By Sue Boland
Two federal Coalition government decisions this year indicate that the ground is being prepared for a major assault on women's rights.
The first was the decision to provide $220,000 to the national office of the anti-abortion Australian Federation of Pregnancy Support Services (AFPSS) in Canberra. This funding is equivalent to the amount withdrawn from the Family Planning Association over the last two years.
The second decision, announced in September, was the granting of two $50,000 payments over two years to the anti-feminist Lone Fathers Association (LFA). The grants are to be used to develop a peak body for "fathers' rights".
One week later, the government withdrew its $50,000 annual funding for the National Council for Single Women and their Children, although, after public protest, the funding was reinstated.
The government seems to have decided that it needs the assistance of groups like the AFPSS and LFA to build a groundswell of public opinion against feminist ideas. For the AFPSS, LFA and other men's rights groups to help in the campaign against feminism, they need to be better organised and resourced.
There is widespread public support for the idea that because women are oppressed, they need specialised services such as refuges, domestic violence and sexual assault services, and women's health centres. To fulfil its aim of eliminating funding to specialist services for disadvantaged groups, the government needs to convince large sections of the population that these groups are not oppressed.
The government has been arguing for some time that women and Aborigines should access mainstream services and that demands for specialist services are attempts to obtain "special privileges" for Aborigines and women. For its attacks on Aboriginal services and rights, the government was able to use Pauline Hanson's One Nation.
One Nation's constant reiteration of the idea that Aboriginal-specific services are racist because they give "special privileges" to Aboriginal people at the expense of non-Aborigines helped to prepare the ground for the Coalition government's assaults on native title and other Aboriginal rights. The government needs men's rights groups to play a similar role in preparing the ground for its attacks on women's rights.
The 'best welfare system'
Another area where the government needs men's rights groups to assist its war on women is in attempting to stem the break-up of the traditional family. The government is worried by the increasing number of divorces, of people who remain single and of couples who do not have children.
Since coming to office, the Coalition has devoted a lot of resources to saving the family. Its "national families strategy", announced in June, allocates $16.5 million to relationship support services which target men. It also includes a pre-marriage education trial which will cover the cost of marriage preparation courses for 2000 engaged couples.
In announcing the strategy, Prime Minister John Howard said, "A stable, functioning family still represents the best social welfare system that any community has devised".
Such services are not being supported because the government is concerned about the poverty and unhappiness in many families; on the contrary, it is implementing a raft of economic and social policies which exacerbate tensions within families. Rather, the government wants to dismantle more of the public health and welfare system and needs these services to ensure that families assume most of the responsibility for looking after elderly, very young, sick and disabled people.
The government is also planning to penalise parents who leave marriages by lowering the cut-off point for the sole parents' pension. Currently, the pension cuts out when the youngest child reaches the age of 16 years, but the government wants to change this to 12 years. A number of men's rights groups want to see the sole parents' pension cut out as soon as the youngest child reaches school age.
The government is forcing people into greater dependence on their families and making it more difficult for women, men or children to leave unhappy families. This is being done through cuts to public child-care services, making aged care more expensive, turning patients out of hospitals before they have fully recovered, cutting disability services, forcing many young people to live at home for longer by refusing them the youth allowance until they are 21 (for unemployed people) or 25 (for full-time students), and enabling employers to reduce wages and job security.
Because the majority of divorces are initiated by women, it is women in particular whom the government wants to convince to remain in marriages, and thereby retain responsibility for the welfare of other family members. As well as penalising women who divorce by restricting access to the sole parents' pension, the government needs to make women feel guilty about leaving their marriages.
It is still difficult for the government to campaign openly against women's rights to economic and social independence, because the ideas of the women's liberation movement penetrated public consciousness widely in Australia, so much so that even members and supporters of the conservative parties were affected. It is therefore less costly politically for the government to employ men's rights groups to do the anti-women's rights scaremongering.
'More oppressed'
There are now approximately 150 men's groups nationally, and only a tiny minority would consider themselves pro-feminist.
The most active are organised around family law issues. They call for: evenly shared custody of children; reductions in maintenance payments; restrictions on access to domestic violence orders; cutting the sole parents' pension once the youngest child reaches school age; the notion of "fault" to be reintroduced into divorce proceedings with a view to changing the way in which property is divided; and the abolition of the Family Court.
Some men's rights groups also claim that the willingness of women to divorce and become single parents has a harmful effect on their children, that women are responsible for more, or as much, domestic violence as men and that women falsely accuse their male partners of child sexual abuse and domestic violence in order to win custody of children.
The men's rights groups have increasingly sought to graft women onto their groups to shield themselves from the criticism that they are anti-women. They have had some success recruiting women in relationships with men who are paying maintenance to former partners to support their children. These women often feel bitter about the loss of family income.
Since the Howard government took office in 1996, men's rights groups have won some changes to child custody and maintenance arrangements, although these wins are only a small fraction of what they are campaigning for.
A number of men's rights groups also oppose specialist women's services, or call for specialist male services, including an Office for the Status of Men. They claim that men are now more oppressed than women, citing as evidence that women now outnumber men amongst university students, girls do better than boys in the higher school certificate in NSW, more men than women commit suicide, men experience more violence than women, and men are less likely to win child custody cases.
While the views of men's rights groups vary, a study of fathers' rights groups in Australia by Miranda Kay and Julia Tolmie from Sydney University's law faculty found a higher degree of consensus than they had expected.
A number of the groups' web sites contain clear statements that pro-feminist men's groups do not belong in the men's rights movement and that feminism is responsible for discrimination against men. These views fit neatly with the ideological campaign against so-called political correctness by politicians, academics and media commentators who want to retake the ground won by all the social movements in the 1960s, '70s and '80s.
This ideological campaign denounces anyone who identifies and argues against racist or sexist discrimination, labelling them "politically correct thought police" who are trying to control and censor others' ideas. The campaign aims to disempower the victims of racism and sexism by telling them that the discrimination is all in their minds and that they are being deluded or selfish if they demand more.
The problem for the government is that the women's liberation movement achieved real improvements in the lives of all women, so any insistence that they should now give back these gains in order to help balance the nation's budget or "save the family" is likely to rebound electorally. The government therefore needs shock troops to make the initial headway — and that's where the men's rights groups come in.