Gender Equality and the Failure of Political Imagination: Lessons for Reframing in Uncertain Times

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Australian government policy but also provides relevant international examples. The Australian Albanese government is committed to making Australia a world leader in gender equality again. However, it is attempting to do so in very difficult and uncertain times in which the government faces major social, economic, technological and climate change challenges. Furthermore, there is a backlash internationally in which gender issues are being mobilised to support authoritarian and radical right agendas. Meanwhile, culture war perspectives are impacting on Indigenous women’s rights. This chapter will explore some of the dilemmas that this and future Australian governments and governments internationally will face, from artificial intelligence to climate change. It will argue that gender equality policy has all too often been shaped by pre-existing policy frameworks designed to address other issues. Consequently, governments need to reassess and reimagine the policy frameworks they are using and this is even more important given the current and future challenges they face. At the same time, Australia, as a multicultural, settler-colonial society situated in the Asia–Pacific has some potentially interesting insights and lessons to offer, if Australian governments can seize the opportunity.

As this book has demonstrated, the Australian Albanese government is committed to furthering gender equality policy, albeit in a reforming rather than radical way. However, it is attempting to do so in very difficult and uncertain times in which the government faces major social, economic, technological and climate change challenges. Furthermore, while Labor aims to develop world leading policies, there is a backlash internationally in which gender issues are being mobilised to support authoritarian and radical right agendas.This chapter will explore some of the dilemmas that this and future governments will face, while arguing for a need for governments to reassess and reimagine the policy frameworks they are using.

Gender Equality in a Time of Backlash

In June 2023, Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong gave a stark warning to the National Labor Women’s Conference. She began by reminding attendees of the key role that an Australian delegation advisor, feminist Jessie Street, had played in the 1940s in ensuring that Article 1 of the UN Charter recognised equality of the sexes and in introducing stipulations that the UN itself should not practise sexual discrimination. Wong noted that Street also played a key role in establishing the UN Commission on the Status of women and became its first Vice President.¹ Street was particularly progressive given that the then Australian Labor government privileged male-wage earners.² Nonetheless, once again, Australian feminism had played an important role in furthering gender equality internationally, as this book has argued it has done in other historical periods in areas ranging from women’s right to vote and stand for parliament to the appointment of women’s advisors and the pioneering of gender responsive budgeting. However, Wong warned that “the norms” that Jessie Street “helped establish are being eroded” since “there is a growing and sophisticated global campaign” questioning gender equality.

…in the last five years, progress on gender equality has been imperilled…We see gender becoming a Trojan Horse for those pursuing geopolitical ends. Countries like Russia and Iran, supported by conspiracy theorists and right wing extremists, manipulating attitudes on gender, questioning agreed international rules and norms of established so many years ago. This campaign dismisses the women who speak out for equality as ‘agents of Western influence'.³

Wong dismissed such accusations of “western influence”, pointing out that Street had worked closely with feminist activists from the global South all those years ago, including Bertha Lutz from Brazil and Minerva Bernardino from the Dominican Republic. Wong also cited recent examples of non-western activists and leaders from varied regions of the world who were strong supporters of gender equality. Nonetheless, Wong noted that: “Our diplomats report backlash on gender equality across the multilateral system. They report a rollback of women’s human rights and long-standing norms under attack”. Wong went on to list UN outcomes that had been blocked because of opposition to “long established propositions on gender equality” as well as “reports of well-resourced campaigns that amplify difference on gender equality to wedge, divide, and exclude”.⁴ Those campaigns included increased “disinformation about sexual and reproductive health”, including attacks on sexual health clinics in countries that hadn’t previously experienced them.⁵ As pointed out in the last chapter, Wong has moved to make support for gender equality an important part of Australian foreign and aid policy.

The Report of the Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce, established by the Albanese government, also noted a backlash:

In recent years there has been significant backlash against women’s rights…. This backlash is highly visible online. All over the world, women in politics and journalism experience relentless volumes of online abuse, threats and gendered disinformation campaigns on social media. This type of backlash can be due to the vested interest in upholding discriminatory attitudes and behaviours that maintain inequalities in access to resources and power.⁶

The previous chapter also noted the influence of misogynistic, anti-feminist social media on a significant percentage of Australian teenage boys as some boys respond negatively to uncertainties over, and challenges to, more traditional gender identities and privileges.

Such warnings concern backlash against equality between men and women. However, as we have seen, attacks on so-called anti-gender ideology have also attempted to fix meanings of what it means to be a true “man” or a “woman” in ways that have targeted transgender people in particular and also the broader LGBTIQ+ community. Such attacks do reflect a fear of gender, as Judith Butler points out.⁷ They also involve a failure to acknowledge that gender and sexual identity involve the complex interaction of social constructions and biology, so the category “woman” cannot be reduced to “biology” alone.⁸ Although, David Paternotte makes the point that international anti-gender campaigns shouldn’t just be constructed as a backlash attempt to retain or reintroduce a more traditional status quo. They also often involve an attempt to create new social and political formations.

…. the assaults on women’s or LGBTI rights take part into a wider project, which strives to establish a new political – less liberal and less democratic – order. In other words, these attacks do not only or mainly aim to destroy or dismantle progressive laws and policies in the fields of gender and sexuality, but also ambition to build something new.⁹

Paternotte’s analysis alerts us to the ways that critiques of “gender” are often mobilised internationally to fuel authoritarian and autocratic attacks on the norms of liberal democracy. Similarly, Wendy Brown has written about the Nihilism, Fatalism and Ressentiment felt by a key population of white men impacted by neoliberalism and mobilised by the radical right.¹⁰ It is a development that has helped to drive Trumpism in the US.¹¹

Fortunately, Australia has not yet seen the major developments occurring in countries ranging from Orbán’s Hungary to Milei’s Argentina and the Trump-influenced US. Both major Australian political parties still state their support for gender equality policies, albeit with somewhat different views on how to achieve it. Nonetheless, past Liberal government attempts to mobilise US-style anti-gender politics on transgender issues in particular were discussed in Chapter 6. There are also some concerning connections between Hungarian government-funded organisations, Australian News Corp journalists and some former Liberal politicians.¹² More recently, a number of former or current socially conservative Liberal politicians attended the international inaugural Alliance for Responsible Citizenship associated with the Canadian socially conservative campaigner on gender issues, Jordan Peterson.¹³ Meanwhile, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who played a key role in the campaign against the Indigenous Voice, has stated that she intends to take up transgender issues as a major focus, arguing that transgender rights arguments impinge upon women’s rights and non-western women’s rights in particular.¹⁴ As pointed out in the last chapter, it is unclear how long the Albanese government will be able to sidestep transgender and gender fluidity issues and its attempts to do so can reflect a lack of positive support for transgender Australians. One cannot rule out that future political developments could have implications for how gender equality is conceived in Australia, whether it is confined to those deemed “biological” men and women; whether it is open to broader forms of gender diversity and identification; or whether there is a backlash against gender equality itself.

When Minister for Women, Katy Gallagher, launched the new Australian national strategy for gender equality, she mentioned that “as my friend Penny Wong likes to remind me sometimes – change doesn’t come easily”. Gallagher also acknowledged that: “Addressing gender inequality is not the work of a single minister or a single government. It is whole of government work over decades…. But I also know that progress isn’t inevitable and isn’t linear. It can easily be wound back”.¹⁵

Significantly, the challenge to progress also impacted Indigenous women facing intersectional racial issues in a settler-colonial society. The defeat of the Indigenous Voice referendum ruled out a constitutionally enshrined voice to parliament and the executive. While the final model of the Voice had not been formally finalised prior to the Referendum being held, it had long been proposed to have equal gender representation, as well as two co-chairs of different gender (and this was also the model legislated for by the South Australian state government in its Indigenous Voice).¹⁶ There had also been a recognition that the Voice would need to represent forms of traditional Indigenous gender diversity and LGBTIQ+ Indigenous Australians.¹⁷ As pointed out in Chapter 3, women had played an important role in Indigenous society and had major cultural responsibilities. Indeed, white settler colonial institutions had disempowered them politically, including in areas that had traditionally been clearly defined as “women’s business”. Nonetheless, there had been a long history of Indigenous women leaders playing a key role in the struggle for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights. Australian settler colonial society, and the former British and European colonial powers, could therefore have learned some useful lessons from Indigenous society and the proposed gender structures of the Voice. The model of a required, inbuilt equal gender representation used in the Voice would have been internationally innovative, including compared with Canada’s Indigenous Advisory Committee, the Nordic Sámi Parliaments and Taiwan’s Council of Indigenous Peoples.¹⁸ However, the defeat of the Constitutional Referendum meant that was not to be and instead what was learned was a sad lesson about the difficulties of countering right-wing populism and ensuring intersectional women’s rights in a settler colonial society.¹⁹

In tracing the work of government gender equality policy in Australia over decades, this book has also found many examples of policy being turned back. The result has been a repeated need to reinvent the wheel, with previous advances sometimes forgotten in the process. Gallagher’s own mistaken claims, mentioned in the previous chapter, that the Albanese government’s national gender strategy was the first is such an example. In particular, gender equality policy has often been constrained by economic policy and it is to that issue that the discussion will now turn.

Economic Constraints on Gender Equality Policy

Economic policy framing has played a particularly important, and often problematic, role in the development of Australia’s gender equality framing. Internationally innovative policies, initiated during the Whitlam years, faced a very rocky rather than linear progression. As pointed out in Chapter 2, already by the end of the Whitlam period (1972–1975), the Keynesian economics that had helped justify the expansion of public sector services for women was under threat and services for women were some of the first to face cuts. That threat worsened during the Fraser Coalition government period (1975–1983), despite the efforts of socially progressive Liberal feminists to retain some of the impetus from the Whitlam years. However, neoliberal ideology was also increasingly influencing Australian Labor (and Australian Labor in turn later influenced Tony Blair in Britain). In Chapter 3, it was explained how the Hawke and Keating governments’ (1983–1996) attempts to meld a watered down form of neoliberalism with social democracy had negative impacts on women despite arguments that women’s equality benefited the economy and some positive gender equality reforms also being introduced. Chapter 4 explains how the advent of the socially conservative, more explicitly neoliberal Howard government (1996–2007) had an even more detrimental impact on women, not least because of the government’s negative attitude towards feminist advocacy groups. Consequently, advances made during the Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Keating years were stymied and/or went backwards under Howard.

Chapter 5 describes the efforts made during the Rudd and Gillard years (2007–2013) to undo some of the worst harms of the Howard period and continue a trajectory of gender equality policy reform. The attempts by the Rudd/Gillard governments (2007–2013) to try to improve the low pay of female-dominated industries were influenced by traditional social democratic concerns. Nonetheless, Labor did not adequately address gender biases in Keynesian-influenced economic stimulus policies. The government had also inherited some lingering neoliberal legacies from the Hawke and Keating years that impacted on policy in areas ranging from industrial relations to welfare benefits. Meanwhile as Chapter 6 explains the advent of the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison governments (2013–2022) saw the return of a more neoliberal-influenced Coalition government once again. Although, despite the influence of social conservatism under Abbott and Morrison, the governments were less overtly hostile to feminist arguments than during the Howard years. They embraced a limited, market-friendly form of gender equality policy. However, that over-reliance on the market contributed to some significantly gender-blind policy settings, including in response to the COVID- 19 pandemic.

Consequently, through all of these periods gendered economic ideology influenced perceptions of how to conceive of, and deal with, actual economic conditions and uncertainties in the global economy with major implications for gender equality policy framing. The current period is no exception. As Chapter 7 explains, the Albanese government (2022–) is addressing some neoliberal legacies, including in regard to single parents benefits and industrial relations. It has welcomed and facilitated progressive feminist policy input in a way that the Morrison government, for example, did not. Nonetheless, some neoliberal influences still remain in regard to issues such as tax cuts and reducing deficits—not least because neoliberal critiques of government debt and increased taxes have been successfully mobilised to defeat Labor electorally in the past (e.g. in the 2013 and 2019 elections).²⁰

Yet Australian social democratic governments have long faced funding issues due to the impact on revenue of relatively low tax rates.²¹ Despite COVID-19 stimulus packages, the level of Australian government debt is still relatively low internationally and also historically.²² Indeed the Treasurer and Finance Minister (whom, one should remember, is also Minister for Women) boasted that “Australia had the second strongest budget balance as a share of GDP among G20 countries last year”, including bringing in a budget surplus.²³ It is therefore debatable just how much the government has to constrain debt and how it prioritises the expenditure and tax decision choices it does make (e.g. in regard to substantial defence budgets, fossil fuel subsidies, private schools or superannuation tax concessions amongst other issues).²⁴ Indeed, Tanya Kovac and Maree Overall have claimed that: “At a Federal level, only 3.2 per cent of total service output and asset expenditure is targeted to women”, although the government would no doubt dispute this figure, including suggesting it doesn’t adequately reflect the mainstreaming of gender equality measures within broader budget measures.²⁵ Furthermore, despite neoliberalism problematising government budget deficits, some international research suggests that neoliberalism has actually contributed to higher government debt via monetary policy and government subsidisation of the private sector, while neoliberal austerity policies targeting welfare measures have had detrimental impacts on economic growth and therefore revenue.²⁶

However, as we have seen in the last chapter, the government has constrained or delayed full implementation of a number of measures for women, including paid parental leave. The Australian government has also been left trying to manage the marketisation of services, from childcare to aged care that has resulted from decades of neoliberalism, often ending up subsidising private sector providers for wage increases in female-dominated caring jobs as a result. Given budget implications, the government has attempted to delay phasing in full wage increases for aged care workers on two occasions.²⁷ In short, a sometimes pernicious form of path dependency is at work as past economic policy framings are still influencing government policy.

Additional Policy Omissions and Future Challenges from Artificial Intelligence to Climate Change

Indeed, the past is still present in other ways. Governments are often still addressing issues identified by the Whitlam government over fifty years ago (see Chapter 2) from low wages in female-dominated jobs, to the need for women’s services in areas ranging from domestic violence to health to the importance of affordable childcare. Yet cost constraints mean that, for example, Whitlam-era demands regarding free contraception and childcare have still not been achieved in Australia. Parts of Canada may offer free contraception, but not Australia, despite ongoing feminist demands.²⁸ Nor is there yet free 24-hour childcare (other than a partial exception to keep workers in place during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic). Yet countries such as Belgium, Denmark, Lithuania, Norway and Slovenia offer some free childcare for children under three, although most countries fail to cover full-time women’s work never mind longer hours.²⁹ It is not just paid childcare that is an issue. Paid parental leave is still tightly tied to workforce participation, with some men who want to play more of a role in parenting dismayed to discover that the Albanese government’s new paid parental leave scheme only covers fathers whose partners have returned to paid work. In other words it doesn’t pay them to stay home to co-share parental labour with a partner who isn’t currently in waged work.³⁰ It is no coincidence that the Albanese’s national gender strategy is entitled Working for Women.

There have also been some notable omissions in recent Australian government policy when it comes to addressing future challenges. For example, it is strange that the party that boasted to have introduced the world’s first policy on women and information technology during the Keating years (see Chapter 3) should have failed to include a gender lens in its initial interim response to issues of Artificial intelligence. This is despite the well-known gender inequalities in the area that could undermine existing progress on gender equality, ranging from gender biases in, for example, financial, health, justice and welfare algorithms to the predicted greater impact of AI on current women’s jobs and women’s underrepresentation in the new industries arising around artificial intelligence.³¹ An International Labour Organisation report has found that: “Concentrated job losses in female-dominated occupations could threaten advances made in the past decades in increasing women’s labour market participation”.³² By contrast to Australian Labor’s approach, the European Union has committed to “leveraging AI to advance gender equality”, including “by recognising the pervasiveness of gender biases”, and has introduced legislation accordingly.³³ The government’s gender equality strategy, Working for Women, only has one mention of artificial intelligence, in the context of countering gender-based violence, where the government has recognised the prevalence of technology-based abuse and sexual violence and funded programmes accordingly.³⁴ Neither Working for Women nor, indeed, a key report from the e-safety commissioner’s office, include detailed discussion of the role that artificial intelligence, including deepfake technology, is increasingly playing in not only sexual abuse but the widespread online denigration of women.³⁵ However, Working for Women does list technology amongst a general range of areas where women need to be involved in decision-making in order to ensure their needs are met.³⁶ Yet, there has been resistance to calls for an independent expert body to assess algorithms used in government decision-making, that could be tasked with gender oversight as well.³⁷ Nonetheless, the government has also promised that it will provide new women in STEM initiatives following recommendations of an independent Review of how to increase diversity in STEM and an Evaluation of the previous government’s programmes.³⁸ The government has also funded a digital literacy programme for women from migrant and refugee backgrounds (that is, women who have been officially accepted as refugees, since Australian Labor still supports harsh policies of mandatory offshore detention for asylum seekers arriving by boat).³⁹ Australia is well positioned geographically to learn from Asian models, such as Singapore’s and India’s, given that they have higher participation of women in STEM than most western countries, as well as from elsewhere in the world.⁴⁰ However, it should be noted that Labor governments have a long history of being over-optimistic about the positive impacts of technology and of underestimating the downsides.⁴¹

An OECD report has also suggested that it will be crucial to develop policies that help to diversify women’s employment in the digital and green sectors of the social economy, which includes many caring and community-focused jobs. Yet, climate change is another strange omission. Susan Rimmer complained that in the government’s major Working for Women strategy:

Literally the last page of the report notes that given the unequal impact of crises such as climate change and natural disasters on women, diverse leadership and representation are important. But the strategy doesn’t see climate adaptation as the game-changer that it is, with most current climate adaptation measures in energy, transport, disaster management, finance, climate services and technology fuelling gender inequality outcomes.⁴²

The detrimental impacts of climate change on women are well recognised internationally and the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that the European Convention on Human Rights covers protection from the effects of climate change.⁴³ Australian feminists have also expressed major concerns. For example, in a post for feminist organisation the Victorian Women’s Trust, Fang Zhao has highlighted research showing that Australia’s increasing bushfires have a disproportionate impact on women, both exacerbating existing gender inequality and cases of domestic abuse. Climate-related changes are also exacerbating health issues that disproportionately impact women. Meanwhile, women are also underrepresented in the clean energy sector in Australia and in developing climate change policy.⁴⁴ Indeed, journalist Toni Hassan has noted that: “Astonishingly, the National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework, the Australian Emergency Management Arrangements and the Australian Government Crisis Management Framework – so many frameworks and plans, all recent – are all silent on gender. It is still largely men who decide how a community mitigates and responds to disasters”.⁴⁵

The government aims to facilitate Australia becoming a “renewable energy superpower”.⁴⁶ However, so far there has been little discussion of how gender equality policy would fit into the new, green industry policies, despite Australia having signed up to an international agreement that seeks to commit to gender equity in the green energy sector.⁴⁷ Hopefully, additional relevant gender equality measures, including workforce, skills and procurement policies, will be developed in due course, although it is also clear that a significant part of the government’s agenda is to find new jobs for the (predominantly male and electorally significant) workforce in the old energy sector, including groups such as coal miners.⁴⁸

The Challenges of Transforming a Capitalist Economy

Turning Australia into a renewable energy superpower is part of the government’s ambitious plans to develop Australian industry, including addressing issues of sovereign capability that became very apparent during pandemic-induced supply chain issues. Australia will face major challenges in doing so given competition from Chinese, US and EU efforts to develop their own renewable energy industries as well as to develop manufacturing industry more broadly. The challenges will be even greater because, as we have seen in Chapter 5, Australia’s economy has long been buffeted by the rise of Asia and China in particular. Indeed, as pointed out there, the very aspects that have benefited Australia, such as the sale of mineral resources to China, have also sometimes distorted the Australian economy and impacted negatively on other industries, with implications for women’s employment and the gender pay gap. Now Australia risks being caught in the economic jousting between one of our largest trading partners (China) and one of our closest allies (the US), with China showing it is more than willing to penalise Australian trade when the relationship becomes too tense and with security issues massively increasing Australia’s defence budget.

Nonetheless, the Albanese government’s belief that the neoliberal “‘Washington Consensus’ has fractured”, along with the influence of alternative economists such as Mariana Mazzucato, does provide opportunities for more interventionist industry policies that could also be designed to assist gender equality.⁴⁹ Treasurer Jim Chalmers has emphasised building a capitalist economy with “equality and equal opportunity at the centre”.⁵⁰ This is compatible with Labor’s long-term agenda to reform and humanise capitalism rather than to incrementally replace it as some social democrats in the historical past aimed to do.⁵¹ However, the government will also face gendered dimensions of social democracy’s longest term challenge, namely how to reform capitalism in ways that substantially improves workers’ pay and working conditions without antagonising business by impacting levels of profitability.⁵² Governments of any persuasion are constrained by economic factors and by the political factors associated with them, for example by cost-of-living issues, economic downturns and/or the fear of them and the consequences for employment. This is especially the case since business occupies a privileged position in a capitalist economy, given that private sector investment, or the projected threat of reducing it/sending it offshore in response to government decisions that business opposes, can impact on employment levels and citizens’ standard of living. However, it should be noted that historically capitalist interests were sometimes subordinated to patriarchal ones in the contest between male-dominated unions and male-dominated employers. For example, the male wage-earner model, whereby one male wage worker was paid sufficient to support his wife and children, interfered with earlier capitalist models in which the whole family, men, women and children had to sell their labour to earn sufficient money to support the family.⁵³ Labor will therefore face ongoing challenges in subordinating capitalist interests to those of gender equality in situations where paying higher wages to women workers might reduce profits and especially where government subsidies are not available to soften the blow. However, Labor does not always adequately recognise or address such potential conflicts, given that it has long framed relationships between labour and capital in terms of “social harmony ideology”, a belief that workers and business may compete but also share common interests in a healthily functioning capitalist economy that can offer both reasonable returns for business and employment for workers.⁵⁴

Yet, it is important to recognise that the history of economic gender equality in Australia outlined in this book has also partly been an account of the interactions between a capitalist economy and, for want of a better term, a patriarchal one, with major implications for gender. The debates about how to recognise and reimburse caring labour partly are taking place in the context of a (male-defined) industrial capitalism’s separation of the public workplace and the private domestic sphere as, for example, factories and offices replaced agrarian production and paid work became increasingly time-demanding. It is a division that is being to some extent reworked now, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and with technology providing increased possibilities of working from home, although gendered domestic responsibilities have reasserted themselves.⁵⁵ However, work/life balance remains a major issue.

Both Australian parties of government, Labor and the Liberal, were shaped by the need to manage currently existing capitalism (the issue of how to manage other forms of gendered economies, including ones claiming to be socialist, is beyond the scope of this book). Labor’s social democracy has potentially been at its best when dealing with issues such as women’s wages and the provision of government services, given they were related to previous social democratic agendas. However, as outlined in this book, a political movement that originally centred around managing capitalism, the public sphere and economic class relations has at times struggled to deal with the broader ramifications of gender inequality. Meanwhile, Chapter 6 revealed the limits that the Coalition’s greater reliance on the market placed on gender equality policy. Importantly, both Labor and the Coalition parties have failed to adequately reimagine the economy.

Re-Imagining the Economic

One can only fantasise about what our current economies might have looked like if male capital and male labour had not created a male wage-earner, head of family, form of capitalism and if nineteenth-century utopian feminists, discussed in Chapter 2, had managed to have more influence on the form that modern economies took. Nor should it be forgotten that, as early accounts by commentators such as Frederick Engels  imply, male labour’s response was partly due to the need to rebuild a form of masculine identity and self-esteem that had been emasculated by women being predominantly employed in early factory production, for example, in the cotton industry.⁵⁶ Similarly, social democracy itself has historically played a key role in constructing forms of masculine and feminine identity that have oppressed women.⁵⁷ Governments have either failed to address the issue that current forms of capitalism contain gender biases (historically constructed by both male members of the capitalist class and working class) or, as in the case of some social democratic governments, have belatedly attempted to play catch-up by simply adding women to existing economic programmes. Either way, the economy has not been radically reimagined in terms of what it might look like if gender equality was really privileged. Measures such as partially recognising and valuing women’s work in the care economy, as the Albanese government has done, are significant but far from sufficient. Indeed, some feminist research has problematised the concept of care, pointing out both its possibilities and limitations in challenging gendered power relations and developing better policies and communities.⁵⁸

Nonetheless, what if the impact on caring work of economic decisions really was fully taken into account? What if funding services that benefited women were privileged more over controlling deficits and government debt? What if governments that have been all too ready to fund private sector provision of services under neoliberalism were prepared to fund more not-for-profit community and community provision of services? What if the type of collective provision envisaged by 1970s feminists and discussed in Chapter 2 had more impact? What if the economic case for gender equality was actually taken seriously enough to justify significant intervention and regulation rather than being all too often used to justify leaving matters to the market? In short, what if, to return to the question raised by a femocrat at a Whitlam-era meeting discussed in Chapter 2, the economy really was meant to serve society rather than the other way round?

There were some faint hints that the government might be partially considering a reimagining of the economy when Treasurer Jim Chalmers stated that:

One of the reasons I’m attracted to some kind of broader measures of economic and social progress is to do a better job tracking gender inequality in our society. There’s no reason why a wellbeing approach to the budget can’t sit alongside traditional economic data and give us a better and more complete picture of how women are faring and the impact of government policy decisions.⁵⁹

However, the government’s well-being framework only made passing reference to issues ranging from higher levels of psychological distress amongst Indigenous women to women having less free time than men, negative experiences online and being more afraid of walking alone at night, as well as family violence and higher levels of abuse, in addition to more directly economic issues such as the gender pay gap.⁶⁰ It clearly wasn’t a major rethink of well-being that fundamentally challenged existing, highly gendered, economic structures, never mind the broader issues about masculinity and femininity that will be raised later in this chapter. Nor has the government actually addressed some fairly basic questions about the frameworks being used, that could usefully be raised when policies are under consideration. These include the following:

• Is gender equality policy conceived in its own terms or in ways that were originally conceived for addressing other forms of inequality, for example class equality? If the latter, are there any detrimental impacts?

• What priority is given to issues of gender equality? For example, what priority is given to gender equality policies in relation to the market? Are issues of gender equality prioritised (when justified) over issues of private sector profitability or reducing government debt or subordinated to them? Is expenditure on other areas being unjustifiably prioritised over gender issues?

• Is the economy being conceived too narrowly, for example, is the impact of policies on (predominantly) women’s caring, emotional and domestic labour in the home being adequately taken into account?

• What forms of citizen identity are being encouraged by particular policies and are those identities intentionally or unintentionally gendered?

• Are collective solutions being considered or primarily individual, marketised ones?

• Is equality being measured against a male-defined norm or one driven by feminist perspectives?

• What priority is given to issues of gender equality in shaping the future economy?

Such questions go to the heart of a broader issue—have government policy frameworks been totally transformed to address gender equality issues or have gender equality issues mainly been incorporated into/added on to existing policy frameworks?

Of course such questions are not new. Some of them, such as how the economy could be reconceived to recognise female unpaid labour and emotional labour, have been raised for decades.⁶¹ They also raise related longstanding issues regarding political will as well as how much one supports the primacy of politics over economics.⁶² Nonetheless, such questions could usefully be built into a gender responsive budgeting process, and gender evaluations of policies more broadly, especially since the previous chapters have argued that gender equality is far too often subordinated to other priorities, concerns and frameworks. In other words, while all governments are constrained by the need to manage an economy in ways that benefit their citizens’ standards of living and quality of life, there is considerable debate about how best to do that and about the extent of the constraints.

Given all the questions raised above, one also wonders how fully effective Australian gender responsive budgeting has been despite the many positive budget measures for women mentioned in the last chapter. It is somewhat concerning that Minister for Women, Katy Gallagher stated in February 2024 that she hadn’t yet received a policy submission that cited negative consequences for women and that there wasn’t a clear process for such policies being sent back and reworked if it did occur. The gender impact analysis is also not public, despite it being so in some other countries.⁶³ For example, as the Women’s Economic Equality taskforce report noted:

In Spain, the legislative framework requires the government to submit a Gender Impact Report of draft provisions to the Council of Ministers. This has ensured an enduring requirement despite changes due to political cycles. Through an interactive website, Spanish citizens can access data from the Gender Impact Report, increasing transparency and public accessibility to gender budgeting information.⁶⁴

Australian feminists have also previously suggested that a government funded but independent women’s budget group could assist with monitoring and evaluating the gender responsive budgeting process.⁶⁵ The introduction of such measures would contribute to establishing the broader forms of Feminist Democratic Representation envisaged by Karen Celis and Sarah Childs.

In this imagined feminist future, we look forward to a politics in which diverse women participate and contribute to the conversations of civil society, and with women participating in and represented in and by a formal politics that reciprocally seeks out their participation and representation. Learning among women, and between women and the politicians who ultimately make political decisions, is maximized…. Our elected representatives would be institutionally and systemically required to represent women. This role is designed into the political institutions of our representative democracy. This future is one we call Feminist Democratic Representation.⁶⁶

However, such representation would involve not only reimagining economics but also the nature of politics itself.

Reimagining the Political: The Politics of Gender Identity

Many years ago when giving an Australasian Political Studies Association Presidential Address, Carole Pateman made the point that politics did not stop at the garden gate.⁶⁷ “The personal is political” was a key slogan of the early women’s liberation movement as explained in Chapter 2 and feminist scholars such as Pateman have also long argued for a broader conception of the political. Prime Minister Whitlam was correct when he argued, as noted in Chapter 2, that there were limits to how much government could do in bringing about the broader cultural change necessary to liberate women. However, what neither Whitlam in his early 1970s statements regarding the need to change attitudes regarding women nor more recent attempts, discussed in the previous chapter, to encourage “healthy masculinity” fully acknowledge is that parliament itself is a key site for the production of conservative forms of masculinity. Indeed, it has been for centuries internationally as the historical exclusion of women reveals. Although obviously there have been enormous advances, compared for example when women couldn’t even observe the British Houses of Parliament at work and Flora Tristan had to be smuggled in, inadequately disguised in male Turkish clothes, to witness appalling male behaviour.⁶⁸ Changing the culture could begin for politicians in their parliamentary home. The Australian government has supported measures designed to change parliamentary culture and prevent some of the most toxic parliamentary behaviour towards women, that has been exhibited by men in a range of parties.⁶⁹ However, the fact remains that gender identity still plays a crucial role in Australian politics as it does elsewhere internationally.⁷⁰ Most recently, we have seen that in the efforts by Opposition leader Peter Dutton, discussed in the previous chapter, to project a strongman politics, while deriding Albanese as weak and soft. The increasingly difficult security situation, as tensions rise between one of Australia’s largest trading partners (China) and one of its closest allies (the US), can also favour strongman politics.

Meanwhile, although the role of women politicians is now more broadly accepted and they are arguably now able to display a wider range of forms of femininity than in earlier years, they still have to walk the tightrope of gender expectations. Australia’s first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, particularly encountered this problem. Her attempts to call out sexism and change the culture were praised by many but also resulted in a backlash by conservative forces. Gillard became a “feminist killjoy” to use Sara Ahmed’s concept and has continued to pursue issue of gender equality.⁷¹ But what if the politics of identity really was taken seriously, not just in right-wing culture wars but by progressives wishing to challenge conceptions of masculinity and femininity? What if discussions of changing toxic forms of masculinity went beyond issues of domestic violence or occasional comments regarding the need for men to undertake more caring responsibilities to have a much broader discussion regarding alternative, kinder, gentler, more caring forms of masculinity in which masculine self-esteem, and heterosexual constructions of eroticism, did not require forms of female subordination as they sometimes still do in more conventional constructions of masculinity? The role of emotion should not be discounted here as the politics of identity involves not only whom one is encouraged to feel empathy, fear or ressentiment about but also people’s own feelings of self-esteem.⁷² Of course, such cultural change will involve the need for broader, extra parliamentary campaigns by women as well, just as the women’s movement acknowledged in Whitlam’s day.⁷³

As this book has revealed, prime ministers from Scott Morrison to Anthony Albanese have argued that men have nothing to lose from women's equality. Such views fit into Labor’s “social harmony” ideology and the Liberal’s market one. But some men do have things to lose and it isn’t just that they may face additional competition from women for jobs or for promotion. Those men whose masculinity is dependent upon women being in a subordinate position, who feel emasculated by women potentially being superior to them have something to lose. For those men whose masculine self-identity and self-esteem depends on seeing themselves in a macho job, it is potentially threatening to have women in the same trade and doing the same work. Conversely, for some men, the thought of being in one of the caring professions such as nursing or aged care would emasculate them. After all, there is a reason why women are overrepresented in some caring economy jobs—namely that it is compatible with a conception of femininity but not necessarily with some conceptions of masculinity. Yet politicians have not been good at dealing with the politics of identity around masculinity. Politicians frequently deal with how masculinity needs to be changed in regard to domestic violence for example. However, dealing with the broader issues of masculinity is often just too hard for them, both potentially electorally in terms of alienating a section of the voters but also because they cannot get their own (parliament) house in order, as the accounts of numerous female politicians mistreated by male colleagues, including in recent times, have revealed.⁷⁴ Of course, it is also an issue for some women in terms of their construction of femininity as the creation of groups like Women who Want to be Women, discussed in Chapter 4 showed. So, one of the things that politicians have been bad at dealing with is the politics of identity. They can deal with a (traditionally male-defined) politics of identity when it involves the Liberal Party encouraging the construction of a neoliberal entrepreneurial citizen and Labor was founded upon a (masculine) conception of working-class solidaristic identity (although it has been challenged by decades of neoliberalism). However, transforming the politics of identity, of masculinity and femininity, has all too often proved to be beyond the scope of conventional politics.

Note that the issue here is not so much abolishing masculine and feminine gender identity as reformulating it. Indeed, the analysis in this book suggests the importance of keeping the category “woman”, given it has proved crucial for analysing gender blindness and biases in policies. This book endorses arguments that retaining the category “woman” is quite compatible with supporting transgender rights, not least so transgender women can identify with the category.⁷⁵ Additional transgender inclusive and gender fluid language should be used as well when needed. It is also not assumed that the construction of gender identity inevitably requires one binary form of identity (masculinity) to be dominant and the other (femininity) to be subordinate or that it rules out gender fluidity and non-binary identities.⁷⁶ Rather, it becomes possible to reimagine different forms of masculinity and femininity along with gender fluidity and non-binary identities. For example, is it possible to develop forms of protective masculinity that not only do not subordinate women but actually empower them?⁷⁷ After all, theorists of masculinity from Connell onwards have raised the possibility of transforming masculinity into forms that do not oppress women.⁷⁸ What would it take for politicians to not use performances of traditional masculinity to belittle their male and female opponents or for sectors of voters not to reward them for doing so? In short, it is all very well for politicians to advocate cultural change, including men sharing domestic responsibilities and respecting women, but all too often parliamentary culture itself has undercut such worthy statements and reinforced undesirable and traditional forms of masculinity in the broader community.

Such issues are central to gender equality but it is also necessary to realise the limitations of equality frameworks themselves.

The Limits of (Intersectional) Equality

This book has focused on issues of gender equality for women while recognising that gender identity, and the forms of equality related to it, can take diverse forms. However, as this book has suggested at various times, the conception of equality is itself problematic. Some poststructuralist and queer frameworks have suggested that equality demands can encourage oppressive forms of normalisation. For example, it is suggested that arguing for same-sex marriage equality can end up excluding those in non-marriage-like relationships.⁷⁹ This book does not endorse arguments that privilege avoiding normalisation over addressing inequality. However, it is important to transform existing social norms around issues such as masculinity, femininity, labour, work, care, health, welfare and parliamentary behaviour, rather than reproducing them in ways that measure women’s equality by male-defined norms. For example, Chapters 2, 5 And 7 have described how women’s pay in undervalued female-dominated jobs was held back for five decades by the privileging of male job norms and the higher pay associated with them.

There is also a related need to contest conceptions that construct equality as treating all social groups the same regardless of the specific circumstances or disadvantages they face.⁸⁰ Significantly, the Indigenous Voice that would have so benefited Indigenous Women’s representation was defeated partly by mobilising equal/same treatment arguments against it. Both Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and conservative Indigenous Coalition Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price argued that the Voice would institute racial inequality by giving one race special rights denied to others.⁸¹ (Admittedly, Price also contentiously argued that it wouldn’t effectively address practical women’s issues such as domestic violence in Indigenous communities.)⁸² Yet same treatment can reinforce, rather than challenge, existing norms and social power relations by ignoring patterns of disadvantage and the different needs associated with them. Same treatment can also ignore not only different needs but also different insights. For example, work on Indigenous women’s conceptions of care have not only highlighted that Indigenous women have an even higher level of care responsibilities but have also highlighted that many conceive of care work differently. This includes having broader conceptions that allow for care not only of people but also of animals, plants and country that are so important for the environment and well-being and placing less emphasis on advancing via the paid economy.⁸³

It is also important to realise that equality of opportunity by itself is not enough. Achieving equality of outcomes is particularly important in a society characterised by gendered and intersectional social power relations that can shape so-called choices and assert themselves long after an initial equal opportunity is offered. Such issues also raise complex broader questions, explored by Rebecca Huntley, regarding how issues of gender equality are best raised and argued for with specific sectors of the population who conceive and experience equality differently.⁸⁴

The issue of what is equality being measured against emphasises that not all quality of life and well-being issues for women can be adequately understood or addressed via the lens of equality with men. To give just one example, both men and women would benefit from an improved approach to the sociology, politics and economics of (digitally accelerated) time, including relief from “greedy” jobs and a reduced working week.⁸⁵ While the leisure and domestic labour times that result should be shared in a gender equitable manner, the point is that gender equality is only part of what is desirable here and only one of the well-being benchmarks that need to be set. In other words, while this book has focused on gender equality issues, they are far from the only issues that need to be addressed in order to improve women’s opportunities and quality of life. They are, nonetheless, very important ones.

Conclusion

The Albanese Labor government came to office promising to make Australia a world leader in gender equality again. That exceptionally high benchmark is still far from being reached. Nonetheless, the Albanese government has been making serious attempts to improve gender equality in Australia that have been documented in this chapter and the preceding one. However, the government’s efforts have been made all the harder by a difficult economic and security situation. These are uncertain times, nationally and internationally. In addition, the government has inherited the legacies of decades of neoliberalism in Australia, with ramifications for multiple issues including industrial relations, public sector cut-backs, marketisation of social services, depleted public service expertise, industry policy, a fear of government deficits and a lack of regulation in the private sector. At the same time, the government has faced ongoing culture wars facilitated by the Opposition, not only over issues of transgender identity but also over intersectional issues such as race in a settler-colonial society. Internationally innovative proposals, such as the gender-balanced Indigenous Voice, have failed to proceed as a result. The situation is made all the more difficult for the current Labor government because the post-Howard parliamentary Liberal Party remains dominated by politicians influenced by social conservativism and neoliberalism. Liberal adherents of the social liberal tradition, who would be more sympathetic to some of Labor’s agenda, remain marginalised. Parliament itself has been a site of toxic masculinity, sometimes across the political spectrum, undermining efforts for cultural change.⁸⁶ The culture wars partly reflect the uncertainties resulting from the fact that traditional gender identities are also under threat.

Many of the lessons that Australian government gender equality policy offers to the world are therefore salutary ones. Policies that had been internationally innovative from the role of women’s advisors and femocrats to gender responsive budgeting were derailed by a combination of social conservatism and neoliberalism. Furthermore, one of the reasons the damage was so substantial is that Australian Labor helped pioneer the integration of neoliberalism and social democracy internationally and is now having to belatedly address the harm caused. Australian governments of both persuasions need to reconsider their belief that gender equality doesn’t sometimes involve conflicts with their existing economic and social frameworks and consider how to address those occasions when it does. Nonetheless, Australia’s experience also provides important lessons in how a Labor party that helped initiate the attempting melding of neoliberalism and social democracy can begin to move beyond it.

Furthermore, Australia’s geographic location has also given it a ringside seat to the geopolitical and geoeconomic changes occurring with the rise of Asia, and China in particular, with economic and security implications that have impacted on broader policies, including gender equality ones. In the process, Australia has potentially experienced the impacts of the rise of Asia earlier and more immediately than many other western countries. Nonetheless, as the defeat of the Indigenous Voice referendum shows, Australia is also still suffering from the effects of British/European settler-colonialism. It is a difficult situation in which to pursue gender equality, although the Australian government has been attempting to do so. However, all too often, Australia has not just been playing catch-up with international developments but with its own domestic history. Yet, if Australia could seize the opportunity again, Australia, as a multicultural but predominantly western, settler-colonial society situated in the Asia-Pacific potentially has some unique insights and lessons to offer. Australia is itself an intersectional society.⁸⁷ It has a rich cultural, geopolitical and geoeconomic mix on which it could draw in an intersectional reimagining of the economic and the political.

Unfortunately, it has been argued in this book that, like their international counterparts, successive Australian governments have not yet adequately reimagined their policy frameworks to address issues of gender equality. Much has been achieved. However, after half a century of trying to pursue gender equality, albeit with some backsliding, there is still so much more to be done. Yet, in an uncertain time when gender equality is under attack internationally, it is even more important to prioritise gender issues and to bring about fundamental policy change.