Once again I can’t help but notice a glaring omission on the invite to a gender diversity related launch this week.
The Shadow Minister for Women Senator Claire Moore will be there. The Green’s representative on women Senator Larissa Waters will be there. A number of prominent representatives from the business community will be there.
So what about a representative from the Abbott government? Well Minister for Human Services Senator Marise Payne will be taking on that role.
Our Minister for Women — that would be Prime Minister Tony Abbott — is presumably busy with prime ministerial duties (he will be in Gallipoli this weekend, thankfully dealing with more important duties than last weekend).
We’ve been told that folding the minister for women portfolio into the prime minister’s office raises it’s importance. Abbott wanted to take it so seriously that he couldn’t entrust it to another member of his team. He follows the lead of other former prime ministers in doing so, Paul Keating and Bob Hawke both took on responsibility for women within their departments, and both had ‘ministers assisting the prime minister on women’, as Abbott does now.
But raising the importance of such a portfolio is only as commendable as your commitment to actually treat it with the respect it deserves. If you don’t have the time, energy, experience and passion, then you may as well ‘lower its importance’ and give it to somebody who can actually manage it effectively.
When asked what he had achieved as Minister for Women at the end of 2014, Tony Abbott pointed to the carbon tax. By removing the tax, his government has helped the women of Australia cut down on their household expenses.
At the current rate of progress his 2015 answer to such a question will be something along the lines of ‘No jab, No play’. That would be his government’s response to a newspaper campaign to get more kids vaccinated or risk losing government childcare rebates.
A good move and a great slogan – albeit with potentially limited results – but getting kids vaccinated is certainly not a ‘women’s issue’.
The ‘women’s issues’ we should be focussing on are the ones that are not only seeing women paid less, promoted less and valued less, but also put the lives of women at risk.
This is not the time to be treating ‘women’s issues’ trivially. Women are dying from violence at a rate of two a week in Australia. Shelters and services supporting at-risk and disadvantaged women are being shut down. The gender pay gap is at its highest point in twenty years.
Meanwhile, women continue to be one of Australia’s greatest untapped economic resources – potentially worth billions of dollars in GDP, according to the Grattan Institute. At a time when our over-reliance on the mining and resources boom is starting to look particularly problematic, addressing some of the challenges that prevent women from participating in the workforce is essential.
The problem is not that a man has taken responsibility for the status of women in Australia. The problem is that it’s being held by an individual for appearances sake, rather than due to their commitment and passion for what it all means. Abbott proved this himself shortly into his tenure in the position when he said Australian women had just about, “smashed every glass ceiling” and won the “lottery of life”.
If the portfolio is as important as Abbott says it is, then the time to give it up is well and truly overdue.