Gender equality advocates are calling on Australian governments to step up their commitments to women, as Australia prepares to host the 2026 Women Deliver conference in April.
In a joint open letter facilitated by Fair Agenda, leading human rights and women’s organisations have called for action on six priority areas, including improving women’s safety, advancing women’s health, valuing care, upholding self-determination, acting for a safer climate, and contributing to a better future for the region.
The Women Deliver conference is the world’s largest conference on gender equality and will bring 6,500 advocates to Melbourne next month.
The six priority areas (shared below) for action mentioned in the open letter were discussed at a recent briefing at Parliament House in Canberra in the lead up to International Women’s Day.
The briefing panel was chaired by Fair Agenda’s Executive Director, Renee Carr.
Below, we share some of what was discussed.
“I really want to start with the message of hope. Our assessment is that hope and evidence together are the tools that we need to change the systems that are really critical to any domestic family and sexual violence in this country,” Tessa Boyd-Caine, CEO of ANROWS said at the briefing.
“Yes, it is mostly women and children who are experiencing domestic family and sexual violence. That harm is continuing to occur, and we can never accept that harm.
“At the same time, at ANROWS we are monitoring signals of progress. We are seeing the prevalence of intimate partner violence decreasing.
“We’re seeing that public awareness is growing. That’s reflected in more people seeking help. It’s reflected in more people recognising abuse earlier as part of that reaching out for support.”
Brook McKail, Domestic Violence Crisis Service ACT, said the crisis line sees an increase in calls year on year, “in referrals from police, more referrals from the community, and certainly more requests for case tracking”.
“But getting to the hopeful bit – the reason why that is hopeful is because the reasons why our numbers are increasing are not because there’s more violence in the community, it’s because more people are reaching out for help to services like ours,’ McKail said.
Tiffany Karlsson from the Canberra Rape Crisis Centre said their services sit “at the epicentre of sexual violence prevention and response”, providing highly specialised services for tens of thousands of victim-survivors every year.
“We know with the work we do it reduces PTSD, it reduces anxiety, it reduces depression, it improves workforce participation and economic stability and it lowers downstream health justice and child protection costs,’ Karlsson said.
Elise Phillips from Illawarra Women’s Trauma Recovery Centre said the service had been open for almost two years, and provides holistic support that works with women who’ve experienced domestic and sexual violence.
“Instead of women having to go to four or five different services to get their needs met, under the one roof, we are able to provide counselling, group work, case management, financial counselling, equine therapy (healing with horses), ecotherapy (healing in nature), as well as creative and social groups to support healing and increase a sense of engagement with community and social supports,” Phillips said.
Phillips added that the organisation was only able to support women in the Illawarra but had a vision that there will be trauma recovery centres right across the country.
“My vision is also to have trauma recovery centres that also work with children and young people,” Phillips said.
Adrianne Walters, from Women’s Legal Services Australia, said thousands of women were being turned away from its services because of capacity or other reasons.
“That was estimated to be about 52,000 women in 2023-24,” Walters said.
“Our members try to refer them, but eligibility and capacity issues at other community legal services, legal aid commissions, mean that women escaping violence can be left without any or good quality legal help. And that’s clearly not good enough.
“Our experience is that cases involving domestic and family violence are getting more legally complex. They are taking more time and more resources to resolve across multiple courts and systems. And the ease at which perpetrators of violence can weaponise the government’s own systems is making it even harder for women to escape abuse.”
Malini Raj, from the Australian Multicultural Women’s Alliance, said safety is not experienced equally among women.
“We consistently hear from women and from frontline providers that visa dependency can become a form of coercive control,” Raj said.
“Threats of sponsorship withdrawal, of financial exclusion, fear of deportation. Safety becomes structurally conditional.”
Raj said areas for reform include guaranteed access to Medicare, social security, and safe housing for temporary visa holders experiencing domestic and family violence and sexual violence, and sustained multi -year funding for multicultural community -led services.
The six priority areas from the open letter include:
1. Improving women’s safety and wellbeing – and treating gender-based violence as a true national priority
Achieving this requires governments across the country to fully resource all parts of the National Plan – including long-term funding for specialist and community-led violence services; and working with the specialist sector and victim-survivors to progress the recommendations of the recent Australian Law Reform Commission’s inquiry into Justice Responses to Sexual Violence.
2. Upholding and advancing women’s health and access to sexual and reproductive healthcare
Achieving this requires governments to increase funding for women’s health services; invest in improved access to reproductive healthcare services, including abortion care – particularly in regional and remote areas. It also requires funding research and workforce support to prevent reproductive coercion.
3. Valuing care, and removing barriers to women’s economic security
Achieving this requires the federal government to improve support for carers across our communities; continue addressing the gender pay gap; and change the tax and safety net settings that make housing and gender inequality worse.
4. Upholding self-determination and agency for all
This requires governments to invest in women’s leadership, respond to the call for Treaties with First Nations peoples, and modernise our laws to address discrimination in all its forms.
5. Acting for a safer climate
This requires governments to invest in stopping further harm and repairing the climate harm already done. It means developing a National Roadmap on Gender, Climate and Environmental Action shaped by those at the forefront of climate impacts. And it means investing in women’s and First Nations’ leadership as our communities transition to renewable energy and build resilience in the face of extreme heat and climate-fueled disasters.
6. Contributing to a better future in our region
This requires the Australian government to increase long-term, flexible funding to the communities and movements working to ensure everyone can exercise their human rights, no matter their gender or age.