Friends, this is an anniversary truly worth celebrating. Thirty years since delegates to the 1994 Australian Labor Party National Conference took the decision to adopt Affirmative Action with the aim of equal representation.
I am proud I was one of the delegates to that Conference.
Ten years after the great Susan Ryan gave us the Sex Discrimination Act, we took the crucial step of adopting quotas for women to be pre-selected in winnable seats.
Every day we come into this place we see the wonderful, history-making consequence: Australia’s first ever female majority government.
And Australia’s first ever female majority government keeps delivering result after result.
We have cut the gender pay gap to a record low of 11.5 per cent.
The number of women employed is up and we now have a record number of women in the workforce.
We have established paid Family and Domestic Violence Leave because no woman should ever have to choose between her financial security and her physical and mental safety.
We have expanded Paid Parental Leave – and we’ll soon be adding super to it.
We have lifted wages in aged care and child care, two industries dominated by women.
We’ve made child care cheaper – because we know that when we make it easier for families and give them more choice, it makes things better for women.
And on Friday I announced our latest step in our work against family and domestic violence, a package that includes an investment of $3.9 billion in a new National Access to Justice Partnership.
This is the biggest single Commonwealth investment in legal assistance ever.
This – all of this – is what happens with women at the table. More women at the table means getting more done for women.
Thanks to Affirmative Action, we have come to better reflect the society we are elected to represent.
We have become more diverse. We have become more whole.
And with women doing so much to drive the steady broadening of our caucus and our perspective, we have become more representative. More truly Australian.
With every Labor woman who has entered Parliament, we have better served our great nation.
And Labor governments have been better because we embraced Affirmative Action three decades ago.
You can pick any moment in history and be reminded of the one lesson that has been repeated with great clarity through the ages: Men don’t have all the answers. I don’t believe anyone’s going to ask me to prove that statement.
Labor women have been responsible for so many firsts – and they will always have an honoured place in the Labor pantheon.
For everything they are, and everything they have been.
For everything they achieved.
For every door they pushed open.
For every election where it got that bit easier for the women who wanted to follow.
As we look to the future, we concentrate on ensuring that we don’t just have firsts, but that we continue to have equal and diverse representation in our party.
True to character, the Liberals mocked Affirmative Action when we introduced it and they mock it now. They did not see a case for intervening to accelerate a process that had been so painfully incremental.
With no commitment to advancing women in their ranks, they took no action at all, assuming things would somehow work out.
Their faith in that was as misguided as their belief in trickle-down economics.
The result has been similarly woeful – an embarrassingly lopsided party room where women make up just 29 per cent.
As their NSW branch has so stunningly reminded us in recent weeks, it’s important to recognise when there is a case for intervention.
Thirty years on, the result of Labor’s audacious step is clear, as is the contrast.
The Liberals yearn to wind back historic gains. Labor makes history.
We keep doing the work. As much as today is a celebration of a turning point in the past, and where it has made it possible for us to be in the present it is also a collective commitment to the future – and a Parliament as great and broad as this country.