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.

In the course of our submission, we make some remarks critical of two key recommendations from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) submission. The burden of our concern is the deregulatory approach underpinning both of these recommendations, which would

• remove any legislative requirement for employers to provide specified workplace numbers, and replace that requirement with a list of broad data types, leaving the Agency with the discretion to change, add or delete any of the current data points at any time (WGEA recommendation 4)
• make action against minimum standards a matter for individual employer discretion, with no specified floor for achievement and no specified timeframe for action (WGEA recommendation 27).

Taken together, these proposals would return the Agency to the ‘action plans’ and weak compliance mandate which characterised the regime of the Affirmative Action Act 1986 Act thirty-five years ago. While NFAW has a history of supporting the work of the Agency and the Workplace Gender Equality Act (WGE Act), we are concerned by these proposals. The background and rationale underpinning these concerns are set out at length in our discussion of questions 4 and 8 in the Consultation Paper.

Our own recommendations in relation to these and other issues raised through the Consultation Paper are as follows.

 

 

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