Keywords

Introduction

The 1996 Australian election saw the defeat of the Keating government and John Howard becoming Prime Minister of a Liberal-National Coalition government.Footnote 1 The previous chapter has argued that the Hawke and Keating period had continued key aspects of Labor’s gender equality trajectory, despite the detrimental impacts of neoliberal influences on women. In particular, Labor’s social democratic traditions had facilitated the government recognising social disadvantage and the need for government to introduce measures designed to increase gender equality. Consequently, the Labor government had introduced measures such as its Sex Discrimination legislation and Affirmative Action legislation. Meanwhile, the “social wage” component of Labor’s agenda had also justified the funding of various women’s services, even if this was often inadequate. Labor’s recognition of inequality also legitimated consulting with the social movement organisations that were advocating for disadvantaged groups, as well as frequently funding them. These factors had limited the impact of neoliberal influences, despite that impact still being significant. Consequently, as argued in the last chapter, while Australia was behind other countries in some respects (for example, when compared with Nordic parental leave measures), overall, it still ranked relatively highly in terms of gender equality policy internationally. Australia had also pioneered early innovations, such as its Women’s Budget Programs/Statements.

While social democratic influences were obvious, some of these Labor measures were also not incompatible with forms of social liberalism that had once influenced the Liberal Party.Footnote 2 However, as we saw in the last chapter, the Liberal Party was becoming not only more neoliberal but also more socially conservative, despite the efforts of social liberal feminists within the party. Consequently, the Liberal Party had opposed Labor’s Sex Discrimination and Affirmative Action legislation. While Liberal leaders such as Andrew Peacock and John Hewson had been somewhat less socially conservative on women’s issues, John Howard had proudly embraced conservative traditions.Footnote 3 It will be argued in this chapter that Howard’s version of neoliberalism also positively embraced UK and US influenced neoliberal arguments that so-called elite, politically correct special interests had been ripping off taxpayers. Unfortunately for issues of gender equality that categorisation included feminist organisations. Howard was also to embrace US-influenced family values and religious right style arguments which were to see specifically women’s issues mentioned less as Coalition MPs increasingly emphasised the family, with women frequently disappearing into it as a result.Footnote 4 Howard’s arguments regarding elite politically correct special interests were also to apply to Indigenous and multicultural organisations with detrimental effects on particularly vulnerable groups of women. Unions were also targeted under the neoliberal agenda with detrimental implications for women on low incomes and with poor working conditions. Australia was soon to forfeit any claim to being a world leader in regard to innovations in gender equality policy. Above all, Howard claimed to represent “mainstream” Australians and it became increasingly apparent that that term included Australians with socially conservative attitudes on race, ethnicity and gender and excluded others who were deemed to be suffering from “political correctness”.Footnote 5 Meanwhile, women’s position in society was largely framed as a matter of individual choice rather than social disadvantage or discrimination. Feminists were therefore to face a very hostile environment with Anne Summers, former head of the Office of the Status of Women under Labor and also an advisor to Paul Keating, writing in 2013 that: “A bitter lesson of the past forty years has been the realisation that we have not been able to guarantee that a reform will be permanent. It did not occur to us back then that a hard-won reform could actually be reversed, repealed”.Footnote 6

Furthermore, Howard’s attitude to gender equality was part of his broader electoral strategy which attempted to drive a wedge between Labor and its heartland working-class base by suggesting that Labor was supporting politically correct elite issues while he was supporting the “mainstream”, including “battlers”. It was a perverse mimicking of class-based arguments about exploitation in which exploitation was depicted as occurring not in the capitalist labour market but at the level of the state via, for example, so-called elite feminist or Aboriginal “industries” ripping off taxpayers.Footnote 7 Perverse it might be but it was an electoral strategy that was to help keep Howard in office for eleven years.Footnote 8 Howard’s position, on issues ranging from emphasising individual choice and rejecting social disadvantage to minimising the public sector and government intervention in the economy, involved a very different framing of gender equality policy from that of his more immediate predecessors.

Howard’s Programme: The Background

Howard’s socially conservative position on women’s issues had long been apparent and was closely related to his attitude on the family. Howard had helped shape the Liberal’s 1988 Future Directions document during his first period as Leader of the Opposition, which referred to the increasing “opportunities” for women to work but also to them being “forced by the economic pressures on families to do so”.Footnote 9 The family was depicted as “the prime source of individual security” which was now under attack by social and economic change and Labor government policies.Footnote 10 Similarly, during his second period as Leader of the Opposition in 1995, Howard argued that “protecting and strengthening the family unit is the key to maintaining social cohesion and economic stability in the future. A stable functioning family provides the best welfare support system yet devised”.Footnote 11 The implication was that the family was also a haven of security in a fast-changing world. As we shall see, women were to all too often to disappear within the family in Howard’s conceptions. As well, the suggestion that the family is the best welfare support system has echoes of older family wage conceptions in which a male wage-earner head of household would support dependants. It also suggests that the family—that is mainly women—would play a key role in supporting those who needed caring for, rather than the state. Howard’s social conservatism therefore reinforced neoliberal arguments against state support, suggesting that Howard could protect voters from social change while embracing a market-driven philosophy of economic change.

Nonetheless, Howard denied that his government was opposed to mothers working, arguing that it was a matter of parental choice whether a mother—or even a father—decided to stay home to look after their children and that governments should not interfere with that choice. However, he derided the claimed “stridency of some of the ultra-feminist groups in the community who sort of really demand that every mother be back in the workforce as quickly as humanly possible”.Footnote 12 Stay-at-home mothers were depicted as those being oppressed now. Howard argued that one should not replace “outdated” arguments of “some years ago” against working mothers which were “by and large, behind us”, with new attitudes “from some other sections of the community who seek to almost sneer at and treat as second class citizens those women who elect or, indeed, those men who elect to be full-time carers for their children at home”.Footnote 13 (Howard’s own wife Janette had given up teaching to raise the Howard children and support his career.) Elsewhere he said that “I think the ideal policy is to give all men and women an effective choice. Those who want one of the parents to be at home, normally but not always the mother, full-time while kids are young should be financially able to do so”.Footnote 14

In other words, Howard suggested that the “normal” choice would be for the women to have major responsibility for children. Framing the issue as one of choice also enabled Howard to avoid suggesting, for example, that more men should play a role in childrearing and domestic labour, with Howard reverting to the argument that:

It is not the role of a government to dictate a stereotype. It is not the role of a government to say that you should or shouldn’t be in the workforce, that both parents should or shouldn’t be in the workforce when children are young. That is for parents to decide.Footnote 15

Howard claimed that “some of the taxation changes we are making at the moment will make it a little easier… for them to exercise that choice”.Footnote 16 However, Howard was being disingenuous, in that government tax and benefits policy was shaping those choices, encouraging women to stay at home by providing a financial disincentive for them to work. Furthermore, the government’s weak action on equal pay (primarily as we’ll see providing information packages) contributed to women often earning less than men, thereby making a choice that women in heterosexual couples would stay at home more likely. In 1998, the same year Howard made his statement ostensibly supporting choice against “ultra-feminist groups”, the government supported a tax package offering generous tax benefits to single-income families, thereby potentially discouraging some women from working. It also offered significant benefits to couples in which one parent, most likely the woman, appeared to be earning a relatively small income by working part-time (given the assumption of a 67%:37% income split).Footnote 17 By 2006, Harding and Vu were stating that, combined with $28 billion spending on family benefits in the previous decade by the Howard government, the “effective tax rates are about 65c to 70c in the dollar” for many two-income families. This resulted in a very small financial benefit for both parents working that “may not be sufficient to cover additional costs of working, such as transport and child care. So it’s not surprising if mothers facing this system decide to stay home”.Footnote 18 Later in its period in office, the government paid single-income families $2.6 billion per annum in non means-tested benefits that often benefited wealthy male-headed families. Yet it rejected Pru Goward’s, their handpicked Sex Discrimination Commissioner’s, proposal of government-funded paid maternity leave (costed at $213 million per annum).Footnote 19

Anne Summers, former head of the Office of Status of Women under the Labor government argued that:

The Howard government has made ruthless use of childcare, employment, family assistance and taxation policy to steer women with children out of the workforce and into fulltime motherhood, in the process imposing substantial financial penalties on mothers who continue to work.Footnote 20

Summers particularly cited cuts to childcare, including abolishing operational subsidies for community-based centres, capping the Childcare Assistance Payment, stopping indexing it and changing its payment from being in advance to being in arrears. While childcare places expanded, the spending per place was reduced (for example, being less in 2001–2002 than in 1993–1994) despite rising operating and compliance costs, thereby contributing to fee increases.Footnote 21 The emphasis on marketisation of childcare centres also continued.Footnote 22 Academic commentators, such as Rhonda Sharp and Ray Broomhill agreed, arguing that policies, including the Baby Bonus (along with the Maternity Allowance that replaced it), “contained financial incentives that entrenched women’s primary responsibility for the care of children and their status as secondary incomer earners reflecting male breadwinner gender values”.Footnote 23 Indeed the baby bonus reflected natalist fears of a declining birth rate, and the resulting encouragement for families to have more babies, that had particular implications for women.

Dissenting Voices Within the Howard Government

This is not to suggest that the Howard government did not include members who had different views in regard to women. There were still members who came from more moderate social liberal traditions when it came to issues of social inequality and the role of government. One of them, Judi Moylan, became Minister for Women from October 1997–October 1998. Moylan made a wide range of feminist comments. Her statement on the 1998 Budget included comments advocating both men and women sharing family responsibilities; blending those responsibilities with work; recognising women’s unpaid contributions and the importance of childcare in facilitating women’s employment.Footnote 24 The recognition of women’s unpaid labour was particularly un-Howard-like. Nonetheless, the example of Moylan also reveals how women (and supportive men) with more progressive views were constrained under the Howard government. Overall, Moylan’s budget statement was compatible with a broader Howard government agenda, including providing $6.1 million funding for “marriage and relationship education services”, reflecting the government’s focus on the family as the best welfare institution and consequent efforts to discourage divorce.Footnote 25 The statement suggested that the government’s focus on enterprise bargaining would contribute to greater flexibility for women, without noting the downsides of enterprising bargaining for women, that have been noted in the previous chapter.Footnote 26 It stated that the government “is firmly committed to ensuring that men and women receive equal remuneration for work of equal value without discrimination based on sex” but then referred merely to an information Handbook that was designed to “assist employers in understanding the factors which lead to disparity in pay” and their existing legal obligations, rather than supporting legislative or regulatory measures being introduced.Footnote 27

Moylan’s marginalisation was graphically illustrated when Treasurer Peter Costello prevented Moylan from providing a gender analysis of the government’s tax package to the Press, stating that “I don’t think they’re interested”.Footnote 28 The failure of Women’s Budget statements to provide a detailed analysis of the impact of broader government policy settings on women had been an issue under Labor but was even more so under Howard given his claim that “the way in which the economy operates, the way in which policies impact upon the community generally are of the same concern and of the same relevance to women as they are to men”.Footnote 29 While Howard suggested that women were as interested in issues such as interest rates as men, his statement also implied that the economy did not impact on them differentially. There was no analysis of the implications of the Howard government’s budget cuts for women. Moylan reportedly considered the funding and resources for her own portfolio of Women to be pitifully low.Footnote 30 Furthermore, Moylan’s budget statement was only 39 pages long compared with up to several hundred pages under Labor.

Nonetheless, in various speeches, Moylan continued to make feminist-influenced statements that were markedly different from Howard’s and reflected her own different life experience, including on equal pay:

Equal pay for equal work is an issue that I feel very passionate about. It frustrates me that 90 years after the Harvester decision, and nearly 30 years after the equal pay decision of 1969, women's wages still don’t have parity with men’s. Here we are in the late 1990s, still battling a basic equity issue. And the bottom line of that equity issue is whether we’re born male or female.

This was a bitter home truth that I faced in the 1970s, when, left with three small children, I looked at my options to earn a wage to support myself and my children. At that time, the only job I could find that offered equal pay for equal work, for which I was qualified, was real estate. The pay was based on results, rather than my gender -- and sexist assumptions about whose wages support children.Footnote 31

(The Harvester decision of an industrial court supported the idea of a male wage-earner head of household who had dependant family members and should therefore earn more while women should be paid less.)Footnote 32 Moylan also acknowledged that women with their own businesses were still in a minority position with the clear implication that they often faced discrimination.Footnote 33

Nonetheless, Moylan was loath to acknowledge that some businesses actually benefited financially from paying women less. She asserted that: “Most employers just want to… run their business – properly and fairly” which is why an information handbook would be useful.Footnote 34 She claimed that businesses would benefit from equal pay:

Improving parity between men’s and women’s wages is an issue of fairness. But there’s also a great deal in it for business. Tackling the issues behind gender pay inequities encourages a happier, more effective and productive workforce. It can also result in more stable staffing patterns, and more loyalty from employees. In short, it’s a “win-win” situation.Footnote 35

Admittedly, Moylan also noted the impact of different working patterns on women’s low retirement incomes, implying that women should not always put their family carer responsibilities firstFootnote 36:

Women must start to move past the burnt chop syndrome - the tendency to put their own needs last. This is especially true for women with small children …. Superannuation is essentially an employment-linked entitlement. The fact is that more women than men spend long periods out of the work force - usually to take primary responsibility for child rearing - and interrupted work patterns deny many women adequate income security in retirement.Footnote 37

She also noted the impact on women’s retirement incomes if marriages broke down. Indeed, one of the Howard government measures she was particularly proud of was a family law reform ensuring that superannuation could be shared in the event of marriage breakdown.Footnote 38 Though it should be noted that while Moylan may have seen such measures as recognising the sacrifices and domestic, caring labour that women contributed to their marriages, more conservative Liberals may have seen it as reflecting the traditional male wage-earner head of household role of financially supporting women.

Given her relatively more progressive views, feminists were not surprised when Moylan was removed as Minister for the Status of Women and replaced by her predecessor, the more conservative, Jocelyn Newman. Newman had been notorious for positions such as defending Howard’s decision to use the word “Chairman”, including in legislation, declaring: “Call me chairman, my name is Newman”.Footnote 39 The ministry was also renamed from Minister for the Status of Women back to Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Status of Women. Many years after leaving office, Moylan expressed her concern that “feminism is branded as a left-wing issue” by many conservatives which “is unfortunate, as generations of women have battled for basic principles of fairness and equity for all women under the banner of feminism”.Footnote 40 She also expressed her concern that some male conservatives still believed that women’s place was in the home.Footnote 41

As we shall see below, moderate Liberal women were to try to influence Howard on some other issues, including cuts to key anti-discrimination positions. In a particularly important example of cross-party cooperation, female Coalition senators were involved in a successful attempt to facilitate Australian women’s access to RU486, the medical abortion drug, which was also partly seen as a revolt against the religious right influence in the party.Footnote 42 However, later Howard government ministers for women tended not to make as feminist-influenced statements as Moylan. Subsequent ministers, including the final Minister Julie Bishop—who notoriously refused to describe herself as a feminist even many years later—continued to argue that the Howard government’s broader social, economic and industrial relations policies had been good for women, increasing the “choices and opportunities” available to them.Footnote 43 Many Liberal politicians also continue to depict the Howard government’s impact on women in a favourable light.Footnote 44 Though other Liberal women cautioned early on that at least some Howard government policies risked alienating women and raised the need for ongoing reform.Footnote 45 Indeed, as the comments by Anne Summers amongst others have already made clear, there is another story that can be told about the Howard government’s broader measures.

Cuts to Women’s Services and Organisations

As explained previously, Howard’s electoral strategy revolved around arguments that his government would protect so-called mainstream Australians from claimed politically correct, elite “special interests” that were attempting to rip off ordinary taxpayers by accessing state largesse. This socially conservative argument gelled well with neoliberal attempts to cut state benefits or, more accurately, to often redirect those benefits to private enterprise. Consequently, the Howard government’s broader neoliberal perspectives resulted in major cuts to the public sector and welfare programmes along with privatisation, corporatisation and contracting out of previous government programmes to the private and faith sectors.Footnote 46 Howard’s protective masculinity (that will be discussed in more depth later) included wishing to abolish the so-called nanny state a Thatcherite term that implied that reliance on government was emasculating for male citizens. Like Thatcher, Howard wished to encourage economic “self-reliance” (particularly for male individuals and their families) and an “enterprise culture”, thereby correcting so-called welfare dependence.Footnote 47 The arguments regarding facilitating private sector provision were influenced by US right-wing claims that it was more efficient to contract out government services to competing private sector providers.Footnote 48 Although this often resulted in inefficiencies due to market failures and the private sector plundering state resources and taxpayers’ money. Howard’s position was therefore diametrically opposed to Whitlam’s arguments regarding positive equality, discussed in Chapter 2, in which public provision was seen as crucial for the achievement of equality and he also went much further in privatising, corporatising and urging public sector restraint than Labor’s Hawke and Keating had.

Furthermore, it was not just that Howard’s neoliberal focus on “choice” meant that he generally did not depict women as being disadvantaged or constrained by gendered power relations. It became increasingly clear, in related arguments, that feminist groups were amongst the “special interests” that the government was targeting as part of its neoliberal claim that so-called politically correct special interests had been ripping off taxpayers. Both these factors led to a major targeting of feminist organisations and feminist advisory machinery within government. The Office of the Status of Women was moved from Prime Ministers Department to Welfare where it covered issues such as family benefits. Importantly, it lost the ability to comment on all cabinet submissions.Footnote 49 The government even abolished the Women’s Bureau which had been established by the Menzies Liberal government in 1963 and provided invaluable data and advice on women’s employment and issues such as equal pay.Footnote 50 Howard removed the expert femocrat women’s desks that had been based in individual government departments and advised on departmental policy, contributing to the disempowering and sanitisation of the women’s budget programme, mentioned earlier.Footnote 51 The Women’s statistics unit in the Australian Bureau of statistics was abolished. Consequently, it became much harder to track what was happening to women’s equality issues.

The cuts would have gone even further if it was not for the efforts of some key government women. Howard’s then chief of staff, Nicole Feely, reportedly persuaded him out of abolishing the Office of the Status of Women and the Affirmative Action Agency.Footnote 52 Jocelyn Newman, to give her due, was amongst those defending the continued existence of the Office of the Status of Women although its budget was cut by 46%.Footnote 53 Reportedly the Sex Discrimination Commissioner position in the Human Rights Commission was also under threat, but was saved by a combination of interventions within the Liberal Government and Liberal Party and by a number of non-government women’s groups mobilising to defend it.Footnote 54 As it was, the government accused the then Sex Discrimination Commissioner Sue Walpole of being too close to the Labor Party and did not replace her for 14 months after she resigned.Footnote 55 A 40% cut to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission caused the loss of a third of its staff and particularly impacted the Sex Discrimination Policy Unit.Footnote 56

The cuts were clearly targeted with the feminist Women’s Electoral Lobby losing most of their government funding while the more conservative National Council of Women received $275,000 over three years.Footnote 57 (As we will see later, a so-called father’s rights group was also funded.) The Association for Non-English-Speaking Background Women of Australia was defunded despite, as Democrats Senator Stott Despoja noted, being “a national policy, advocacy, research and information organisation that provides advice on the needs and perspectives of migrant women, not just to government, but to industry, community organisations, unions and the media”.Footnote 58 A 1999 Women’s Round Table advisory meeting saw conservative women’s groups invited but not some feminist organisations, Aboriginal, Muslim and Jewish women’s groups—a point which indicates the multiple disadvantages faced by women who also suffered from the government’s general policies in regard to race and ethnicity.Footnote 59 Labor MP Tanya Plibersek listed numerous women’s organisations that were initially defunded, with only partial funding restored after an outcry from politicians and community groups:

The organisations which initially lost their funding included Guides Australia, the National Council for Single Mothers and Their Children, the Older Women’s Network, the Women’s Electoral Lobby, the Catholic Women’s League Australia, the Muslim Women’s National Network, the National Council of Jewish Women, the National Women’s Justice Coalition, the National Women’s Media Centre and the Women’s Action Alliance. All of them—they are very worthwhile organisations—initially lost their funding probably because they criticised the government.Footnote 60

Importantly, the government refused to sign or ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which would have facilitated an individual complaints process. The government had a general objection to United Nations human rights approaches, particularly after criticisms had been made of its treatment of Indigenous Australians and asylum seekers.Footnote 61

Domestic Violence

Given a neoliberal economic policy framing, those women’s issues that were taken up were increasingly justified by a business case. For example, Howard supported business playing an active role against domestic violence, not only because he appears to have been genuinely shocked by it, but because, in the words of the Office of the Status of Women:

… domestic violence can have a large cost for business. The victims of domestic violence, and the perpetrators, are not isolated in any one part of the Australian workforce. The witnesses - their children - are the workforce of tomorrow and we know that the culture of violence can be handed down from generation to generation.

A worker who experiences violence at home will not be as productive, neither will a worker who has been violent at home. And those are costs which are passed on to businesses.Footnote 62

The Office of the Status of Women commissioned a report into the costs of domestic violence to the economy, funded by the Australian government under the Partnerships Against Domestic Violence programme, which concluded that the cost in 2002–2003 was $8.1 billion.Footnote 63 The government claimed it was “a world-first in estimating the total extent of the costs of domestic violence economy-wide”.Footnote 64

In 2006 Julie Bishop pointed out that the Howard government had provided $149 million for tackling domestic violence, including spending money on major multimedia campaigns.Footnote 65 The government had also funded a legal support programme for Indigenous women and children escaping family violence.Footnote 66 Quite beside the business case, Harris Rimmer and Sawer have argued that conservative governments can be more ideologically predisposed to funding domestic violence measures because they do not involve forms of market redistribution.Footnote 67 Such measures also reflect conservative views that it is men’s traditional role to protect women and were therefore compatible with Howard’s form of protective masculinity that will be discussed in more depth later in this chapter.

Women, Race and Ethnicity

Howard’s conception of special interests also included the so-called Aboriginal industry which Howard claimed had thrived under Labor.Footnote 68 Howard’s broader attitudes to Indigenous Australians saw negative developments in issues ranging from funding for Aboriginal organisations to women’s sacred sites, land rights and the abolition of ATSIC, the Indigenous advisory body established under the Labor government. Howard government legislation particularly targeted anything constructed as “special rights” for Indigenous peoples and favoured a neoliberal market rationality instead.Footnote 69 So-called special rights were depicted as socially divisive and undermining not just national unity but also equality, as equality was interpreted as treating all Australians the same.Footnote 70

All of these measures impacted on Indigenous women but there were also some particularly pernicious effects. One was the involvement of federal Liberal politicians, including Howard, in discrediting the attempt of some Ngarrindjeri women to prevent the construction of a bridge in South Australia on the grounds that the construction interfered with a sacred women’s Aboriginal site and beliefs—an argument that had been accepted under the Labor government but was dismissed by state and federal Liberals.Footnote 71 Government attitudes to the issue of the stolen generations of Aboriginal children taken from their families, often to be trained for menial service tasks, also impacted Indigenous women. Some Liberals, such as Judi Moylan acknowledged that the “separation of indigenous children, often by force from their mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters was a tragic period in our history”.Footnote 72 However, Howard refused to issue a formal government apology, arguing that current governments and Australians were not responsible, despite the fact that, as the then leader of the Opposition Kim Beazley pointed out, children were still being taken form their families in the 1970s when he and Howard were seeking public office.Footnote 73 Howard’s family values had clear limits when it came to Indigenous issues. However, those family values, along with a paternalistic form of protective masculinity, were also used to justify a militaristic “Intervention”, designed to protect Indigenous children from sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities, that was implemented without appropriate consultation. The measures often ended up disempowering Aboriginal women, despite claims that it would protect them, depicting them as inadequate mothers while demonising many Indigenous men.Footnote 74 It was a move that some also depicted as both neocolonial and neoliberal.Footnote 75

While Indigenous women faced some of the most obvious impacts of the Howard government, as we have seen the government had also reduced funding to, and disempowered, multicultural groups. Indeed, Howard had initially avoided using the term multiculturalism arguing that it was divisive and only later endorsed the term “Australian multiculturalism” which he claimed emphasised common values.Footnote 76 In short, Howard was loath to acknowledge the existence of disadvantaged groups with major implications for intersectional issues of gender inequality.

The government boasted that Australia had been performing well on UN gender indicators.Footnote 77 However, it failed to mention that many of the policies praised had been introduced by Labor, such as paid maternity leave for public servants (the Whitlam government) and the Sex Discrimination legislation (the Hawke government and opposed by many Liberals). In particular, the UN Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women had expressed its concern over the lack of adequate statistics available regarding women’s progress, the double disadvantage faced by Indigenous and migrant women, the treatment of female asylum seekers (including those facing domestic violence) and the government’s rejection of quotas for female representation on decision-making bodies.Footnote 78

Masculinity

The Howard government’s project to change the culture into an “enterprise culture” also involved encouraging forms of masculine self-reliance.Footnote 79 Women’s identity was constructed more as a matter of choice with Howard, as we have seen, also encouraging stay-at-home mums and housewifely identities. Consequently, other than occasional statements by more feminist ministers such as Judi Moylan, there were very few statements encouraging non-traditional forms of masculinity. Howard himself projected a form of grandfatherly protective masculinity, suggesting that he would protect women who embraced more traditional forms of femininity as well as protect women from domestic violence which was depicted, including by Moylan, as “unmanly”.Footnote 80 The fact that some men held discriminatory attitudes towards women and that their sense of masculine identity and self-esteem might be based upon gender power relations and conceptions of women’s subordination was not addressed. After all, women’s position in society was constructed more as an issue of choice, rather than an issue of gendered power relations. Nor was it acknowledged that some businesses might benefit from paying women less, rather than it simply being due to oversight or a lack of information. Howard rarely endorsed the terms “equality of men and women”, except when he was critiquing radical Islamist views on gender, or dismissing quotas for women in the Liberal Party by claiming that such quotas undermined merit and conceptions that all individuals were equal and had not been needed to increase the number of women in cabinet and parliament.Footnote 81 Consequently, under Howard there were none of the strong prime ministerial statements that we have seen from previous prime ministers, including Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, who recognised women were in an unequal position and sought to improve it.Footnote 82 Rather, Howard’s rhetoric all too often suggested that it was more traditional women, such as stay-at-home mums and housewives who had been disadvantaged by feminist policy agendas. Gender equality seems to have been understood at most in terms of involving obvious formal legal equality rather than a more nuanced and complex conception of gender inequality. Furthermore, Howard may have seen the need to shape other identities in order to build what he saw as a better future for Australians, however, when he came to women, it was more a matter of trying to hold back and protect Australians from social change, or, as he perceived it, government social engineering. In other words, Howard was shaping women’s identities in ways that facilitated socially conservative forms although Howard would not acknowledge that, for example, via the economic policy disincentives for women to go out to work or to increase their hours of work that were discussed earlier.

The government also had a history of supporting anti-feminist organisations that promoted “men’s rights”.Footnote 83 While major feminist groups had funding cut, the Howard government gave $50,000 for two years to the Lone Fathers Association—a group widely criticised by feminists.Footnote 84 (Although the Lone fathers Association rejected suggestions it was anti-women, examples provided by the Opposition suggested a long history of them opposing Family Court custody decisions and arguing that women’s issues were dominating the agenda.)Footnote 85 Howard also criticised previous government legislation he claimed was “against men”.Footnote 86 Fathers’ and men’s rights groups influenced the Howard government to change child custody laws to ensure more male access to children, a move which critics claim often overrode accusations of domestic violence.Footnote 87

Same-Sex Issues

The support for traditional gender roles and so-called family values, combined with heteronormativity and homophobia, also impacted upon same-sex couples.Footnote 88 Howard attempted to amend the Sex Discrimination Act to allow state governments to prevent lesbians and single heterosexual women from being able to have access to IVF (or donor sperm screened for health issues). He claimed he was not discriminating because: “This issue primarily involves the fundamental right of a child within our society to have the reasonable expectation, other things being equal, of the care and affection of both a mother and a father”.Footnote 89 (A journalist did draw attention to Howard’s potential double values given his claimed opposition to social engineering when it came to the issues of choice and the construction of the family.)Footnote 90 The amendment was drafted and sent to a Senate Committee but was not reintroduced after a subsequent election. Howard argued that while people should be able to “choose their own lifestyle” and not be discriminated against, heterosexual marriage was still “one of the bedrock institutions of society” that provided “stability”. Consequently, he did not think that “you should give the same status to homosexual liaisons as you give to marriage”.Footnote 91 Although he claimed that: “I certainly don’t practice any kind of discrimination against people on the grounds that they’re homosexual”.Footnote 92 However, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission identified 58 pieces of discriminatory legislation against same-sex couples, in areas ranging from superannuation, to moving expenses for public servants, immigration, medicare, independent youth allowance.Footnote 93 Yet, Howard blocked moderates within his own cabinet who wished to remove key forms of discrimination against same-sex couples. In Howard’s mind, same-sex discrimination seemed to be reduced to laws making (male) homosexuality illegal. Meanwhile, he used same-sex issues as a form of electoral “dog-whistle” politics, signalling his socially conservative support for more traditional gender and family structures without risking an electoral backlash by spelling out his views more explicitly.Footnote 94

Wages, Work and Industrial Relations

A number of the Howard government’s socially conservative gender agendas came together in the context of industrial relations policy, despite claims to the contrary. The government proudly proclaimed that women’s wages had risen faster under it than under Labor (albeit without mentioning that the Labor government had introduced wage restraint and offered government-funded social wage benefits in compensation).Footnote 95 The gender pay gap in relation to full-time average weekly earnings did reach a low point in 2004 under Howard, but then began to rise again.Footnote 96 Towards the end of the Liberals’ period in office, the Government Office for Women was also proudly pointing out that the percentage of women in paid work had grown by 5.5% to around 55.1% along with a nearly 3% decrease in female unemployment since the Keating years. However, it also noted that around 44% of women worked part-time but that women constituted just over 70% of part-time workers.Footnote 97 The high percentage of women in part-time work also potentially gives a very different picture of what was happening to women’s wages. Furthermore, Anne Summers pointed out that, despite social and historical change seeing more women enter the workforce internationally, the Australian women’s participation rate was lower than in comparable countries with the percentage of part-time work also higher. She suggested that such figures revealed the impact of government policy rewarding stay-at-home mums and mothers who worked part-time.Footnote 98 Although, former moderate Liberal Senator Judith Troeth argued that the government’s negative attitude towards working mothers had begun to soften as more younger male members with working wives entered parliament.Footnote 99 There was also some attempt to encourage women to work in non-traditional areas. For example, Julie Bishop, the Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Women’s Issues, promoted a publication designed to encourage more women to work in the mining industry and also hosted a symposium designed to encourage more young girls to work in the STEM field.Footnote 100

However, women’s wages and employment conditions were to come under new threat once the Howard government gained control of both Houses of Parliament in the 2004 election and could pass its desired industrial relations measures, the so-called WorkChoices legislation. Julie Bishop, claimed that: “Women have particularly benefited from workplace reform that has encouraged greater flexibility in working arrangements” which had contributed to women having “more choice and opportunity in pursuing personal and family goals”.Footnote 101 Her arguments were compatible with long-term arguments by John Howard that deregulating the labour market would contribute to greater flexibility for families.Footnote 102 In fact, however, the workplace reforms introduced under the Howard government were to prove particularly detrimental to low-paid women in predominantly female-dominated industries, who found themselves in an even weaker bargaining position than previously given that various workplace protections had been removed.Footnote 103 Interestingly, it was claimed that when WorkChoices was first discussed in 2004 and 2005 the three women in cabinet, Kay Patterson, then Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Status of Women, Amanda Vanstone the previous Minister and Helen Coonan had expressed concerns that it would be too harsh on vulnerable workers.Footnote 104

Indeed, a study at the time found that, rather than providing more flexibility for organising work-life balance, the opposite was more likely the case as a result of the industrial relations changes:

A significant area of impact lies in the hours of work and the difficulties women face in balancing work and family responsibilities. Few participants in the study were able to negotiate their start and finish times. Rather, many found themselves either working very long shifts without breaks or working short and unpredictable shifts (also affecting their income predictability). Single parents on parenting payment and subject to the new “Welfare to Work” rules (which require the undertaking of a minimum of 15 hours per week of paid work once the youngest child turns six) were particularly disadvantaged in their bargaining over hours. The fear of losing welfare support for failure to work 15 hours effectively removed any bargaining power these women had.

These women’s accounts suggest a hardening of their employers’ attitudes around accommodating work and family.Footnote 105

Consequently, John Howard soon saw himself facing a major trade union campaign at election time targeting the impact of his industrial relations policies on women.Footnote 106 A key advertisement depicted the distress of a mother who was facing the dilemma of unexpectedly having to go into work due to arbitrary roster changes, despite having no childcare arranged, or losing her job.Footnote 107

Commentators such as Judith Brett argued that Howard’s WorkChoices legislation revealed a significant contradiction between his social conservatism and neoliberalism by undermining protections involving “the regulation of time, and the capacity of working people to balance their work and family commitments”.Footnote 108 It was an argument that was also made by then Labor Opposition leader, Kevin Rudd, who argued that: “Neo-liberalism’s core philosophical dilemma is that it has no answer to the relentless march of market fundamentalism into the sanctum of the family itself”.Footnote 109 Or, as he put it even more explicitly:

….the white picket fence and all it stands for is supposed to be enhanced, not undermined by Hayek’s economic revolution. And, for a political party that trumpets family values, the impact of the quality and quantity of time that families have together as a direct consequence of Howard’s industrial relations revolution is now a matter of great personal and therefore political importance.Footnote 110

It was an attempt by Rudd to shift the socially conservative “family values” debate in a more left-wing direction. In addition, WorkChoices facilitated Labor advocating more traditional social democratic class agendas aimed at humanising capitalism and reducing exploitation of workers by bosses. That more traditional agenda undermined Howard’s mimicking of class politics in his arguments regarding the so-called elites who were allegedly ripping off ordinary mainstream Australian taxpayers by accessing government largesse. The political agenda shifted with the site of exploitation reverting to being the labour market rather than the state.Footnote 111

Conclusion

Howard’s political demise was therefore partly due to contradictions in his policy framing that undermined his attempts to integrate neoliberalism with social conservative attitudes to the family. It has been argued here that the integration of gender issues within that broader framing also had major implications for women both in terms of the impact of cut-backs to both general and women-specific services and in terms of an undermining of the women’s advisory machinery that had previously functioned under both Labor and Liberal governments. The focus on deregulation and free markets also had major implications for women when applied to industrial relations. Particular attention has been drawn to the Howard government’s emphasis on individual choice, with the position of women being framed as a matter of choice rather than being due to discrimination and structural disadvantage. The election of a Labor government was to see some positive developments in regard to the latter and it is to the next stage in this story that we will now progress.