Roadmap for Australian women
The National Foundation for Australian Women (NFAW) calls on the Rudd government to agree to develop a National Women’s Agenda to establish its credentials on women’s issues.
Australia has a long way to travel before we achieve equality between women and men. Issues such as pay equity, paid maternity leave, access to housing, access to education, funding against domestic violence, all need to be addressed in an overarching and comprehensive plan.
Marie Coleman, NFAW spokesperson, said, “A roadmap is needed to clearly articulate the Rudd government’s policy objectives and desired outcomes for women.”
“Clear targets, based on good evidence, will allow Australian women maintain a focus on the important issues and to ignore mistakes (such as forgetting to put women on government bodies).”
“Without a plan, every mistake looks like a new direction.”
“Government has already committed large amounts of money to address women’s issues, but at the national level there is no clear articulation across Ministerial responsibilities of all the policies intended to deal with ending discrimination and violence against women. There is no national plan for Australian women.”
“Specific measures for the advancement of women, action plans and gendered statistics are also essential if we are to make progress towards achieving gender equality.”
“There is not enough data about women’s issues to properly inform action.”
“When NFAW, the Women’s Electoral Lobby and HREOC commissioned studies to benchmark women’s wages, we found that there were tremendous problems with the adequacy of data.”
“The government encourages state governments to collect data and meet certain targets in relation to health and education. Disaggregating these statistics by gender and publishing them would be a good start.”
“Without data, there can be no roadmap. The first step on the National Women’s Agenda should be to collect the data to tell us where we are – then we can move on.”
Media inquiries
Marie Coleman, NFAW on 0414 483 067