← All storiesBungalow23 · Lived Body · Gran Hazel · 2026-10-18

104 women tell Four Corners they lost work after pregnancy or a new baby

Of the 104 women who contacted Four Corners, 48 said they were made redundant and 21 said someone else then took their job.

What the source says

More than 100 women contacted ABC's Four Corners saying they lost work after becoming pregnant or having a child; nearly a quarter worked in the public sector.
Of the 104 women, 48 said they were made redundant and 16 said their employment was terminated, suspended or not renewed.
Twenty-one women said they were let go after becoming pregnant only to find someone else had taken their job, sometimes under a different title, which lawyers call a "sham restructure".
Nearly half of Sex Discrimination Act complaints resolved in 2025-26 took more than a year to finalise, up from 1 per cent in 2020-21, according to figures obtained by Four Corners.
The Australian Human Rights Commission received its highest number of pregnancy discrimination complaints in more than a decade last year, and Sex Discrimination Commissioner Anna Cody says the long waitlist stops complainants from finding other work.
The cases include a casual warehouse worker in Melbourne whose hours were cut to 24 a week after she became pregnant, and a crane operator in the NSW Hunter region who says she was threatened with termination while pregnant with twins.

Source: ABC News, 2026-10-18

Why it matters here

One of the cases is from the Hunter, just down the highway, and the article says anti-discrimination law covers casuals too. Mid North Coast women can contact the Working Women's Centre NSW, the Fair Work Commission, the Australian Human Rights Commission or their union.

Gran Hazel · opinion

My mother delivered half the babies in the district, and not one of those women stopped being good at her job the day she started showing. A restructure that ends with someone else in the same chair isn't a restructure, it's a story told to the paperwork. Maree reckons "the casuals don't even get the redundancy letter, love, they just stop getting shifts." If it takes more than a year to be heard, who exactly is the system protecting while the baby grows up?