WEL-Informed December 2025

Thank you to our members, supporters and donors for the extraordinary support you have given WEL in 2025.

In 1972, WEL’s election scorecard helped create a voice for women and a place for feminist policies across the mainstream political spectrum.

In 2025 we are proud to have run our twentieth election campaign to put gender equality on the national policy agenda and measure parties’ commitments to women’s equality.

We urge you to read all about our 2025 year of advocacy and campaigning in our 2024/25 Annual Report HERE. The Report includes an assessment of our election campaign as well as encouraging news on increases in supporter engagement and donations.

The new WEL NCC

WEL powers into 2026 with a freshly elected National Coordinating Committee with members from Victoria, NSW, Queensland, South Australia and the ACT. The new Committee will bring a diverse and deep mix of skills, expert knowledge and field experience to WEL.

Lifelong feminist energy, spurred by determination to end gender inequality and gender based violence, fires up our voluntary work. Veterans of WEL’s early days will work side by side with third and now fourth wave feminists on many of the same issues such as violence and sexual assault, reproductive rights and income inequality - but refracted through contemporary circumstances.

We are energised by the big policy challenges looming in 2026. The Albanese Labor Government must begin to deliver on some potentially transformative promises, including universal and affordable early childhood education and care, adequate resourcing of the National Plan to Eliminate Violence against Women, tackling the unequal burden of care which drives women’s poverty and the gender pay gap.

Professor Carol Johnson’s AGM presentation

In her comprehensive and stimulating presentation to our AGM on ‘What more must be done for women’s equality and possible strategies for making this happen’, guest speaker Emerita Professor of Politics, Carol Johnson outlined the substantial successes and the limitations of the Labor Government’s policy initiatives on gender equality.

Her talk built on her recently published book ‘The Politics of Gender Equality: Australian Lessons in an Uncertain World’ (Palgrave Macmillan 2024). There she traces the historical development of gender equality policy from the Whitlam years through to the early period of the Albanese Labor Government.

The book is open access and you can read and even down load it on: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-64816-8

It is a must read for WEL members interested in gender equality policy.

In her talk Professor Johnson identified broader, long standing economic (including fiscal) policy settings as major constraints on Labor Governments’ implementation of plans to achieve genuine gender equality.

She cited a default faith in free markets to deliver services- such as disability and childcare, distrust of ‘regulation’ and a fear that the cost of progressive policies and initiatives will exceed the budgetary discipline enforced by international ratings agencies.

She highlighted a contradiction in the Government’s commendable emphasis on supporting increased women’s workforce participation, but their seeming inability to devise approaches to identify and value the contributions of the largely feminised (paid and unpaid) care economy to Australia’s ‘productivity’.

Echoing the work of New Zealand feminist economist, Marilyn Waring, Professor Johnson called for ‘governments to radically reimagine policy so that it is genuinely reshaped by gender equality, a concern that organisations like WEL have been arguing for decades’.

Professor Johnson traced a lingering small ‘l’ liberal feminism within sections of the Liberal party that might offer a possibility for engagement with WEL and other feminist groups, if the Liberals included a new electoral focus on attracting women voters.

She argued that the Albanese Government has been more reforming than it has been given credit for - especially in relation to women’s health and crucially by  inserting gender equality into the  Fair Work Act, tackling wages and pay equity (especially in the care industries), employment and training, paid parental and domestic violence leave, requiring companies to report on gender inclusion and  major improvements in  women’s political representation and policy leadership through Government inquiries and boards. The Government has introduced gender responsive budgeting and a gender lens on some but not all policy areas and has emphasised women in its electoral and campaign strategies.

However Professor Johnson presented evidence that the Government’s application of the gender lens has been patchy, especially in the wake of a troubling new push amongst some Labor Ministers for ‘deregulation’. This conservative, libertarian policy approach, prevalent in the late eighties, has been imported through Klein and Thompson’s largely anecdotal and American based book ‘Abundance’.

As an example of the influence of the Abundance ‘ideology’, the recent Government plan for AI, an area identified in Working for Women as having major implications for negatively reinforcing gender and racial biases, instead emphasises ‘light touch’ regulation and abandonment of ‘guardrails’. Disturbingly in the United States diversity and inclusion measures designed to advance gender equality are also under attack from opponents of regulation arguing for the ‘abundance enabled by uninhibited market led productivity’.  

Professor Johnson urged independent feminist organisations like WEL to intensify pressure on the Government to extend Gender Responsive Budgeting and for a universal application of an intersectional gender lens to all government legislation, policies, reports and initiatives.

WEL’s work in 2026

The WEL NCC is meeting early in the new year to plan our 2026 strategies and campaigns. Professor Johnson’s analysis and recommendations will play a useful part in our discussions on our priorities and our advocacy work. We will be keeping in touch with you, our members and supporters, without whom WEL would not be able to continue its work.

WEL wishes you all a safe and enjoyable summer.

Our 2025 election evaluation concluded that :

‘The WEL campaign would have been greatly assisted by a professionally trained campaign spokesperson or specific advocates for our priority polices. …..We will need to invest in spoken media such as podcasts and TikTok to be relevant to diverse audiences.

Your donations now will help us in 2026 to build the capacity to field WEL voices in the media, organize face to face meetings with MPs and build our already large follower and membership base to put pressure on governments for more urgent action to end gender inequality.

WEL acknowledges the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first inhabitants of the nation and traditional custodians of the lands where we live, learn and work.

Women's Electoral Lobby
https://www.wel.org.au/