Ms BURNET – Minister, I just wanted to touch on the Gender Budget Statement and obviously there’s a large proportion of women in the Health workforce. You and I co‑hosted a forum on menopause and perimenopause – a good time to pause there, wasn’t it? There’s a significant concern for women in relation to having those benefits in the workplace and, clearly, Ms Haddad was talking about retention or work health and safety around issues. Having and retaining more staff rather than losing them would be of benefit. I was just wondering what sort of benefit you may see to having some sort of reproductive leave and recognition of that.
Mr BARNETT – Thank you very much for the question and your interest in this important matter for women. I think it’s an issue for all of us and that’s why I was very pleased to jointly host that with you, honourable member –
Ms BURNET – Thank you. I appreciate it.
Mr BARNETT – I think it was a very productive and collaborative meeting and I learnt more about the merit of appropriate leave in appropriate circumstances to support women going through menopause, and perimenopause as well. That’s something that I have taken on board and I’d like the acting secretary to respond as well to help outline the government’s views on these important matters.
Mr WEBSTER – It’s a range of issues but in particular perimenopause and menopause are a focus of our people strategies going forward at the moment to look at how we can do this. The first thing is flexibility within our leave provisions, particularly around personal leave and the use of that. Second, it’s also in patterns of work and how we can work with people who, from a financial point of view, need to work full time but may not be able to do that because of a range of situations within life – endometriosis comes to mind and things like that – as well as menopause. How do we flexibly design their work practices to meet their personal needs? The answer is not always in flexible work practice, that someone should work part time. We may need to be flexible around shift rostering, hours of work and those sorts of things so that we’re supplementing any leave packages which, by their very nature, end up being limited. We don’t want people needing personal leave, taking rec leave, because the purposes of those two leaves is completely different. We have to have flexible work practice available.
Ms BURNET – Is that available now for staff?
Mr WEBSTER – Yes, it is, but where we need to work on this is to making sure that people know about the access. We’ve got a range of things that have come through recent enterprise bargaining agreements, et cetera, but we don’t promote the use of it in this way. That’s work that’s underway, to especially say to people we actually want you in the workplaces as much as you wish to and therefore we want to adapt our work practices. I’ve just been reminded, for instance, I should add breastfeeding to this as well, but there’s a whole range of things where we need to change the way we expect our employees to work and agree that with the employee rather than the traditional, ‘we expect you to be here from 9.00 to 5.00’ or ‘we expect you to do five eight‑hour shifts’ or whatever.
We need to change that and to negotiate it on an individual basis because, again, we can’t assume that what fits me will fit the minister. Our flexible work practices policies are all about flexibility, but we have to make it, and we are increasingly aware that we don’t market it enough. Traditionally, when we talk about flexible work practices, we talk about part‑time work and we need to change the way we think.
Ms BURNET – I’m interested to see that flexible work practice because that sounds like you’re moving in the right direction. Clearly, reproductive leave and legislative reproductive leave – Queensland has I think 10 days. We would be looking at introducing 12 days. The health workforce would benefit greatly as would the rest of the Tasmanian workforce and economy. Thank you.
