Cherchez la femme. In his March 1 speech to the National Press Club, Treasurer Peter Costello announced: ‘We ought to be looking to make this the most female-friendly place on Earth.
What a fabulous thought.
Of course, there are questions to be asked. Which females, I wonder, does Costello have in mind? Students? Working mothers? Women over 65? Or maybe he’s thinking of women with disabilities, or breast cancer patients, or women seeking abortions or about to give birth. What about female artists and writers, indigenous women, women asylum seekers or Muslim women? I’ve certainly not exhausted the range, but I hope I’ve made my point, that half the population is as varied as the other half, and providing for the needs of one group among us may well detract from those of another. The first thing anyone involved with women’s policy learns is that we women are a diverse, contradictory, often refractory bunch.
Thirty years ago, when I was involved in developing policy myself, the government conducted annual pre-budget consultations. Essentially a public relations exercise (the budget had already been decided when they were held), the consultations exemplified the relative innocence of those days, when ordinary citizens met with Cabinet ministers and face-to-face delivered their demands. It was early in the Fraser government and a round of consultations with women’s organisations had been arranged. But before the women met with the ministers, we in the department brought them together to discuss the issues among themselves, and with skilful manoeuvring enabled them to present a more or less common front.
Separately, however, each had a concern about the others. ‘Sara,’ said one migrant women’s representative, ‘do you actually believe that the Aborigines are … what do you say … redeemable?’ When she left the room and her indigenous counterpart returned, she expressed her disgust for the ‘Eyeties’. The Country Women’s Association delegate clearly disliked them both. By the end of the day the entire procedure had taken on the character of farce, with one woman coming in a door immediately after another had gone out, to voice her distrust of the actor off-stage, just as that woman had done only the minute before. And so it went. We had conservatives and social democrats, single mothers and ‘family’ champions, businesswomen and housing advocates; a variety of perspectives not altogether conducive to mounting a unified case.
It would be easy enough to