Imagine...
Imagine a world where any woman could walk down any street, day or night, and feel no fear of harassment or assault, and where society denounced domestic violence as so abhorrent that every home was safe.
Imagine a world where girls did not merely dream of being an astronaut, a mechanic, a prime minister or a scaffolder, but said with complete confidence: "That is what I'm going to be when I grow up."
Imagine a world where parents on their way to work or classes, or just to have some time to themselves, dropped their child off at a childcare centre in their street or workplace happy in the knowledge that their child loves going there, learns new things, and is well-fed and cared for.
Imagine a world where elderly and disabled women live independently and at home for as long as they wish because they have a guaranteed, decent income and there are plenty of community support workers to help with housework, health-care and transport.
Imagine a world where there really is equal pay, and it is decent pay so that no woman is forced by poverty into prostitution, or seeing her children go without food or new clothes, or not having the child she wants, or living with someone only because he can pay for her accommodation.
Imagine a world where every woman has a real choice about whether or not to have children, unconstrained by economic or social factors, and where safe, reliable contraception is widely accessible and abortion is freely available.
Imagine a world where women, in all their individuality, love the bodies they were born with, and where women express their sexuality proudly and joyfully, without fear or favour.
Imagine a world where people, not private profits, matter where all people's basic needs are automatically addressed, and their hopes and dreams for a fulfilling life are valued.
The reality today
In 21st century Australia, women have supposedly achieved equal rights. Yet women still do most of the household chores and the care of children and sick, disabled or elderly relatives. The double burden that this imposes on women who also need to or want to do waged work is barely acknowledged by society.
Whether they are migrant women working 12 hours a day for $4 an hour in the suburban sweatshops of Sydney or Melbourne, or tertiary educated teachers, nurses or public servants who spend 60% of their wage on child-care fees, or unemployed single mothers on the 200,000-long public housing waiting list, or students trying to survive on Austudy/Abstudy payments, which are now 37% below the poverty line, life for most women in Australia is getting harder every day.
Despite the introduction three decades ago of equal pay, affirmative action, equal employment opportunity and anti- discrimination legislation, women's average weekly earnings are now only 66% of men's — less than they were relative to men's 10 years ago, and declining.
The workforce participation rate of women in Australia is now lower than any comparable industrialised country, and the proportion of women with full-time and/or permanent (as opposed to casual) employment is falling. Seventy percent of all part-time jobs are held by women, but 22% of women working part-time would like more hours. Meanwhile, 30% of male workers are working more than 50 hours a week and more than half of them would like fewer hours.
Five hundred thousand women who want to be in the workforce are not, 32% of them because of lack of child care. State and federal government funding for women's services is less now than it was a decade ago, despite a steady increase in the number of women and children living below the poverty line.
Under new tax policies, working-class women with dependent children are being penalised for going out to work — the lower a family's income, the higher the effective tax rates faced by women who work, and this disparity actually increases with the number of children.
A female welfare recipient with dependent children has her welfare payments cut if she partners with a man whether or not she wants to be economically dependent on him, and whether or not he can or does support her and her children. Meanwhile, bitter post-divorce disputes over child support are endemic as working-class men struggle to support two families on declining real wages and sole mothers continue to swell the ranks of those living below the poverty line.
Most women in prison are there because of crimes of poverty. The system fails to meet the needs of these women and their children then punishes them by putting them in an even more vulnerable situation.
In 1996, 23% of women in marriage or de facto relationships suffered domestic violence. There are no more recent figures because the government has cut all funding for collecting them. While women's refuges have to turn away as many women as they accommodate each night, in 2002 $10.1 million of funding allocated for domestic violence programs was diverted to pay for the National Security Public Information Campaign's "anti-terrorism" advertisements and fridge magnets.
The rate of sexual assaults reported to the police has increased by around 9% per year over the last few years. The most reliable recent estimates are that around 250 women are raped each day in Australia.
In most states abortion is still illegal and is becoming much more difficult for poor, rural and/or young women to obtain. Meanwhile, lesbian couples still cannot adopt children or access IVF programs in most states.
As sexist images of women flourish in the mass media, eating disorders and the deaths that result from them are increasing among young women.
A different future
So is our imagined world of justice and equality for women merely an impossible dream? We don't think so.
Consider how different Australia would be if the $43.3 million per day that was allocated for military expenditure in the 2003-4 federal budget was redirected to social services. Or if the billions of dollars in private profits that are made each year by Australia's biggest corporations was spent on public and community education. Or if workers and communities had the legislative power to decide how the industries and services they run operated. Or if politicians were truly accountable and could be immediately recalled if they broke their promises or didn't listen to the people between elections.
That would be a very different world for all ordinary people, and especially for women.
Making progress towards an Australia in which there is full economic, social and political equality for women requires, in the first instance, collective opposition to each and every government attack on women's rights — as workers, mothers, students, patients and welfare recipients. At the same time, women's ability to exercise these rights regardless of their race, ethnicity, citizenship, religion or disability must be defended and extended.
We demand action
As essential steps towards complete gender equality, the Socialist Alliance demands immediate government action on the following:
For equality and justice in the workplace
- Real equal pay for work of equal or comparable value.
- Automatic wage indexation that corresponds to real cost of living increases.
- Increase the minimum wage to a level that recognises that many workers, women and men, are solely responsible for supporting family members.
- Enterprise bargaining and individual contracts disadvantage women workers, who are more often in less organised sectors, so we call for all wage increases and improvements in working conditions to be automatically generalised across each industry.
- Extend full-time and permanent employee entitlements (sick leave, annual leave, etc) to all part-time and casual workers on a pro-rata basis.
- Legislate for and enforce programs in both the private and public sector to encourage and assist more women to be trained and employed in non-traditional jobs.
- Twelve months' parenting leave fully paid by employer contributions to a publicly managed scheme; the right to return to the same job; and generous paid leave to allow parents to take time off work to care for sick children and attend school activities.
- Enforce anti-discrimination and affirmative action legislation to assist Indigenous women, non-English speaking background women and disabled women be economically independent.
For independence and equality in family life
- A living wage — which enables a decent quality of life, not just survival — for all welfare recipients and their dependents, and automatic indexation of all welfare benefits to cover real cost of living increases.
- A massive expansion of funding for community/employee- controlled, good quality, free child-care services in communities and, funded by employers, in large workplaces; these services to include after-hours, vacation and occasional care.
- No discrimination in out-of-work-support and parenting payments, regardless of marital status; increase the sole parent benefit for parents of dependent teenage children.
- Abolish all taxation measures that penalise families in which women are engaged in waged work.
- Reverse the privatisation of all utilities and other essential services, which has disproportionately adversely affected women and children.
- Expand affordable, good quality, secure public housing so child-raising can take place in a stable environment.
For women's control of their own bodies
- Remove abortion from all state Crimes Acts and Health Acts and make abortion available safely, free of charge and on demand through the public health-care system.
- Make safe, reliable contraceptives freely available to both women and men; end the prohibition on the import of RU486; make the "morning after" pill available free of charge.
- Enforce the law outlawing sterilisation without a woman's consent.
- No discrimination based on age, sexual preference or marital status for access to reproductive technologies. Women in prison to be able to use contraception, and have access to pregnancy or abortion care if needed.
- Restore Medicare bulk-billing and massively increase funding to public hospitals and community health services.
- Provide free menstrual/sanitary protection for all women as a public health service.
- Improve availability of women-centred pregnancy care, including state funding and insurance for community based midwifery and birth centres.
For an end to sexual violence and exploitation
- Strengthen and strictly enforce laws against sexual harassment.
- Restore and increase funding for women's services to ensure ready access to health centres, rape crisis centres, women's refuges and counselling services for all women and their dependants who need them.
- Launch a community education campaign in the media, schools and all other public institutions to promote positive, non- stereotyped, anti-sexist images of women in all areas of social activity.
- Repeal all laws against prostitution in order to end the criminalisation and victimisation of sex workers, and publicly fund comprehensive health-care, legal and personal support services, and alternative employment opportunities, for sex workers.
- Prosecute Australians who profit from the international sex trade and prostitution, and give full protection and rights to victims of the sex trade in Australia.
A better world for women and for all humanity is possible. Join the Socialist Alliance to help make it happen.
From Green Left Weekly, March 3, 2004.
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