Melanie Fernandez (NSW) and Sarah Brasch (ACT) represented WEL at the annual Equality Rights Alliance Face-to-Face Meeting 20 and 21 June in Canberra.
About 30 women from ERA’s 54 members attended from all over Australia, including several from regional and rural areas. The group was complemented by several young women from the Human Rights Law Centre in Melbourne who are keeping a close eye on proposed changes to the Sex Discrimination Act and developments with the Human Rights Action Plan (also of interest to WEL).
The idea of the annual face-to-face meeting is to prepare for and then spend a day lobbying members of Federal Parliament.
The first day was spent in briefings on three of ERA’s top priorities: affordable housing, a particular concern for older women many of whom will not own their own homes by the time that they retire; consolidation of the four anti-discrimination acts announced by the Government last year (no exposure draft or draft bill as yet) and approaches to income management (building on the experience of the NT Intervention with extension soon to those receiving welfare payments in Bankstown NSW; Logan and Rockhampton Qld; Shepparton Vic and Playford SA). This is likely to affect over 730,000 people in the broader community including small businesses, community organisations, schools and health services used by income managed families. For further information including ERA’s commissioned independent research on NT Income Management outcomes due to be published in July, check out the ERA website where you can also sign up for alerts and news from ERA.
The delegates were organised into small groups of two or three women to lobby on these three topics in about 30 meetings with politicians from all parties and from both Houses of the Federal Parliament. This happened on Day Two which was spent at Parliament House. We had a convenient base in one of the Senate Committee rooms sponsored by Senator Claire Moore (ALP Qld). We also spent some time brushing up on lobbying techniques and how to work effectively with parliamentary committees, both in making appearances before committees and in getting our interests pursued by committees, particularly Senate Committees.
ERA has been particularly active on affordable and social housing, calling for a national policy with long-term vision and increased funding for rental housing to address the growing crisis in housing supply. In February this year, ERA in conjunction with the Economic Security for Women Alliance, the National Foundation for Women and the National Rural Women’s Coalition (also a government-funded national women’s alliance), hosted a workshop to discuss investment in affordable and accessible rental housing which brought together a wide range of government and financial interests including the banks and credit unions, the latter have been quite active in supporting investment in social housing over the last few years.
This theme was continued at the ERA meeting with Dr Andrea Sharam from Swinbourne University of Technology as the guest speaker. Her topic was “Affordable Housing: Building Women’s Home Security”. This was very valuable to assist the delegates prepare for lobbying politicians. Housing was a popular topic and ERA’s practical recommendations, including putting all federal responsibility for housing under a single Minister, were well received by all members of parliament with whom the ERA representatives met.
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