Women are worse off under the Liberals
By Susan Laszlo
If Pru Goward, John Howard's executive director of the Office of the Status of Women, had wanted to deflect attention from the United Nations criticism of the government's policies on women, she certainly didn't go about doing it very well. The establishment media gave cursory coverage to this news late last month, but since then Goward has refocused attention on the UN's concerns by attacking a non-government submission which documents how the government is discriminating against women by removing specialist services.
On July 27, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women criticised the federal government's submission. Signatories to the UN Convention on Discrimination, including Australia, are required to submit periodic reports on their compliance.
A spokesperson for the government, Clare Nairn, told the committee that "much" had been achieved in the areas of employment, education, health and the increased visibility of women in public life.
According to the UN committee report, Nairn argued that the government had put in place a robust framework of anti-discrimination legislation, as well as positive legislative measures, strategies and programs to assist women.
This was queried by the committee, which stated its concern at "policy changes that apparently slowed down, or reversed" Australia's progress in gender equality and the government's "apparent shift in attention and commitment" to the rights of women and equality.
Specifically, it expressed alarm at cuts in federal funding for health services and legal aid, and the fact that the government's submission hadn't provided statistics on important indicators of women's status such as morbidity, mortality and substance abuse.
These concerns were echoed by 17 non-government organisations, including the Association of Non-English Speaking Background Women of Australia, Australian National Committee on Refugee Women, Australian Reproductive Health Association, Coalition of Activist Lesbians, International Women's Development Agency, National Pay Equity Coalition, UN Status of Women Committee (SA), Women's Economic Think Tank and Women's Electoral Lobby.
According to them, the government's budget cuts "have the effect of encouraging women to move out of mainstream social and economic participation and back into the role of family carer". Further, they state, "The Australian Government now puts far more money into rewarding women in traditional roles ... The status of women is currently going backwards."
Defending her government, Goward claimed that the UN had been too influenced by the NGO submission, which she said was full of "exaggerations" and "inaccuracies". In a letter in the August 1 Financial Review, Goward claims that the government is not trying to remove the complaint handling role of the sex discrimination commissioner.
On August 4, Senator Margaret Reynolds replied that an objective of the attorney general's Human Rights Legislation Amendment Bill, 1996, was to ensure that specialist commissioners (sex, race, disability) lose their powers of investigation and conciliation and that all complaints are handled by a new full-time president. (Darryl Williams believes that the appointment of specialist commissioners has increased rather than reduced conflict in society!)
Given that the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission has had its budget and staff cut by some 40%, a dramatic decline in complaints — whether or not the amendment is passed — is expected.
The NGO submission is also concerned that cuts to the Office of the Status of Women, which provides policy advice to the PM and cabinet, will adversely affect women.
It criticises the abolition, last year, of the requirement that companies, higher education institutions and trade unions with more than 100 employees report annually to the Affirmative Action Agency, saying that the objective of the act has not yet been met.
Women's share of managerial jobs remains woefully low (6.1% of women workers are managers compared to 14.1% of male workers) and the work force remains highly gender segregated (17.2% of women workers are employed in retail trade; 16% in health and community services; 10.7% in education and 8.3% in manufacturing).
The NGO submission also points out that domestic violence now accounts for 70% of police work in NSW and that 40% of men believe that sexual assault is justified if a woman behaves in a certain way. Despite this, the government has cancelled funding for the Australian Institute of Criminology's four-year project to determine the true levels of violence against women. Of the $14 million budget of the National Crime Prevention Strategy, domestic violence prevention receives only $210,000.
Cutbacks in funding for tertiary education and the introduction of up-front fees for postgraduate courses will impact adversely on women, the NGO report states. New laws governing work practices, including the move away from collective bargaining to individual contracts, will also have a worse effect on women, who are still concentrated in jobs with little bargaining clout.
The unemployment rate for non-English speaking migrant women is 13.9%, some 50% higher than for English speaking women. Migrant women also have a lower rate of labour force participation, yet the government is in the process of de-funding the only peak migrant women's organisation.
Budget cuts accompanied by "the defacto commercialisation" of child-care also threaten one of the best systems in the world, the NGO report states. The $200 maternity allowance introduced by the so-called family friendly Howard government "covers too small an amount of money for too brief a period of time to meet international standards".
While Australia has good overall health services, including successful pap smear and breast cancer screening programs, too few trained Aboriginal health workers results in a foetal death rate among indigenous mothers double that among non-indigenous mothers.
Indigenous women's life expectancy is 25 years less than the Australian average. Also, 10.4% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people over 45 years of age have a disability compared to 3.6% of the general population.
The development of a national breast-feeding strategy, while important, does not tackle the systemic discrimination suffered by indigenous women — discrimination which will worsen as a result of the government's: cuts to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission's budget; attempts to limit, if not extinguish, native title; and refusal to pay compensation to victims of the "stolen generation".
The government is also criticised for attempting to further restrict access to abortion via its proposed "model criminal code". It has ignored the report earlier this year of the National Health and Medical Research Council, recommending that abortion be decriminalised and that the morning after pill be available over the counter.
The government has also cut funding to Family Planning Australia by some 10% and is continuing to restrict the importation of the abortion drug RU486. It has cut funding to UN family planning programs by $3.5 million.
Goward claims that the "mainstreaming" of women's policy issues will benefit women. If by this she is referring to the government's moves to scrap affirmative action programs and monitoring bodies (such as the Women's Statistics Unit within the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Women's Budget Papers, which provide a department by department assessment of how policies and programs have affected women) this is obviously untrue.
Not only will there be fewer specialist services for women, but the statistical evidence to support their maintenance — let alone expansion — will also no longer be available.