What Have the Party Policies Told Women So Far?
1. Introduction
This document has been created to assist women to cast an informed vote. We do not endorse any Party nor do we rank responses.
The purpose of What are they saying to women? is to provide clear and objectiveinformation on the effect of the main parties’ policies on issues of significance for women. To this end we have provided the Coalition, the ALP and the Greens with the opportunity to comment on our representation of their policies, and to provide additional policy material over the election period. We have reserved to ourselves the right to comment on the likely impact of those policies on women. For this reason, not all amendments proposed by each of the parties were adopted. Changes that were made go to providing more detail on specific and articulated election policies.
Women tend to be particularly dependent on the quality of our national social infrastructure – the age pension, access to health care, measures to promote pay equity, affordable quality child care (which mother willingly leaves her child in poor care?), education and training all matter. So too do structural arrangements to focus on gender equity.
We have especially given attention to young women in this document. We will do our best to communicate this to young women through social media.
What have the Party policies told women so far?
We are past half way through the election campaign. Parties still haven’t formally launched their policies. Postal voting has already begun.
Labor has launched a comprehensive women’s policy[1] –which the media reported on selectively, and not as a full women’s policy. The Turnbull Government has produced a media statement as a riposte[2], but no comparable document.
We value the assistance of major Parties in checking that our analysis correctly reflects their positions.
This has been an extraordinarily long election campaign. Many voters, not least young voters, are said to be disengaged.
NFAW is concerned about this disengagement. The election has been characterised by a degree of cynicism, including about election funding. Political leaders and spokespersons have criss-crossed the continent to speak about their policies. Perhaps the fact that the major parties have left their official launches until very late in the campaign has added to that cynicism – given that the costs of politicians’ travel fall on the taxpayer until the date of official campaign launches.
Voters need information sufficient time before voting to make informed decisions.
We sincerely trust that the policies we describe herein will not prove post the election to have equally little connection with actual Government actions as was the case for Election 2013 and Budget 2014-15. That would increase voter cynicism and disengagement. We note however the Treasurer has flagged that more cuts (a.k.a. ‘savings’) might be necessary post the election. We consider that Governments need flexibility to respond to unanticipated changes in the economic environment. However, abuse of political trust is not appropriate.
We commend voters also to the website www.womenvote.org as a guide to cast a valid vote.
Marie Coleman
For the National Foundation for Australian Women
[1] http://www.100positivepolicies.org.au/australian_women_labors_positive_policies
[2] https://www.liberal.org.au/latest-news/2016/06/11/turnbull-coalitions-commitment-supporting-australian-women