By Emma Murphy
and Virginia Brown
MELBOURNE — On February 22, the Network Of Women Students Australia collective (NOWSA) decided that the plenary sessions for the July conference would be: Women and capitalism; Exploring different feminisms; Indigenous women; Non-English speaking background women in Australia and internationally; Lesbianism and bisexuality; Gender; women and institutionalisation/social servitude; and Prostitution and pornography.
All raise important topics for feminists to discuss. But the conference agenda as the moment does not include some of the main issues that feminist activists have been campaigning around in recent months.
As the largest gathering of women students in Australia, the NOWSA conference has an important role to play in rebuilding a feminist movement in this country. To facilitate this, Resistance members on the NOWSA collective proposed plenary sessions dealing with women's reproductive rights and voluntary student unionism (VSU). Both proposals were rejected by the collective. We think the conference agenda would be greatly improved if the proposed issues were included.
In the past year, thousands of women have mobilised in both Perth and Canberra in response to attacks on women's right to abortion. While these campaigns were strong public responses to the introduction of specific state/territory laws, the women's liberation movement has yet to coordinate a unified national response. NOWSA is an important forum in which to discuss how to develop a sustained, national response to the attacks on women's rights.
Another issue of concern is the threat that the proposed national VSU legislation poses to feminist organising on campus. For example, VSU legislation would seriously affect the NOWSA conference itself, as many of the participants receive student union funding to attend.
Feminist campaigns would also be hindered as the resources provided by student organisations either disappear completely or are severely restricted. VSU is aimed at silencing student opposition to the Coalition's socially regressive policies, from more uranium mines to further attacks on education, all of which effect women.
The NOWSA conference needs to acknowledge the detrimental impact of VSU on women's campaigns and access to services such as child-care on campus. In that light, a plenary panel on how to defeat VSU would be very useful.
Tash Izatt, a Resistance activist, NOWSA collective member and RMIT TAFE's women's officer, commented: "The success of the NOWSA conference should be measured by how many women leave it with the inspiration to go back to their campuses and collectives and build campaigns that can win women's rights.
"With academic and theoretical discussions set to take up the main plenary sessions, discussions about campaigns look like being marginalised into the workshops. It would be great to get feedback from women's collectives to ensure that the conference reflects issues of concern to women nationally."