The growing pay gap between the sexes is now higher than it was at the height of the women’s liberation movement and three out of four Australians say they want it fixed.
At the end of a long 5 week campaign, the Women’s Electoral Lobby, as one of Australia’s enduring women’s activist organisations, has scored the major social policies of each party for fairness against a Feminist Policy Framework.
“Regrettably, there has been too little focus this campaign on good social policy.” said Kathleen Swinbourne, WEL’s Elections Coordinator “We are very disappointed that few of the issues that make a fair society and help women – and men – to lead their lives, have been discussed much at all. Issues like fairness in pay, child care, family law and workplace culture were sadly missing.”
The Greens performed better than Labor, which in turn outscored the Coalition in terms of fairness and equity in social policy. While Labor have made a commitment to pay equity and improvements in terms of workplace culture, there are some areas where they need a lot more focus. And apart from paid parental leave, which scored positively for the Liberal Party, most of its policies just don’t cut it.
Or download the postcard to hand out in your area. If you want hard copies let us know and we’ll do our best to get them to you.
With the election only days away, we ask you to consider who is more likely to make Australia fairer.
WEL has produced fact sheets on some of the key problems that still face women. We then assessed whether any of the major parties’ policies address these problems. Have a look at the facts and policy assessments on this site and think about how you will vote.
We all have two votes and some of us choose to vote differently for the Reps and the Senate because no one party meets our criteria. Be aware that your preferences may be counted, so make sure your senate vote goes where you want it. There are two ways of voting; above the line and let the candidate/party decide your preferences, or below the line and you decide where your preference vote may go. You need to check the lodged tickets to see what the candidate/party have chosen. Note, some candidates hedge their bets by lodging more than one preference ticket. For example, in NSW Cheryl Kernot, the Democrats and Carers have all split their preferences equally between Labor and Coalition.
The senate will be important because neither major party is scoring as well as the Greens on key gender equity issues. Apart from our assessments, the Greens also rated well with the Equal Rights Alliance http://www.equalityrightsalliance.org.au/WomenSpeak_Election_recommendations.pdf and the Australian Health Care Reform Alliance AHCRA_Media_release_11_August__FINAL WEL’s summary of how the parties’ policies faired against our feminist framework will be available shortly.
The choice between the two major parties is sometimes not so clear. The ALP has some fairness runs on the board over the last two plus years. The Coalition still carries the weight of its many omissions when in power. There hasn’t been much new policy in our areas of concern.
Neither of the major parties does well on general fairness scores on changing the social barriers, such as discrimination, that create disadvantages. Both assume individual effort is the solution to the problem and penalise those who fail to improve their lot. Their campaigns have emphasized economics, fear and self interested money bribes and have not offered voters any clear visions for making society fairer!
The old claim is we get the government we deserve. If you feel Australia deserves more than this campaign offers, help us change political priorities. We need to put feminist fairness on the social policy agenda of which ever government is in power.
Eva Cox
So read our policy assessments in the next couple of days and think WEL before you vote!
Why would the analysis of election issues by a feminist lobby group be of interest to voters? If you feel that many of the issues that concern you have been overlooked, we may have something to offer.
Before the election was called WEL decided we needed to focus on fairness; on a collection of issues that made life more civil and reduced some of the tensions in families and workplaces that made life harder. These obviously had a gender dimension, but they are also about making the way we all live fairer.
It is now 38 years since some of us got together to discuss surveying candidates on their views on women in the 1972 election. Politics was almost exclusively male and policies tended to reflect this. Women were assumed to be kept by men, had no rights to paid jobs, equal pay, access to child care, contraception or terminations or any protection against domestic violence. Australia has changed dramatically because we were able to put these and other social issues onto the political agenda. However, there are still problems to fix and systematic unfairness to women, so we are still here as an electoral lobby.
This has been an odd election campaign, singularly lacking in social issues and big ideas that capture the imagination. This makes voting decisions harder for those who may not be rusted onto a particular party, and want to know what is on offer. If you are interested in social equity, you may have been frustrated by assumptions that all voters are interested in is their (male) hip pocket nerve. There is plenty on the economic/money angles both at macro and micro level, and bribes for particular categories of voters. However, there is not much if you are interested in living in a society that is fair in the way it distributes power, resources and rewards.
So check our election pages on this site and look at our fact sheets on various policies. We have also put a fairness measure on some party proposals. These are being updated as new announcements are made. The changes we hoped for in child care, equal pay and other related areas haven’t happened, but there is an interesting battle on paid parental leave.
Next week we will tally up our assessment and give you the material you need to make a socially responsible decision. So watch this page!
Eva Cox, Chair WEL Australia
With the election less than 2 weeks away, it might be a good time to stop and take stock of what the major parties are saying, and whether their promises will lead to a better, more civil, and fairer society.
Way back in 1995, Eva Cox’s Boyer Lectures posed some questions and suggestions for what makes us a civilised society. Perhaps we can have a look back on that, and see what has changed, if anything, since that time.
“The idea of a more egalitarian society, of a fair go as a basic criterion of a good society, seems to have been lost from policy and political processes. The emphasis on economic criteria as the basic policy framework has resulted in an increasing invisibility of social connections that we need to nurture and value. In my 1995 ABC Boyer Lectures, optimistically called ‘A Truly Civil Society’, I put the case for communities based on human connections, rather than economies defined by financial exchanges. A decade and half later, social well being has lost even more political ground to market dominance which has now been invalidated by major global financial crises. The current economic shocks logically suggest it is time to change the taken-for-granted assumptions that have dominated public policy over the past three decades.”
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