Recent figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show Australian women earned just 82.5% of the average male rate of pay across the country in 2009. On average, a female worker would have earned more in 1985?—?and will be $1 million worse off over their lifetimes than their dads, brothers and partners.

That rather understates the size of the problem, because that differential refers to full time earnings, and 57% of women in work were full time, with 43% being part time or casual in 2009. As the recent House of Representatives Standing Committee Report on Equal Pay, Making It Fair, observed:

In August 2007, the average mean earning from all jobs for women was $680 per week (compared to $1022 for male employees) partly reflecting women’s greater participation in part time employment. On a comparison of full time employment earnings, women on average earned $910 per week and men earned $1131 weekly.

The point I’ve been making in my commentary and analysis of the Abbott parental leave plan is that there seems to be a perception that women in the workforce are much better off than they actually are. Otherwise it would be impossible to conclude that income replacement was ‘generous’ or ‘fair’. My argument has been that the Coalition’s approach would further entrench existing inequalities. In that context, it was interesting to note the comments from Eric Abetz on the 7.30 Report tonight. Abetz was responding to a case which starts tomorrow in Fair Work Australia seeking to revalue the work performed (very largely by women) in the community sector.

To say that Abetz was hardly filled with enthusiasm for a case which would raise women’s wages by around $100 a week would be an understatement. Pay equity was a principle no one would disagree with, he observed, but it appears that in practice, it’s never the right time to do anything about it.

This, of course, is the whole problem. The principle was accepted in Australian law in 1972, but the practice has lagged behind, and is now trending backwards.

The method by which the ACTU, the ASU, and the Equal Pay Alliance are proceeding is by a test case based on principles of work value. The Coalition removed the power of FWA’s predecessor, the AIRC, to hear such cases, opposes anything but minimal safety net awards, and rejects the principle of industrial tribunals determining pay rates by an assessment of the skills and values worked.

So, if they were still in government, this campaign could not succeed. And it they return to government, it will not succeed. The Labor government, by contrast, is intervening in the case in support of the union position, and Julia Gillard made a cogent argument as to the timeliness of properly valuing community sector workers’ skills and experience tonight.

The audacity, and gross hypocrisy, of the claim that the Coalition cares about working women has been exposed for what it is, only two days after Tony Abbott’s IWD speech.

Elsewhere: Useful background and context at Business Spectator.

It was the idea of making money from looking after children that so many people found objectionable, and the fact that they had no choice but to participate due to the lack of child care choice in their area. It was almost like WorkChoices for the under-fives. And there was the suspicion that ABC Learning cut corners and offered lower quality care — a view reinforced when it tried to stop the Victorian Government from inspecting its centres and argued its directors weren’t legally responsible for the children in the company’s care, when figures emerged of the company driving down the wages and working conditions of its staff, and when stories emerged of poor quality care.

That’s all now linked to the Coalition. Not just because of the subsidies model that massively expanded under John Howard, but because of the company’s willingness to embrace the Coalition, with Sallyanne Atkinson as chair and Larry Anthony on the board. ABC Learning has now become emblematic of the Howard Government’s approach to childcare, and Eddie Groves will come to be identified with the era just as surely as Alan Bond and Christopher Skase represented the Hawke years.

For those of us in Brisbane who remember Sallyanne Atkinson as both Liberal Lord Mayor and perenially unsuccessful federal candidate, her protestations about her own financial position and avoidance of responsibility repeatedly made in the Courier-Mail have been an all too familiar, and quite predictable tale. Particularly damaging, and revealing, are her comments expressing puzzlement about how ABC could lose money – being a “government supported business”. Keane is quite correct to say that the sorry tale of ABC Learning will redound on the Coalition. But I also think he doesn’t quite understand the paradigm shift in public thinking he himself describes – and I note that bloggers and commenters here at LP were questioning the validity of the market childcare model a long time ago – when he writes:

Whenever the Coalition now talks about private-sector child care — an eminently reasonable concept, given sufficiently rigorous accreditation requirements — people will recall ABC Learning and a profit-obsessed approach to looking after their kids. This is slow-burn stuff, the type of political background radiation that doesn’t show up in polls but slowly accretes over time, shaping voters’ perceptions of parties, making them resistant to their messages, or in their opponents’ case, more receptive. But it’s not yet clear that the Coalition realises how much baggage it is carrying in the debate.

I’m not sure that private-sector child care is an “eminently reasonable concept” at all. Not only – as Atkinson admits – was its business model based on what is basically rent seeking – a transfer of public funds to private profit, but whatever accounting and managerial errors were made, ABC demonstrated that the only way you could make a profit was through aggressive acquisitions in search of market dominance and local monopolies and cutting costs. It seems very clear to me that the market logic is precisely the problem, and Keane is right to point to the fact that people are questioning it, without accepting that the question about the desirability of profiting from child care is absolutely valid.

I think we’re going to see a return to child care as a matter of non-profit and voluntary association provision, with more of an educational and development focus, which I think is fantastic. But I also think we’re going to see a return to the legitimacy of state and community sector provision more broadly, as the lessons of “letting the market rip” are drawn. It would appear that some commentators can’t see those lessons even when they’re staring them in the face.