Talk is cheap
John Howard has got a nerve. Not only does he attend an International Women's Day breakfast on March 8, but he also delivers a speech all about his "commitment to the continued advancement of women's rights" and "the inclusion of women in the decisions shaping our nation into the next century".
Not only that, but after a year or more of the positions being left vacant, Howard used the opportunity to announce the new president of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission and the new sex discrimination commissioner.
And, in a bid to curry favour with women voters, he announced a "reform" to superannuation laws to allow women equal access to their partners' super funds in the event of separation or divorce.
What a joke! Do Howard's minders really expect us to believe that he's had a change of heart on women's rights?
While this is a welcome reform (which, by the way, follows legal precedent), it will not cost the government one cent.
As well, women's groups are worried that it won't resolve women's immediate cash flow problems when their former partner's retirement is still some way off. Of course, a benefit which is not accessible until retirement is consistent with the government's aim of further privatising old-age care — forcing individuals and families, rather than governments, to take increasing responsibility for supporting the aged.
Howard is obviously aware of his growing unpopularity among women. However, his attempt to present a more "modern" impression won't wash with the majority of women, whose lives have become a lot more difficult since the Coalition took government in 1996.
Contrary to the rhetoric of Howard and Pru Goward, executive director of the Office of the Status of Women, the "mainstreaming" of women's policy has not benefited women. Rather, it allows for the abolition of every last affirmative action program and monitoring body which the women's movement forced governments of the 1970s and early 1980s to introduce.
For instance, last year the government decided to gut the powers and slash the budget of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Two years ago, it dropped the requirement that companies, higher educational institutions and trade unions with more than 100 employees report annually to the Affirmative Action Agency.
It has also scrapped the Women's Statistics Unit within the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Women's Budget Papers. So not only will there be fewer specialist services, but the statistical evidence to support their maintenance — let alone expansion — will no longer be available.
Other Coalition policies which are having an adverse impact on women include: the introduction of individual contracts in the workplace; the privatisation of public education and health (including plans to dismantle Medicare); the privatisation of public utilities such as Telstra (which will involve the scrapping of several thousand more jobs); and the privatisation of the care of the young and the elderly in the home.
Howard doesn't need opinion polls to tell him that last year's operational subsidy cuts to community-based child-care, and this year's to after-school-hours care, haven't won him many female friends. The push to boost private for-profit child-care at the expense of the community-based sector will restrict access, reduce affordability and put the squeeze on staff-to-child ratios.
Howard has no intention of doing what he said at the IWD breakfast. He doesn't even want to give women the right to make decisions about their own reproductive lives.
Apart from cutting the budget to Family Planning Australia, the government is also trying to impose more restrictions on women's rights to abortion services through a new national criminal code. This would maintain abortion as a crime.
Superficial gestures by the PM won't con the majority of women, who well know, after the last couple of decades of struggle, that women-friendly talk is cheap, but women-friendly policies are not.
By Pip Hinman