The Minister for Women has done a gallant job of extracting some money from the Government for women.

However, $109 million over 4 years is roughly $26m a year. You cannot do much to increase women’s economic security on an investment of around $26m a year. You have to pad it out with old budget initiatives and do what you can on the cheap.

That’s why many of the measures announced today are double edged. They are often useful measures, but they are only useful because there is nothing better. They propose band-aids where there should be a safety net and seed funding where there should be systemic change.

Violence

Take the case of women fleeing violent relationships. The Government announced that it will make it easier for women violence to borrow from their superannuation to pay for accommodation and legal support. This, knowing that many of those women will have been victims of financial abuse, that one in three women have nothing in a superannuation fund to draw down anyway, and that the rest have far too little–and will now have even less.

Or take the Government’s continued support to the Good Shepherd micro-finance no-interest loan scheme, which helps with the purchase of household items, rental bond and other necessities. Of course this is a measure which deserves support. It is also a measure which would not be necessary if the National Plan National Plan to Reduce Violence Against Women and their Children prioritised capital and recurrent funding for emergency and longer-term accommodation options and better targeting of support in welfare and social services.

There are also unequivocally useful measures to support victims of family and domestic violence. These are mainly legislative changes streamlining property settlement and protecting victims from direct crossexamination by their perpetrators in family law matters.

NFAW also welcomes new electronic information sharing system between the Australian Tax Office and the Family Law Courts so superannuation assets can be identified quickly and accurately.

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