Page 400 - Week 02 - Thursday, 8 March 2007
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That is always a good start—to be a minister for something that you really believe in. Perhaps that is a bit of a luxury in these days.
I am going to speak a little bit about Sarah Maddison’s and Emma Partridge’s work for the democratic audit which she spoke about last night at the Pamela Denoon lecture. Also there is an article in the Public Sector Informant of Tuesday’s edition of the Canberra Times by Sara Dowse entitled “Where have all the femocrats gone?”. Of course the ACT is the home of the femocracy, or at least it used to be, and I think that is the major point that is being made by Sarah Maddison.
Sarah Maddison is a young feminist and Sara Dowse is what you might call an older feminist. One of the things that there used to be quite a lot of heated discussion about in the feminist movement was: were the older feminists hogging the game and not leaving much room for the younger feminists? But I think that was a bit of a luxury and those were the times when that could be the main discussion that we were having. Now the main discussion is such that all feminists have got together on this one, young and old. Whether they are liberal, socialists, radical, cultural—all the kinds of feminism that there are are now all united in saying that things are no longer as good for women as they promised to be in perhaps the early nineties.
I do not know quite where we go back, but certainly Sarah Maddison chronicled the deterioration from 1996, and I think that is a good place to start. In 1995 there was the Beijing conference on women. I do not know if any of you were involved in the women’s movement then, but I was, as a representative for the International Women’s Development Agency. There was in Canberra an organisation—a sort of network because, being feminist, we did not want to call it an organisation—called CAPOW. CAPOW stood for the Coalition of Australian Participating Organisations of Women and their whole agenda was to get together to work with the Australian government—and I said “with” the Australian government—on the input that Australia would have in the Beijing conference on women. CAPOW operated out of a room at the old Hackett school, where we had a fax machine. I do not think we had email in early 1995 but imagine what a difference that would have made. But the fax machine ran hot.
If you are looking for democracy, you have got to look at the women’s movement because the women’s movement is so stuck on democracy and equality. The faxes went out every day. There are about 60 national women’s organisations in CAPOW—can you believe that? I think it is very difficult to believe, because what happened in 1996 was the federal government’s decision to fund only three national women’s organisations. The Women’s Electoral Lobby was, of course, defunded at that time.
Last night was the Pamela Denoon lecture. Pamela Denoon was the first national coordinator of the Women’s Electoral Lobby and it was good to reflect on what had happened. WEL has not been funded for 10 years now. It still exists, it still struggles along—but it is a struggle when you do not have very much money.
The women’s movement is made up of volunteers. Women are, by their very nature, very busy people and so to fit into their lives another thing, like being a part of a community organisation, is often a very big ask. Women are already involved in community organisations, in a sense, if they have children, because most women are
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