although we have
a very large established university the ANU and a smaller
newer university Griffith in Queensland but generally the
kinds of problems that affirmative action is going to address
in higher education wouldn't vary a great deal from institution
to institution, so three seemed to us to be a sensible number.
JOURNALIST: Were any of those companies that declined opposed
to affirmative action or were there other reasons?
PM: I wasn't involi~ ed in those discussions.
RYAN: I think there wele a few companies that didn't feel
able to participate at this stage. Some of them felt that they
already had some programs and they would rather just pursue
their own for the time being. others felt that they were
engaged in other kinds of restructuring. It wasn't a good time
for them to take on a new program, but they all requested to
be kept in touch. They were all interested in the program
and will monitor the pilot.
JOURNALIST: Senator Ryan, will there be tax incentives for
companies who take part in the scheme, now or further down
the track?
RYAN: There won't be any new tax incentives for the scheme,
but as you will notice in the paper-, I think it is on page 49,
there is a letter there is correspondence between me and the
Treasurer where I enquire as to whether existing tax incentives
for training schemes and so on will be able to apply to any
schemes that companies put in for affirmative action and in
general the answer was yes and that they would apply in the
way that companies apply to have tax incentives for any
other training scheme so it seems as though a lot of those
kinds of expenses would fit into and be covered by already
existing tax incentives.
U r
JOURNALIST: Senator, how long do you estimate it would take
for changes being instituted at a management level to flow
down to basic attitudes in the community. You have said it
is a gradual evolution, what sort of timetable would you put
on it?
RYAN: I think that there have been basic changes in comimunit~ y
attitudes, hence the degree of co-operation we have got in
the whole thing and the volunteering of companies to participate
in the pilot program. So I think attitude change is well und. er
way. This will, I think, reinforce the movement towards
attitude change because it seems to me that people change
their attitudes when they see things being different, rather
than when they hear that things are going to 1 e different.
When they see women working in a wider range of
when they see women undertaking new responsibilities successfully,
then attitude change will be reinforced and I think that that
will be as soon as women get into the newer jobs. But we are
looking at the pilot program as taking all in all about 18
months about 12 months to report back and then some months
to feed that into the legislative process, but I think
attitude change is with us now and we are really just seeking
to reinforce it.
JOURNALIST: Senator Ryan, will the working party, or anybody
else be examining the need for penalties for companies who
choose to ignore the Government's approach to action?
RYAN: That will be a part of what the working party will
look at, yes.
JOURNALIST: Would that'be in the form of fines?
RYAN: Well that is all open to discussion. They can look
at other examples that exist in other areas of company law
and just that is really the kind of thing we are having
a working party set up to advise us and to discuss with us.
That is all open.
JOURNALIST: In the public service area isn't it true that
there will be legislation enforced I think it is Mr. Dawkins3
RYAN: Yes it is and it is before the Senate now.
JOURNALIST: DO they include penalties for-people who don't
comply? PM: Well when you are the Government they don't disobey
you they had better not.
JOURNALIST: Just on a separate topic. * Did you get a chance
to read the Soutter Report?
PM: I Haven't. I was just going to say I haven't had one
sent to me. That may not be accurate. There may have been
one come into the process, but it hasn't come to my desk
yet, but when it does, I will read it.