Category: Inequity

National Sorry Day is a day to commemorate those taken. But ‘sorry’ is not enough – we need action

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May 26 is National Sorry Day. On this day, we commemorate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who were forcibly removed from their families under government policies during the Assimilation era (officially 1910-70).

While this is a national day of commemoration, shamefully, it barely rates a mention in the media.

In what has been referred to as “The Killing Times” massacres of Aboriginal people occurred from 1788 to 1928. The survivors of this frontier violence were then subject to “protection” policies.

During this era, “protectors” were appointed, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations were segregated onto reserves, missions and government settlements.

This time of “protection” was not an era of benevolence. Beginning in the late 19th century, the “protection” era involved controlling every aspect of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s lives. This included forced confinement, institutionalisation and forcible child removals.

An official policy of assimilation was established in 1937.

But this was never the case. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had no say on this policy, nor any freedom to decline it. The notion they were ever intended to enjoy the same rights and privileges as white folk is a lie.

The first National Sorry Day was held on May 26 1998, one year after the tabling of the report from the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families.

Almost a decade after that, on February 13 2008, then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered an apology to members of the Stolen Generations.. . . Rudd, however, firmly stated the government had no intention to consider compensation.

When Rudd delivered his apology 14 years ago, there were 9,070 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care in Australia. That number has since risen to about 18,900, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children now represent more than 41% of all children in out-of-home care.

National Sorry Day commemorates not only the past but the continuity of injustice borne by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. All the “sorrys” in the world won’t provide justice, support or compensation for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who were forcibly removed from their families.

 

Source: National Sorry Day is a day to commemorate those taken. But ‘sorry’ is not enough – we need action

Trans and gender-diverse staff at Coles will now be given 10 days extra leave | Daily Mail Online

Trans and gender-diverse staff of supermarket chain Coles will be entitled to up to 10 days of paid gender affirmation leave.

  • Team members undergoing gender affirmation will be entitled to the leave
  • Coles Chief Legal and Safety Officer said 900 staff members are gender diverse
  • Coles confirmed the leave may be for medical or counselling purposes 

Source: Trans and gender-diverse staff at Coles will now be given 10 days extra leave | Daily Mail Online

Perhaps we should rebrand Senator Jane Hume to Minister for Women’s Economic InSecurity

Just over a year ago she was sworn in as Australia’s very first, dedicated Minister for Women’s Economic Security.

The Morrison government’s decision to dedicate a new ministerial portfolio to the issue of women’s economic security seemed like progress. And then …

The very minister tasked with shoring up women’s economic security has overseen — and publicly defended —  several blatant attacks on their economic security, in particular their super. Women already retire with barely half the retirement savings of men. Perhaps we should rebrand Jane Hume the Minister for Women’s Economic Insecurity.

First there was the suggestion in 2018 that women fleeing domestic violence should fund their own escape with the proposal to allow DV victims access of up to $10,000 of their super on “compassionate grounds”.

Then there was the broader early release of super scheme introduced at the height of the first wave of the pandemic in early 2020 (two weeks before the introduction of the Coronavirus supplement and the JobKeeper wage subsidy), which allowed up to $20,000 to be withdrawn before retirement to people suffering financial hardship due to the pandemic. That saw more women than men wipe out their super entirely, money that we all know many women will struggle to put back because they are entering their prime child-bearing years, a period of time that commonly sees Australian women take extended leave from paid work.

Between April and December 2020, 1.5 million women drew down their super, one quarter of the entire labor force. Some 345,000 women completely emptied out their accounts.

Most appallingly, despite warnings from the violence against women sector about the previous proposed DV early access schemes’ potential to make women vulnerable to financial abuse, the Morrison government put no safeguards in place to guard against that in this broader, Covid early access scheme. And, surprise, surprise, as the Sydney Morning Herald reported later in the year, the scheme “opened a frontier for abuse”, creating a “perfect storm” with one expert estimating that up to 70,000 women may have been coerced into withdrawing their super.

And now there’s this new scheme permitting first time home buyers to access super for their first home. Many, many economists have already pointed out that this will disproportionately benefit men who tend to have significantly more super and disproportionately, negatively impact women who struggle to put enough away to begin with. There’s also the question of what many women have left after the previous raid on their super, but that’s bye the bye.

Source: Perhaps we should rebrand Senator Jane Hume to Minister for Women’s Economic InSecurity

California push to seat more women on boards ruled unlawful | Australasian Lawyer

California’s landmark requirement that corporate boards include women was ruled unconstitutional.

The outcome is a victory for a conservative legal advocacy group that challenged the measure as reverse discrimination.

“We’re disappointed and appalled at this setback for women to be advancing in business,” said Betsy Berkhemer-Credair, CEO of 50/50 Women on Boards, and one of the proponents of the law when she was president of the California chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners. The group expects the state to appeal, but has no assurances yet that it will, she said.

The case is Crest v. Padilla, 19STCV27561, Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles (Los Angeles).

Source: California push to seat more women on boards ruled unlawful | Australasian Lawyer

‘Quiet fury is simmering’ among women as 8 matters for gender equality published

The Victorian Women’s Trust has published eight “matters that count” addressing the “quiet fury” they say is simmering for women.

VWT’s Matters that Count to Australian Women include:

  • Significant investment to stop men’s violence towards women and children
  • A constitutionally enshrined First Nations Voice to our national parliament
  • Wage justice for women working in aged care and childcare sectors
  • Affordable housing for women to stop their slide into homelessness
  • Serious, concerted action on climate change
  • Affordable and high-quality childcare and early learning system
  • Ending the cruel treatment of asylum seekers
  • A strong and effective anti-corruption commission

Source: ‘Quiet fury is simmering’ among women as 8 matters for gender equality published

The Oscars take one step forward and two steps back

Hollywood not only continues to objectify women, but is pushing a misogynist agenda, disguised as progressive politics.

This year, the Academy Awards offered a few pleasant surprises, including the Oscar for Best Director going to New Zealander Jane Campion for The Power of the Dog. Only two other women have won this prestigious honour in 94 years of Oscar ceremonies: Chloé Zhao for Nomadland, last year, and Kathryn Bigelow, in 2009, for The Hurt Locker.

Another welcome surprise was the Best Picture Oscar winner, CODA, directed by a woman: American writer/director Sian Heder.

Other aspects of Oscar night were less unusual, beginning with the hypersexualized women’s fashions. Many of the actresses — not to mention co-hosts, performers, and female guests — who were photographed and interviewed on the red carpet (or attending the popular Vanity Fair Oscars after party) demonstrated that the double standard regarding men and women’s fashions remains alive and well.

Despite the actress-led #MeToo movement and “Time’s Up” endeavour, Hollywood women have declined to push back against objectifying industry norms, lest it challenge their own bottom line.

Most men did not dress much differently than they did in early days of Oscar ceremonies. It is women’s dress codes that seem to have changed most substantially, regressing from fashions that allowed the audience to focus on the award rather than on body parts.

Maintaining the theme of woke misogyny, Oscar attendees took the opportunity to virtue signal their adherence to a queer ideology that seems intent on erasing women.

The actress formerly known as Ellen Page, who recently had an elective double mastectomy and changed her name to Elliot, was a presenter for the Best Original Screenplay award . . . Page, sporting a tuxedo, was likely the most covered woman there. It seems it becomes acceptable for women not to self-objectify only if they claim to be male.

The most memorable moment of the evening was of course Will Smith’s narcissistic efforts to white knight himself, slapping Chris Rock onstage in defense of his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. Rock’s joke about Pinkett Smith’s bald head, due to her alopecia, was tepid, and the fact Smith’s embarrassing outburst went unchallenged seems to say a lot about how the Oscar’s “woke” veneer has in fact moved us back decades.

Source: The Oscars take one step forward and two steps back

Bridging Wikipedia’s gender gap, one article at a time

As the world’s largest and most-used information resource, Wikipedia is home to 6.4 million articles and counting. But despite how comprehensive it seems, 90% of the site’s editors are men, and women are vastly underrepresented as subjects in the encyclopedia. The problem is particularly glaring when it comes to biographical information. Of the 1.5 million biographical articles on the site, less than 20% are about women.

A new study co-authored by Isabelle Langrock, a Ph.D. candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication, and Annenberg Associate Professor Sandra González-Bailón evaluates the work of two prominent feminist movements, finding that while these movements have been effective in adding a large volume of biographical content about to Wikipedia, such content remains more difficult to find due to structural biases.

Art+Feminism is dedicated to adding content about women and nonbinary artists to Wikipedia, while 500 Women Scientists, a nonprofit that aims to improve representation and inclusivity in STEM, creates and edits Wikipedia pages for women scientists as part of its public outreach.

While Wikipedia pages about men tend to be longer and receive more views, the intervention flipped the script. The edit-a-thons created more extensive biographical articles for women, including 250 entirely new entries, that averaged more views than either men’s pages or non-intervention women’s pages.

We need to help activist groups by highlighting their successes and building tools to help them do better at integrating women’s pages into the knowledge network as a whole.

Source: Bridging Wikipedia’s gender gap, one article at a time

Iowa governor signs bill barring trans girls and women from female sports | Iowa | The Guardian

The Republican governor called the signing a celebration of victory for girls’ sports.“No amount of talent, training or effort can make up for the natural physical advantages males have over females. It’s simply a reality of human biology,” Reynolds said. “Forcing females to compete against males is the opposite of inclusivity and it’s absolutely unfair.”

Iowa will join 10 other Republican-run states with such laws. Some have faced court challenges alleging violations of constitutional rights and federal non-discrimination laws.

Source: Iowa governor signs bill barring trans girls and women from female sports | Iowa | The Guardian

Just a pill? | Victoria Smith | The Critic Magazine

Reading Jessica Taylor’s Sexy but Psycho, a feminist challenge to the psychiatric labelling of women and girls, I find myself thinking of contemporary psychiatry as the abusive partner who tries to control you by telling you how shit all the other men are.

“C’mon,” he wheedles. “It’s not as though I’m administering electric shocks until you start to have seizures. Or sticking an ice pick through your eye socket and wiggling it around in your brain matter. It’s just, like, a pill or two. What’s the big deal?”

Taylor is uncompromising, stating that psychiatry is wholly incompatible with women’s liberation. The present-day examples she offers are numerous and shocking: women and girls harmed by sexual violence being told their signs of trauma reveal them to have personality disorders; abused women being encouraged to get diagnostic labels in order to access support, then having their diagnoses used to discredit their testimonies; women’s reports of violence and abuse being treated as evidence that they are fantasists, particularly if they already have histories of being labelled mentally ill; women’s physical ailments being treated as emotional, while their emotional distress is treated as physical in origin.

A psychiatric diagnosis robs women and girls of two of the things for which feminists have fought longest and hardest: our credibility and our right to consent to what is done to our own bodies.

In 1990’s The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf argued that “new possibilities for women quickly become new obligations. It is a short step from ‘anything can be done for beauty’ to ‘anything must be done’”. She was right. In 1990 it was not normal for wealthy women to have their faces injected with poison during their lunch hours; now it is. I think the same principle operates in terms of psychiatric labelling and treatments. If it can be done, it will, and once it is being done, it is seen as justified.

Source: Just a pill? | Victoria Smith | The Critic Magazine

Ground-breaking family law firm bridges affordability gap | The Lighthouse

A new Sydney-based not-for-profit family law firm, Wallumatta Legal, aims to provide legal services to the ‘missing middle’, those not eligible for Legal Aid or other free services but who cannot easily afford fees charged by commercial lawyers.

A collaboration with global law firm DLA Piper, Wallumatta Legal has evolved from research that identified family law as one of the biggest areas of unmet legal need in Australia.

Says Associate Professor Lise Barry, Interim Dean of Macquarie Law School, “A lot of essential workers – aged care workers, nurses, teachers, cleaners and delivery drivers ̶̶̶ fall into the ‘missing middle’.

The reality, she says, is that unless you’re on Centrelink benefits and don’t have many assets, you’re not going to meet the threshold. Even then, Legal Aid is available only for certain matters in family law. It is not usually available for property disputes, for instance, she says.

“Anyone with a net income over $400 a week is generally not going to meet the eligibility for Legal Aid. Some 14% of the population live below the Henderson Poverty Line yet only 8% will be eligible for Legal Aid.” (The Henderson Poverty Line was devised by the Melbourne Institute’s foundation director, Professor Ronald Henderson, in 1975; in 2021 this was established as $1091.50 a week for a family of two adults, one of whom is working, and two dependent children.)

An online questionnaire collates information ahead of an initial consultation, enabling the lawyer to focus on providing the client with advice and representation rather than the often-costly face-to-face process of collecting information.

The new clinic fast-tracks students’ ability to make real-world, positive changes to their communities with valuable insights into the practical application of family law.

Source: Ground-breaking family law firm bridges affordability gap | The Lighthouse