 Well, good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the Susan Ryan Eration for 2023. It's really lovely to have you all here as we prepare for International Women's Day and celebrate the incredible achievements of the late Honourable Susan Ryan AO. My name's Fiona Jenkins. I'm the convener of the ANU Gender Institute, and I'm really pleased to be co-hosting this event today with my colleague Professor Michelle Ryan, who's director of the ANU Global Institute for Women's Leadership. Before I begin, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today, the Nannawall and Nambri peoples. I celebrate and pay tribute to their elders past and present, and I want to extend that respect to any Indigenous and First Nations people who may be joining us today. To start with, I'd just like to mention a couple of quick housekeeping things. Please turn off your phones. Anybody who's got your phone on now and we are recording this event. So please be aware of that. Just a little introduction to the Susan Ryan oration that was established here at the Australian National University in honour of one of Australia's greatest gender and age equality pioneers, the late Honourable Susan Ryan AO. This annual oration gives our nation and our community the opportunity to remember Susan and reflect on her incredible legacy, a legacy of advocacy and far reaching contributions that changed Australia and our world for the better. Susan Ryan steered the passing of the Sex Discrimination Act in 1983 and the Equal Employment Opportunities Bill in 1986. These radically changed the landscape of rights and possibilities for women in Australia. These were, of course, were not her only achievements. She was a long term advocate for higher education access and equality and extended her concern for human rights into many fields, including as the Age Discrimination Commissioner. But today, and as we approach International Women's Day, we want to remember her as in every respect and as an outstanding leader among all those very extraordinary feminists who brought huge cultural change to Australia in the 70s and the 80s. To mark that legacy, this annual oration, which was first held last year, aims to drive important conversations that we still need to have around gender equity and discrimination, national debates that Susan helped ignite across her many years of work. Ongoing gender gaps, experiences of disadvantage, discrimination and violence against women all remind us that this work is far from done and that we best remember those who have gone before by holding ourselves to account for the great ambition of their efforts and the great aspirations of their dreams. So today we remember the university's commitment to gender equity across our campus and our community and we celebrate the achievements of the leading women who have contributed so much to change. And it's in this spirit that the 2023 Susan Ryan oration will be delivered by someone who herself has been a great trailblazer for women, Senator Katie Gallagher. But before I introduce the senator, I want to take a moment to acknowledge and welcome some very special guests that we have with us, Susan's family and friends. We are very honoured to have you join us this year. Rory and Justine in particular, thank you for your support of the oration and for travelling and taking the time to be with us here. Susan's legacy has a very solid foundation at the ANU and we are deeply grateful for her contribution to the university and the opportunity to hold this annual oration in her honour. Please join me in welcoming to the stage Rory Sutton, who is the late Susan Ryan's former partner, is here to say a few words. Thank you very much and thank you ANU for putting on this occasion. I want to now present to you a bond saga. It offers an opportunity to cast our minds back some 60 years. Recently, I found this folder secreted by Susan for many, many years, obviously, which at the risk of channeling or producing our former minister for everything is absolute gold. And it effectively exposes how women in this country were regarded and treated back in the 60s. The date, 8th of July 1963, letter from the Department of Education University branch office. Dear Mrs Butler, that was Susan's original married name. Following your marriage, your teacher's college scholarship has been terminated and your bond liability assessed at £375. However, I'm pleased to inform you that the approval has been given for the collection of this liability to be deferred until January 1964 on the understanding that you will enroll in the Diploma in Education course as a private student paying fees, yours faithfully AH Pelham officer in charge. Thus begins the saga, as I mentioned, that will last some seven years as the department ranted and railed while seeking its pound of flesh from the married bond miscreant Susan. Specifically, the point of contention centres around whether a monthly repayment of between £7 or £10 a month is manageable. As it turns out, the responsibility for the departmental imposition fell on the shoulders of Susan's husband at the time Richard Butler. Thus begins, as I said, a seven year male only interchange between Richard Butler and the department. Seven years on, 8th of July 1970, a letter of demand is sent to Susan's guarantors. Dear Mr Ryan, Susan's father, you will recall that letters have been sent to Mrs Susan Marie Butler asking for repayment of the liability incurred by the forfeitor of her teacher training bond. I'm sorry to have to tell you that Mrs Susan Marie Butler is either unwilling or unable to make adequate repayment. Reluctantly, therefore, I must call upon you to arrange with Mrs Susan Marie Butler and your co-sularity, Mr John Greenaway, for the payment of this outstanding amount of $168. Finally, $168 is paid and a letter dated the 8th of September 1970 is received. Dear Mrs Butler, I desire to advise you that the liability under your forfeited teacher's college bond has been discharged. You and your sureties are now free of any obligation assumed under this bond. Your sureties have been so advised. Yours, faithfully, GW Muir, director of teacher education. So finally, it's worth reiterating that this epistle was effectively a men only domain, but thankfully progress has been made. And I know Susan would be delighted that Senator Katie Gallagher is presenting today's Susan Ryan oration. Thank you very much. Thank you, Rory. And now it's my great privilege to introduce our speaker for this afternoon. Senator Katie Gallagher holds the federal government's finance and women's portfolios, where she leads some of the very significant activity that's currently underway in Canberra and across the nation to improve opportunities and security for women in Australia. She's also no doubt very well known to many of us here for her outstanding service as a previous chief minister of the ACT. And I think there's something particularly poignant about the fact that we have Senator Katie Gallagher delivering the 2023 Susan Ryan oration as an ACT senator, as our minister for women, as an alumna of this university, just as Susan Ryan was. And just like Susan, Senator Gallagher is passionate about making women's equal opportunity and economic and social priority of government. Please join me in welcoming Senator the Honourable Katie Gallagher, the Minister for Women, to give the 2023 Susan Ryan oration. Thank you very much, Professor Jenkins. And for those opening remarks, I've just got to get my old lady glasses out. Just turned into needing them to help me with these addresses. But thank you very much to the ANU for having me here. And can I also acknowledge Susan's daughter, Justine? Thank you for being here and Rory. I can only imagine some of the gold that would be found in Susan Ryan's files and had dotted across the place. I'd also like to acknowledge and pay my respects to the ancient Ngunnawal people, the traditional owners of this land, and honour their custodianship and care for country. And I extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who might be joining us today. And I'm proud to be part of government that is working hand in hand with First Nations people to implement the Uluru statement from the heart in full, including a constitutionally enshrined voice to our national parliament through a referendum later this year. It's an absolute honour to be asked by the ANU to give this address and to reflect on Susan Ryan's incredible legacy. And thank you also to the ANU for acknowledging Susan's contribution to public policy and public life through this annual oration. Too often we have failed to acknowledge the contribution of significant women in this country and the oration is a great step in writing some of these historical emissions from our national story. I also love coming back to the ANU, my university, where I spent my impressionable years from 18 to 21, not just immersed in my studies and a bit of time at the ANU bar, but also learning about life and about the world around me. I know how fortunate I was to have that time here, and it's something that I reflect on often. My address today not only pays respect to the life and work of Susan Ryan, as it should, but I also want to focus on how the work begun under Susan's leadership in the hawk government continues to guide and influence the work that is before the Albanese government today as we continue to walk the path towards a more equal Australia. Susan Ryan's list of achievements in politics along. There is no doubt she led a rich life while doing big, important, nation changing work. She enjoyed a full life outside of politics, raising her family, time spent with close friends, maintaining rich and lifelong friendships and remaining active post politics, campaigning on social justice issues, including the better treatment of older Australians and the Republic. Throughout her life, she found joy in travel, the ocean and a love of all things Irish, as detailed so vividly in her memoir, Catching the Waves. And after she died, the stories and recollections from far and wide about her tremendous life force, love of life and positivity. Susan's wasn't a saccharine positivity, the sort that you see in memes on Instagram. It was an optimism that was deep in her bones, which animated her spirit. Susan's ethos was it's good to be alive and as long as you're alive, you can do some good. Educated by the Brigadine nuns in a working class post war marubra, Susan had a great sense of social justice from a young age. Much of her philosophy around social justice was of the common sense variety. She didn't go in for intellectual abstractions. She just asked very straightforward questions and received some pretty unsatisfactory answers in return. Why should women be forced into a narrow life based on agenda stereotype? Why couldn't they be judged on merit? Why weren't they allowed to be as free as men? Whose interests did that lack of freedom serve? And why were injustices in everything from pay to legal standing, to discrimination, to violence allowed to happen to women unchallenged? So Susan and others like her challenged them and they changed things. Throughout her long decades of public service, the landscape kept shifting. And if you read Susan's memoir or if you are one of her many lifelong friends, you'll know how varied the terrain was. It included the slog of her return to Australia from New York as a young single mum, the heady days of activism in Canberra and the friendships with people such as Jermaine Greer, Wendy McCarthy, Elizabeth Reed and Summers and the Whitlems that helped inspire her political career. Then of course there was her own brilliant political career. She arrived in the Senate in 1975 and as a 33 year old single mother and by 1983 was a senator in a Labor government. At the time in 1983, the gender pay gap was around 33 percent. Labor force participation for women was around 45 percent. Men were more likely than women to enter higher education after year 12. We hadn't yet had a woman's speaker in the House of Representatives or president in the Senate. We'd never had a female high court judge and we'd never had a female head of government. There is a photo of Susan with the newly elected Hawke team. She's in a pink jacket standing in the back row. She was the only woman in a sea of suits. Soon after she was sworn in, she had to rush off to her daughter Justine's graduation, a totally relatable story to working mums of any generation. Susan made history as the first woman from the ALP to serve in cabinet and sponsored pioneering bills which laid the foundation for sex discrimination laws and others. She brought feminist ideals into the mainstream and post politics. She continued her ferocious capacity for work right up until she was taken from us all too soon in 2020 at the age of 77. To me, as a single mum skirting around politics, Susan Ryan showed me that not only could it be done, but that it must be done, that there was an expectation on us to get involved and that it was only by getting involved that change happened. She, along with women like Joan Kerner, showed me and in fact told me that women like me can't vacate the field. We have to step up. They convinced me that being a single mother was an asset, not a disadvantage, and that it was important that candidates with my background entered politics and that I would be a better politician because of it. So it was more than just Susan's work that resonated with me deeply. Her life as well showed me what could be achieved. As a young worker in the disability sector in 1988, when the Disability Discrimination Act came into effect, I saw first hand how legislation could change lives for the better. A student at the time, this was my first real-life tangible example of the power of politics as a tool for progressive social change. And I was hooked. Susan and I have shared many similarities in our political careers. We were both young women in our 30s, both single parents when we ran for office the first time, both in the ACT Legislative Assembly. We were both tapped on the shoulders and asked to run by the women in our party to challenge the gender inequality that existed in the ALP ranks. And of course, we both dealt with the surprise and maybe some shock when we won. We both became senators representing the ACT and we both fought for abortion law reform in the early days of our political career. And for this, we both attracted the ire of those opposed to it. We both had a love-hate relationship with our hometown newspaper, The Canberra Times. Mostly love, though, just in case they're in the room. And when Labor was and now is in power, we both made the advancement of Australian women our focus in our ministerial responsibilities as Minister for Women. So role models are crucial in politics. It can be a fast and brutal game in order to keep your head, hold your nerve and maintain an open heart. It's important to have people ahead of you who you admire, who show you it can be done and show you how it can be done. As I told the Senate in 2020 in a condolence motion for Susan, as a woman in politics, Susan just didn't pave the way. She actually built the political pathway that so many women have now followed. Not only to this place in Australia's national parliament, but to so many places, community organisations, unions, businesses. I keep thinking of how proud she would be to know that her party has a majority of women in the caucus and 10 women in the cabinet. Susan and many others, including those in the brilliant women's electoral lobby, taught women of my generation about the power of women organising. She showed us that there was a seat at the table for all of us, but only now sitting where she once sat at the cabinet table in parliament in the Senate. Do I fully appreciate how ahead of her time she was and how difficult it must have been, particularly when it came to arguing for progressing the advancement of women? It was in the mid 1970s when Susan crossed over into federal politics after she was elected as one of the first two senators for the ACT. On the slogan, a woman's place is in the Senate, a slogan that I've adapted on my own merchandise. For Susan, this win was where activism morphed into the world of real politic and policy, and some might argue idealism became realism. When Susan came to politics from activist feminism, she came to politics very deliberately, seeing it as the most effective mechanism for change. She saw that you had to get inside the tent and master democratic politics and processes, policies, parties, lobbying, factions, elections and campaigns in order to make change that would impact the most amount of people. After being bloodied by divorce, activism, the pressures of single parenthood and Labor's internal systems, Susan realised one of the most crucial of things a politician must face. You can't please everybody and you can't lose sleep about that. You just need to get on with the job, with the tools that you've got and the people that you have around you. She also understood that in politics you need to learn the process and make the process work in your favour. Then, to use one of her most cherished metaphors, you could catch a wave into shore. With this philosophy, Susan did something that most politicians and activists can only dream of on becoming a minister. She became powerful within the system and then she changed the system from within. She got her teeth stuck into process and in doing so, she changed the process and changed it for the better for all of Australia's women. Now process is not always glamorous. I should know, I spend hours and hours sitting in various meetings around process, but process allows not only for stability and certainty, but in the right hands for the orderly ushering in of progress. And through process, big things can occur. Almost 40 years ago, Susan pioneered the women's budget statement. It reads as fresh and radical now as it did then. There is perhaps a Trojan horse element to it that makes this policy feel slightly subversive even after all these years. That is an extensively dry economic paper, a budget document, no less, carries in it a radical promise to women that promises economic equality. Susan knew, Bob Hawke knew that with the economic parity, the playing field is levelled and true equality between men and women can be reached. The women's budget statement was also proof that critical elements of the feminist project can be seated in the mainstream and start to make real differences in people's lives across the nation. And while none of this should be radical, after decades of conservative governments overt hostility towards equality for Australian women, sadly it is. Some of the issues Susan was grappling with and thinking deeply about as a shadow minister and then a minister still loom large in public policy debates today. The saying, some things change and some things stay the same, kept jumping into my head as I reread Susan's memoir in preparation for today's address, grappling with these issues such as the gender pay gap, violence against women, cheaper childcare, defy neat three yearly election cycles. Instead, untangling them and providing solutions is the work of decades. And I wish it wasn't the case. But studying the achievements of political leaders that came before like Susan provides a long view of history, that the past can assist and inform the future. In the successive Labor governments, there is a baton being handed along the line across time and space. Lineage can be traced. Good work of the past should be built upon instead of leaders thinking it's ground zero every time they come to office. Susan herself set in an interview with Guardian in 2017. Keep going. It may take decades to achieve your goal, but keep going and you'll get there. As both the finance minister and minister for women, the women's budget statement is emblematic of the importance that the Albanese Labor government is putting on the role the budget can play to advance the interests of women across Australia. Gender responsive budgeting was a practice pioneered by Susan when the hawt government handed down its 84-85 budget. In this budget, the hawt government used gender disaggregated data to work out exactly how its spending was going to affect women and it reported these findings in that very first women's budget statement. Gender responsive budgeting has since been recognised internationally as essential both for gender justice and for fiscal justice as well. It's important work and in my view and the view of the Labor Party, gender analysis should be part of every budget process. But in this, as in so many other things, Susan was ahead of her time. She knew measures such as gender responsive budgeting could be discarded with a change of government and a flick of the legislative wand. She knew we could go back to more retrograde ways of handling the budget, including measures that put the cause of women back years. She was a builder, not a destroyer. She was realistic about the destructive cycles in politics and the need to be forever vigilant, always working, always building and rebuilding. And she was realistic about the records across the chamber taking power and dismantling great labor reforms. She warned us all not to be complacent when she said the gains were so hard to make and if you don't watch out, they're going to disappear. In 2022, Labor led by my good friend and close colleague, Jim Chalmers, handed down our first federal budget in almost 10 years. It was a big moment in politics, but also for the people who voted for a government that wanted to genuinely build a better future for Australia. And we made sure that this first Labor government, handed down within five months of our election, was a little bit crazy, had women at the centre of our commitments with our decision making assisted by gender analysis from the public service for the first time in years. It's not just the budget where there's a gender lens over decisions, though in every caucus meeting, every ERC, every cabinet deliberation, every decision we make, the impact on gender is being assessed and understood before decisions are taken. Last year, when Prime Minister Albanese appointed me as Finance Minister, Minister for Women and Minister for the Public Service, all a great honour. It was not by accident or a random collection of portfolios. It was a deliberate decision on the part of the Prime Minister to bring women right into the heart of our economic team and the decisions we make at the highest level of government. Gender is not an add-on, but it's central to our thinking. We are trying and I think succeeding in embedding a gender lens in government in everything from how we work with the NDIS and social security systems to our IR laws and to the budget more generally. After 40 and 40 years, almost, after Susan Ryan pioneered gender responsive budgeting, we are placed at front and centre of our economic policies and actions again. And our efforts to drive a better deal for Australian women don't stop there. In just the nine months in government, we've already got cracking in other areas to progress economic equality of women, access to cheaper childcare, through our industrial relation changes, with the increase to 26 weeks for paid parental leave, through our housing investments, with the women's safety package, and most recently our legislation to accelerate the closing of the gender pay gap. These are all policy areas that Susan Ryan championed. We've also begun work on a national strategy to achieve gender equality. This is the first time a government has made a commitment to achieving gender equality and about agreeing to set a roadmap to get us there. This roadmap involves in examining everything from again our workplace laws, our plans to tackle violence against women, to the health and well-being of women, and how we balance care responsibilities and employment. And in May, we'll be hearing from First Nations women at the Women's Voice Summit for an indigenous perspective on gender equality. And we know there's a strong economic case to be made for gender equality. Breaking entrenched gender norms could boost the Australian economy by $128 billion a year, according to Deloitte Access Economics. That's an opportunity I don't want the country to miss. And as the Prime Minister said after the October budget was handing down, women's economic participation isn't something that just benefits individual women, it doesn't just benefit families, it benefits all of us. Now, some of you in this room would have been part of the great labour reforms to advance the cause of women when they were enacted 40 years ago. And for those of you there at the time of the first women's budget statement, it must be a shock of just how quickly time passes. Forty years can disappear in the blink of an eye. But I'm sure you'd also all agree that we've not progressed as much as we should have and certainly not as far as the world has had Susan and other feminist activists remain with their hands on the levers. We've had decades of coalition economic policies such as the baby bonus that put a libertarian free market lens over women's policy and initiatives. These policies were designed not to encourage women's workforce participation, but the office, but the opposite. With the election of the Howard Liberal government in 1996, the work of Susan Ryan and others was rolled back. In 1996, instead of a formal women's budget statement, a policy statement was released with the name on it that said, more choice for women. But we all know that jeopardy contained within that word choice. Not everyone's choice is created equal and some people have more choices than others, but the Howard government stuck with it. They liked the word and used it to sell a number of terrible policies, including work choices in 2005. In those long years under Howard, women were moved out of the policy frame as consumers of policy, but also as makers of policy. So much expertise and knowledge in the public service was delegitimised and discarded in those years, the budget for the office for the status of women was cut by around 40% and women's units across departments were abolished by 2004. The office for women started by the great Elizabeth Reed in 1973 in an historic appointment by the Whitlam government was moved from the central department, the department of Prime Minister and Cabinet to the department of community and family services. The office for women lost their links to the cabinet and to the Prime Minister. They were at best sidelined and at worst silenced. Women's issues became repositioned as family issues, and with that women were put in their place. For the Howard government, a woman's place wasn't in the Senate or in the workforce, it was in the home. In the Rudd and Gillard years, as well as welcoming Australia's first female Prime Minister, institutional changes were made again to recommit to the cause of women's equality. This included the appointment of a minister with full ministerial responsibilities for women's issues, and I'd like to acknowledge the incredible work of Tanya Plybysig, both in government and opposition for her work in these portfolios. In 2008, in its first budget, the Rudd Labor government reinstated a form of the women's budget statement. These budget statements were published between 2008 and 2013 and highlighted the gender gaps that needed addressing. Under the Rudd Gillard governments, women were supported to go back to work and participate in both workforce and home with the first paid parental leave scheme, substantial increases to childcare funding and new protections under the Fair Work Act. But then things reversed again with the election of the coalition government. The rollercoaster ride of women's policy advancement entered another backward period. In Tony Abbott's first cabinet, there was only one woman, Julie Bishop, who, of course, has a very close affiliation with this great university. Perhaps that is why, while Tony, in all his wisdom, made himself the minister for women, none of us could actually believe that he actually did that. And there were rumours running around that this had only happened in response to forgetting about us entirely in the appointment of ministerial portfolios. So I'm still processing that one. By 2014, an official women's budget statement felt like a relic from a past feminist utopia. The famous pictures that came out after that 2014 budget were emblematic of where we were at. Two powerful Liberal men, Joe Hockey and Matthias Cormann, the Treasurer and Finance Minister puffing on cigars and looking very pleased with themselves after they'd handed down a budget that hurt the most vulnerable in our society. Remember, that was the budget that was for the lifters, not the leaners. They introduced the Medicare co-payment. They raised the pension age to 70 that made medicines more expensive and caused a spike in university fees, particularly for students studying humanities. It was a bad budget for ordinary Australians and it was a bad budget for women. 2014 was also the year under Tony Abbott as Minister for Women when the women's budget statement was dumped completely from the budget documents. But Labor didn't stop releasing women's budget statements in that absence. We produced them in opposition, again with Tanya leading the charge. And feminist organisations like the National Foundation for Australian Women produced comprehensive gender analysis of the coalition's budget without any funding. The coalition may have ditched the women's budget statements, but we never did and the movement never did. For Australian women during these years, exclusion from economic policy had dire consequences and we all saw that come to a head during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. Under the coalition, women had suffered disproportionately in the pandemic. Women had because they were more likely to occupy low paid and more insecure jobs than men, they suffered first and disproportionately from pandemic job losses. During lockdown, domestic violence spiked and escapes were made more difficult by pandemic restrictions. Women performed the vast share of the lockdown driven homeschooling compounding their pre pandemic burden of an unfairly large share of domestic Labor generally and decreasing women's participation in the workforce further. This wasn't helped by the Morrison Government's positive job initiatives, which were found to favour men with job creation plans focused on male dominated industries. I didn't watch the handmaid's tale when it was streaming because I could watch it on the news and I could see it in the parliament. There were women dropping out of the workforce in droves, women stepping away from their careers, women homeschooling their children, women unsafe in the home and stereotypical gender roles were reinforced with all sorts of policy levers that favoured men. Women were ignored for so long by the coalition that the government of the day just got on without us. Women were not needed in the party. They weren't needed on the front bench or in the cabinet. They weren't needed in the workforce. They weren't needed as Prime Minister's advisers. They weren't needed to be spoken to or about. And everyone remembers the day when we were told how fortunate we were that we could gather peacefully to demonstrate without being shot at. That was where we were until the political pressure got too great. And the former Prime Minister realised he had a major women's problem. He had no choice but to do something, but it was too late. Nine years of neglect and disinterest cannot be papered over in the lead up to an election campaign. So when he did bring women into the frame, such as the time he played hairdresser in a photo op in February 2022, washing that poor woman's hair in Cogra, there was something slightly off key and wrong about it. It was as one meter outlet at the time called it the photo that horrified the nation. But by then in February 2022, which is only one year ago, the days of Susan Ryan, Bob Hawke and driving women's economic equality seemed very far away indeed. But Australian women noticed the backwards slide and they spoke up. They were no longer happy with the status quo. Results from the ANU's 2022 Australian election study showed that the coalition continued to lose the votes of women after women started peeling off from the Conservative parties in the 2016 and 2019 elections. In the 2022 election, 38% of men voted for the coalition, but just 32% of women did. And in the new 2022 parliament, nine out of the ten newly elected independence were women and Labor had for the first time in Australian history, majority of women in our caucus. Women voters were not just acting on a gut feeling that life for them got harder under a decade of coalition governments. The statistics tell the story from being a world leader in gender equality. Australia had slipped far in the rankings coming forty third on the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index, just around where Bulgaria currently sits. The national gender pay gap is being too slow to close currently at 13.3% and a much higher for First Nations women and a much higher again when total remuneration is included. The median undergraduate starting salary for women is 3.9% less than men, despite women graduating in greater numbers from university courses. Women's superbalances are 23.1% less than men as we approach retirement age. Older women are the fastest growing cohort of people experiencing homelessness and women over 60 are the lowest earning of all demographic groups nationally. Women's workforce participation continues to lag behind men consistently by around eight to nine percentage points and women's leadership in the private sector is way behind men and unbelievably of all of the companies that report to a GIA, 22.3% of governing boards have no women on them at all. So here's where we are. Women in Australia are more educated than men, but we work less, earn less, have less savings, less assets and retire with less. One third of us experience violence at the hands of our partners and one woman dies every 10 days in this country at the hands of an intimate partner. This is the work that remains before us and as an advanced nation, I think we can all agree that this is not good enough and we are determined to change it. So just as Susan Ryan and others in the Hawke government rolled up their sleeves and did all that work 40 years ago, now we must continue the work, the work of feminist politicians, it's ongoing and it's never finished. But we're in office and we have Susan and Labor's legacy to remind us, to guide us and for us to build upon. In the 2022 election, women across Australia voted for change just as they did in 1983 when Susan became a minister. As they did then, women wanted integrity, we wanted equality, we wanted childcare and better rights at work, we wanted end to the violence against us and against our children, we want pay parity, we want safety at work and we want policy that considers our current circumstances. In a 2017 interview with the Guardian, Susan talked about cycles in politics and needing to play the long game and deal with the short term disappointments. She said, eventually if you keep going, you'll find the right ideas with the right support actually happen and people will get the benefit. These are the words along with her reminder to keep going and that despite the time it takes, we will get there in the end. These are the words that will keep me focused on my job as I play a small part in progressing what was started by my Labor colleague all those years ago. Thank you very much. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Katie Gallagher. We're going to have questions in a second. So if anyone has a question and wants to come up to the microphone and be prepared, you can sort of rouse yourself and get yourself up there. But my name is Michelle Ryan. I'm a professor of social and organisational psychology here and the director of the Global Institute for Women's Leadership here on campus. So we're going to have time for Q&A. So please, if anyone does have any questions, please come up to the microphone. We've got about 10 minutes or so for questions, but maybe short answers then. Yeah, but maybe I will start us off as well. I know you're on Q&A next week as well. So maybe we can sort of warm you up for what's to come next week. But my first question I wanted to ask is you talked a little bit about holding three portfolios at once and I'm really interested in how you juggle all three of those. I mean, we know we've seen people juggle more than that up to five, apparently, so but but can you tell us how how you managed to deal with the three portfolios at the same time? Thanks, Michelle. And again, thanks for the opportunity to be here and pay my respects to Susan, such an incredible woman for me personally. But how do I juggle? Well, I try to lean into it and see it as an opportunity. At times it is very busy like when we're in the middle of budget. You know, it feels a bit overwhelming if I'm entirely honest. I have a great team and I should pay my thanks to them. A few of them are here who have and Bridget in particular, who helped me with that great speech. So I have a good team around me. And there are the opportunities to drive synergies through those three portfolios are real like the obviously the women with the economic frame that we are pursuing for progress through with the finance and sitting at all the right meetings like the ERC meetings and all of those. It's not like we have to drag the minister for women in at the end and say, is this all right? Is this going to work? Because I'm there at the beginning, but also in the public service because the public service has sort of taken a backward step in the last decade and so driving sort of providing leadership through the public service for women's policy is a great opportunity as well. And also it's my hometown. This is like our big thing that I've grown up around the APS. So it's it's a real privilege to have them. So I try to in short try to see it as an opportunity. Terrific, we've got someone here with with the first question. If there are others, feel free to sort of come and line up towards, you know, behind the microphone as well. Thank you. I thought I'd be the first penguin off the iceberg. I'm hoping there will be more behind me. Thank you so much for for such an interesting speech. And I'm pleased to say that as also as an alum of this fine university, I was able to litigate my own hex liabilities rather than having any men do that with me, but and that that's not the facetious statement that it sounds. Actually, it speaks to the idea that we stand on the shoulders of the generations who have who have come before us. And I'm acutely conscious of the privilege that that we carry with doing that. So as a resident of the ACT, what what could we be doing now to leave a legacy for the generation that comes behind us, particularly given your comments about where the APS has been going over the last little while? Well, I think I think women of our generation, the way I see it, is this sort of continuum of progress. So we inherited, you know, again, off the backs of women of Susan's generation, opportunities that were not available to them. So I feel like my responsibility is to continue that and create opportunities for the women coming behind me. And I think all of us have a role to play there in that. I certainly in my own workplace when I, you know, I see women who I think well, for me, I had two babies in politics, right? That was really hard. Well, I've had three, but two little ones that I bought up. So now whenever I see women with children in politics, I really try to make a difference for them. I try to make sure that the things that weren't there for me are there for them as part of handing on. And I just think there is that when women support women, women win. And I know it's hard at times because it's not always the case that that happens, but I just feel like it is our generation to keep pushing forward. And the older we get, I think the more able we are to articulate that in a stronger voice than perhaps we were when we were in our 20s and 30s. Yeah. Sorry, I hope that answers your questions a bit deep. I'm sorry, I have a deep one as well. So I was struck listening to you speak that there when we think about sort of being the sacrifices, I said, no, let me start again. I was struck when I was when you were talking that women were sort of pushed back into the home and pushed out of the workforce. When we think about sort of backsliding under former government, there's that framing of it at the expensive workforce participation and how do you there's a risk, I think that these two different ways of sort of being being a woman in society, being a mother, being in the home versus workforce participation, that they can be pitted against one another? How do you navigate that in your portfolio, including other people that maybe see see them as coming in expense for one or the other? Yeah, I think the argument there is that if you're opening up the opportunities for women to participate in work and have children, it's actually because we need women to have children and we know they add to the economy when they're working. So the two of those working together actually, you know that it's not either or. I think the failure or the progress we've had to make is how do we allow both? You know, because women want to be mothers and they will be carers as well. It's not just children and it's caring for older parents and family. And so how can we make the workplace flexible enough to allow that to occur and support women in those choices that they make? I mean, at the moment and some of the issues we've had, you know, it costs too much to work an extra day. You might want to work an extra day, but you spend all of your pay on the childcare that's needed for that. So trying to shift structurally things like that, PPL, trying to encourage the second parent to take more of that. So it opens up choices, but not forcing anyone into one or the other. I think the government's job is to create the architecture, the public policy architecture that allows women to be able to realistically to make those choices. And I think in the past, the fact that that architecture hasn't been there has meant that those choices aren't real. It's either one or the other. And Sam Moston is speaking next week at the National Press Club talking more about care as well. And so it isn't just about getting women into traditional men's roles, but also valuing traditionally feminine sort of roles as well and how we value the care economy as well. Next question, please. Hello, thank you all for the lecture today. Well, I have a post spoken English, so my expression maybe now they're accurate. And my question may be a little bit repeatable. So my question is, well, someone thinks that well, the root of women rights based on the power in labour markets, the power in workforce and the power in the politics. But I have seen an idea that it thinks the root is that the division of social of social labour, the division of housework, because during the war, women will come to the labor market, they work a lot. But after the war, they just come to the family. And well, so someone thinks the root is the division of housework. So when I was an undergraduate student, I made a presentation about public parenting because I think it's a way to deal with this problem. So maybe the question is a little bit broader, but I think for individuals, for individual women to tackle this problem, we can step out of the family to work, not just restricted to the family. But I want to know for more women to tackle this problem. What should we do? Thank you very much. Thank you. And thank you for the question. It's really important when I've been part of its understanding, the extent of the issue, so the collection of data and having more data available about the division of duties has really, I think, lifted the profile of some of the inequality that exists there, that women have this predominantly the huge share of those domestic responsibilities. And again, that was sort of exacerbated in the pandemic, which had really difficult consequences for a lot of women. So I think understanding the problem, I think it goes again back to the broader cultural change in Australia about what the roles of parents are. And I think that it's certainly changing. It has changed in my lifetime from what we expect, the second parent to be to be able to do as opposed to the primary parent. And also when you're going, if you're returning to work, the division of duties in that regard. And so again, it comes back to the systems and supports around it. We know that where men are offered good PPL, good parenting leave, they are taking it up. The private sector is actually driving this change because the public sector has fallen behind, but we'll try and change that. But where they are offered a good chunk of time, there's a huge take up. So it's not as if that men aren't wanting to step up and fulfil some of that work. I think the broader cultural change of getting Australians to realise that we don't live in a gender equal utopia is an ongoing piece of work because I'm constantly challenged by people who say women have it's fine. Like what is the problem? And so again, shifting some of that is a longer term piece of work. I think the community and recognising the community has changed. Like in the days my mum bought me up in the back of Western Creek with my brothers and sisters, there were street falls of mums predominantly looking after children and sharing that arrangement. That isn't so much available as a realistic choice for a lot of women these days. So I think it falls onto the structures and supports that we can drive across government and making sure we're giving people the opportunity to step up and change those roles and challenge them. And I sorry, just to finish because I know I'm talking for too long. The other thing is in the generation of politicians that are coming behind me, it's changing as well. Like Susan created a spot at you know, she paved the way. She created a spot at the table. People like Penny and me of my generation and I'm not trying to under to do what we're doing. We took those spots and the women coming behind me are saying we'll take that spot and we'll raise you again like they are. You can see the change and it's really, really good. So I just want to leave that little positive note that things are changing. Terrific. And our final question, please. So this kind of alludes to what you're actually talking about. I am it's preceded by a small story. I come from a semi regional school before I'm attending here as a student. And let's say we just had a very testosterone fuel year group. It was a 60 percent to 40 percent split skewed more towards men. And also in my economics class, I had a classmate who would make an effort to convince me that the gender pay cap didn't exist with like videos and stuff. And that was just anyways. So that proceeds to a question about the importance that you were just alluding to of education, not just in the adult men that we have today, but also in raising a younger generation of boys and young men that are aware of these issues, because personally, I haven't come across any sort of programme or any presentation about it. It's just kind of learnt through parents. And sometimes, as we can see in my classmate, it's not really translated properly and how women experience issues and they're dismissed or downright said no or not. So I was just wondering if there was room in maybe your government's plan to introduce some sort of education programme into this, because that's just from my experience, something that I think would benefit. Thank you. Yep, and that is a great that is a great question. And welcome to Canberra and the ANU. It's a what a great opportunity. I hope you're really enjoying yourself here. It's part of me that wishes I was still 18 and here. So yes, I mean, we know that some of those gender norms works both ways because we know women girls are making choices by the time they leave primary school about what they can be and what they should be based on the environment with which they are engaging with, which is that there are things boys do and then things girls do. And that's a big problem in attracting girls and young women into those areas that we need them to be a part of, particularly as we undergo this huge economic transformation in science and technology and energy and all of that. And we know that all the evidence is there's people that are better schooled on this than me, but those choices are being made by girls in year three and four. And so part of it is getting right back into primary school and looking at how we do it through that. So, you know, that's at the feet of Jason Clare, my colleague, but also in high school. And I've just had a son who's gone through high school. And I think he found the poxic masculinity at high school very confronting because he's a very quiet, kind of shy guy and had never experienced anything like it. So it's alive and well in every high school, I would say. So we do have a problem program that will start when we have a problem and a program that will start around consent and respectful relationships being rolled out through schools, through high schools mainly, but there's going to have to be things done in primary school if we're going to start challenging some of these gendered norms about what we expect girls to do in the economy. Are you doing economics now? No, I'm doing law and security studies, but I chose economics just because it was an interest. Yeah, yeah, I think there was three girls and four boys. And so yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. And, you know, this is one of the areas that concerns me is the continued sort of gender segregation that we see in our workforce. Like it's a massive problem in the areas like aged care where it's over, you know, has been dominated by women for forever. It's gone from 92 percent to 96 percent in the last 10 years. So it's actually getting worse. And in those areas where small amounts of women were going in there withdrawing in the male dominated areas, so there's a lot to do there. And we're trying to drive that change through our our TAFE extra investments in TAFE to make sure that we're putting targets around where those who those places are going to to try and challenge some of that, but in short, there's got to be interventions along the way so that we're not dealing with that kind of dysfunction and toxic behaviour in adulthood. Absolutely, it's not enough just to focus on the numbers and change the percentages if we're the cultures themselves are not changing. So thank you very much for those absolutely brilliant questions. It's now comes to me to give a very brief vote of thanks. I can't think of a better person to to give the Susan Ryan a ration marking the legacy of a fabulous pioneer in the in terms of gender equality with another strong advocate for gender equality at the Global Institute for Women's Leadership here at ANU, which was Institute created by another pioneer, Julia Gillard. We're watching you with great interest, you know, where we're very keen and working closely with the Office for Women and and seeing the national strategy to achieve gender equality as it unfolds is a very exciting time for us. So we're all sort of waiting with baited breath to see what that looks like. But we are very heartened to see that you take on these three portfolios and so that that that that women's issues and gender equality isn't marginalised, it's not a side thing, but it's absolutely embedded. And I think if we're going to get this sustainable change, real systemic change, we need to embed it in everything that we do. So we're very excited to see the women's budget statement reinstated, the gender responsive budget, having a really evidence based theory of change for how we're actually going to achieve gender equality instead of just looking at numbers, really looking at that systemic change and making sure that there are the voices of women and the women sectors and that those are intersectional voices. I think those are all really very critical. So in your speech, you spoke about the importance of role models and about Susan Ryan as a role model. But I think we can all agree here that, you know, you act as an inspiring role model for all of us as well. And I think we can just say keep going and please can everyone join us in thanking.