This submission is being made by the National Foundation for Australian Women (NFAW).
NFAW is dedicated to promoting and protecting the interests of Australian women, including intellectual, cultural, political, social, economic, legal, industrial and domestic spheres, and ensuring that the aims and ideals of the women’s movement and its collective wisdom are handed on to new generations of women. NFAW is a feminist organisation, independent of party politics and working in partnership with other women’s organisations.
Improving decision-making around future pandemics requires an understanding of the decision-making that underpinned Australia’s COVID-19 response – not only how decisions were made, but also by whom and on what basis. This includes the high-level decisions to focus stimulus on male-dominated occupations, and to exclude higher education and, later, childcare from JobKeeper, and at a more operational level, decisions relating to the procurement of vaccines and anti-virals, the design and conduct of vaccination campaigns and access to and pricing of pharmacy goods such as RATs and hand sanitiser.
As we note below, non-medical decision-making in relation to the COVID pandemic was characteristically conducted behind the screen of Cabinet confidentiality. Accordingly, our submission focuses what can be learned from the policies themselves and from public documentation available to us. We also reflect on the data and observations made at the time in our submission to Senate Select Committee on COVID-19’s Inquiry into the Australian Government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic (attached) and on analysis undertaken for the 2020-21 and 2021-22 Gender Lens on the Budget.
In our current submission we will address the following subset of the Panel’s Terms of Reference:
1. Governance including the role of the Commonwealth Government
4. Support for industry and businesses
5. Financial support for individuals (including income support payments and early access to superannuation).
6. Mechanisms to better target future responses to the needs of particular populations (including across genders, age groups, socio-economic status, geographic location, people with disability, First Nations peoples and communities and people from culturally and linguistically diverse communities).
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