More than 400 gender equality advocates gathered in Melbourne last week for the Women Deliver conference, with speakers addressing key issues in the lives of women and girls throughout the Pacific region, including climate change, ending gender-based violence, women’s economic equity and resourcing for women’s human rights.
Delegates at the conference– Sisters in solidarity: Our stories, spaces and solutions– heard from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner June Oscar AO and Secretary General of the Generation Equality Forum Delphine O.
“It’s movements like this one, which break away from imagined territorial boundaries and bring us closer together, uniting us over common purposes and goals for a more just and equal future,” said Oscar.
“Women– and when I say women, I absolutely include trans women, our sister girls and all gender diverse people– Collectively, and with all our diversity from our many different backgrounds and cultures, act and think differently to mainstream Western patriarchal society because we rarely fit within the patriarchal structures that govern mainstream society.”
“Women’s knowledges and ways of being do not belong to the mainstream systems that have created many of the global crises that we are faced with today, the climate change crisis. Rising inequalities entrenched, discrimination, and gender based violence, and the list goes on,” she said.
“It is a terrible irony that the very knowledges and lives that are most marginalised– women and gender diverse people, who are impacted profoundly by exclusion– are those we need the most to resolve our current existential challenges.”
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner June Oscar AO
Noting the recent Wiyi Yani U Thangani (Women’s Voices) National Summit in Canberra, where over 800 First Nations women from across Australia gathered, Oscar added that, “the reason our women call for a national gathering is for the same reasons that Women Deliver emphasises the vital importance of global gatherings– it well and truly makes our women visible.”
“We cannot be ignored or silenced. Together we can pinpoint areas of critical structural reform and it gives us the platform to establish the agenda, catalyse collective action, and drive the changes we need to see.”
In partnership with the Albanese Government, the Andrews Labor Government is the Regional Convening Partner for the Oceanic Pacific region for Women Deliver 2023.
Minister for Women, Natalie Hutchins says she’s proud of the Andrews Labor Government for leading this partnership as, “Women Deliver provides an opportunity for many exceptional women and First Nations people from across Australia and the Pacific to share how they are driving change and creating stronger and more equal communities, economies and societies.”
Following this conference, a delegation of young people, First Nations representatives, LGBTIQ+ communities and people with disabilities will take the agreed priorities to one of the largest gender equality conferences in the world, Women Deliver, in Kigali, Rwanda in July.
In Kigali, Victoria will share its leading reforms, including prevention of violence against women, gender equality and self-determination for First Nations peoples.
Pacific Community Principal Strategic Lead for women and girls, Mereseini Rakuita highlights the urgency of Women Deliver’s mission, saying the conference “provides a powerful platform for the diverse and vibrant activists of the Pacific – a region on the front lines of climate change and facing some of the biggest challenges to gender equality – to gather in solidarity to raise the voices of those who have traditionally been marginalised and develop solutions that are relevant to the Pacific.”
Speaking to the importance of individual action for collective change, Australian Ambassador for Gender Equality Stephanie Copus Campbell said: “Every one of us has a role to play as we work together to advance the rights, health and wellbeing of women and girls, in all their intersecting identities, in both the Oceania Pacific region and across the globe.”