Syndicate content Subscribe to the RSS feed
Home
 › 
Anne Summers's blog

More than just lip-service

Tue, 23/09/2008 - 10:39 — Anne Summers

Anne SummersIt is great to see women's employment issues and problems - such as lack of equal pay, lack of child care, lack of paid maternity leave - finally being acknowledged and put back onto the political agenda.

While in my last blog I suggested the government has done well in promoting women to senior roles in cabinet, it is important that it does not commit the mistake of typecasting women as mothers, thus alienating those who have yet to have kids, or whose kids have already grown. 

I was disappointed that the Rudd government decided not to reverse the previous government's downgrading of the women's policy advice function from the Prime Minister's department to the welfare area.

As you will recall, the Howard government not only downgraded the Office of the status of Women but also changed its name - to the Office for Women. We lost our power - and our status. 

The Rudd government has given us back the status, at least in the title Tanya Plibersek enjoys as Minister for the Status of Women - but not the power. There is now an Office of Work and Family in the Prime Minister's department, but not an Office of Women. I am not being semantic here. As I will point out in a moment, not all women are in the workforce and not all women are in what is generally understood to be a family - and many don't want to be. An office of women covers all situations. An office of work and family is already premised on a certain set of choices.

Equally problematic is the removal of EOWA from the Employment portfolio to the department of Family and Community Services. This is no doubt so that it can be attached to the Office of Women and Tanya can administer it. Nevertheless, removing equality of employment functions from the Employment Department is a significant change in policy. As is the fact that none of women's policy is now represented in Cabinet. One to watch.

At the same time, I do welcome childcare being removed from the welfare area to Julia Gillard's powerful education and employment portfolio where, finally, the policy looks like it might receive the serious treatment it has long been denied.

I hope that the government will restore the previous practice of monitoring and reporting on trends in employment, income and so on. We suffered greatly under the Howard government, but it was difficult to document the details because all the monitoring mechanisms were silenced or shut down.

The importance of numbers

Wed, 03/09/2008 - 09:47 — Anne Summers

Anne SummersIt is now commonplace to see women ministers on the nightly news discussing carbon emissions trading schemes, health funding, Indigenous issues and all of the other big policy areas of our time.  Women have a new authority that emphasizes the competence they have always had, but not always been allowed to exercise.

Despite the concerns I expressed in my last two blogs on Open Forum ["Australia's not so secret shame", 18 Aug 2008; "Advance Australia Fair", 5 Aug 2008 - Red.], there is of course much to be pleased about in the way the current government has made it possible for women to actually participate directly in policy direction. The most significant is the number of good, competent women in senior positions in the government.  The importance of women being at the table cannot be overstated.

There are ten women on Kevin Rudd's front bench - 4 in Cabinet, 3 in the outer Ministry and 3 parliamentary secretaries. Women are 20 per cent of the Cabinet and 23.3 per cent of the total ministry, the highest level ever for an Australian government.

However, this number falls far short of many governments elsewhere in the world, especially in Europe, where it is now becoming commonplace for 50 per cent of ministers to be women. Even the conservative French President, Nicholas Sarkozy, has almost equal representation of the sexes in his cabinet.

As a country we have lagged badly in opening up the powerful institutions of our country to women but since the election of the Rudd government there does seem to be a change of attitude towards appointing women.

Australia's not so secret shame

Mon, 18/08/2008 - 09:54 — Anne Summers

Anne SummersSexual assaults remain disturbingly prevalent, seem to be increasing and the rates of successful prosecution for these offences is declining.

Sexual harassment in the work place is a challenge to which we all must rise if women at going to gain access to any kind of economic equality with men. However, the last decade has seen our basic rights to a safe workplace free from harassment seriously challenged politically, legally and culturally. And as a result the incidence of abuse has skyrocketed.

We know that women still endure constant sexual harassment at work and elsewhere. The Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission reported in 2001/02 that there had been a 700 per cent increase in complaints about sexual harassment over the previous ten years.

Sexual assaults remain disturbingly prevalent, seem to be increasing and the rates of successful prosecution for these offences is declining. The same is true of domestic violence, a difficult area in which to obtain precise statistics, but we do know that services such as women's refuges that cater to victims report they have never been busier.

We know women are still fired for being pregnant and they continue to be sacked while on maternity leave. This is a blatant breach of both state and federal anti-discrimination laws yet employers calculate that the risk of being prosecuted is so small that they do it anyway.

Advance Australia Fair

Tue, 05/08/2008 - 10:48 — Anne Summers

Anne Summers

Will women be better off under the Rudd government?

Advance Australia Fair! I can't think of a better title for a session exploring issues affecting women in the workplace. 

Because we want a fair deal for women. We have not had that for far too long but we can hope that, with the election of the Rudd government, that is going to change.

In the time available to me today, I want to remind us of what we lost under the Howard government and what we want restored to us under the Rudd/Gillard government.

In November 2003, I published a book called The End of Equality, which documented the reversal of women's rights under the coalition government.  It made three key points:

1) That the Howard government brought an ideological perspective to women and tried to send us back to the 1950s; in particular, it tried to bribe us into having more babies and it used policy to deter mothers from working, unless they were single mothers in which case they were given no choice.

2) The Howard government also downgraded, disempowered or outright abolished key agencies and offices designed to advocate for women's equality and to monitor our progress.  As a result, it sent a strong signal to the community that women's status was no longer of concern.