Wednesday, 21 June 2023

Gender equality

Vicki WARD (Eltham) (16:44): I have to tell you, I do grieve for a party that continues to believe that merit is all that women need in order to be in this place. I also grieve for the member for Murray Plains, who wants to boorishly belittle a legitimate point made by the Minister for Women regarding the huge deficit of statues depicting women in this state – only 11 compared to the 500-odd for men. In fact there are more statues of racehorses than there are of women. In trying to make a pathetic point about statues for Premiers who have served more than 10,000 days – something that Jeff Kennett and the coalition government invented off their own bat themselves to commemorate themselves, which unfortunately did not work; unfortunately Jeff missed out, but that was the purpose of it – he was not able to suggest an important or any number of important regional women who should actually be depicted in statues. That would have been a far more effective contribution rather than trying to make a cheap shot from the cheap seats, but as we know, they cannot help themselves. I see the member for Ripon here, and I am sure she could come up with any number of women who have done amazing things in her regional community. The same goes for the member for Eureka; I am sure she would be able to do exactly the same as well. These are good regional MPs who represent their communities. They are not after the cheap shots, they are actually after change and are after good policy.

I grieve for a party that has so few women in this place, and I suspect they also grieve for the fact that they have so few seats overall. It is a party that believe they are so deficit of women of talent that in this chamber they only have four women. Are there only four women of merit in the Liberal Party who deserve to be in this place? I suspect that there are not. I suspect that there are a lot of women of merit in the Liberal Party who are indeed not in this place. So this is a party that thinks that political points can be made by asking ‘What is a woman?’ This is where they are at – a party that is prepared to use vulnerable people as collateral damage in a culture war that nobody else is actually participating in.

We have heard so many times from those opposite about the irrelevance of quotas and that all that is needed is merit, yet when we look over to that side of the chamber, we know that that is absolute baloney. We know that there are Liberal women of merit, and yet they are not here. There are talented women who could have been Liberal MPs, but instead they are teal MPs in federal Parliament. Allegra Spender, the daughter of John Spender, a former Liberal shadow minister in the 1980s, is a teal. She is not a Liberal woman member of Parliament. When Kate Chaney, the niece of Fred Chaney, a minister in the Fraser government – and he was deputy Liberal leader – is not a Liberal MP but is a teal, you know that merit is not the problem here. There are plenty of conservative women who have merit, who have ability, who have skills and who have talent. But to quote Jon Faine:

… the reason it is hard for women in the Liberal Party is because their paths are constantly blocked by men.

Two years ago the former Liberal leader of the Victorian Liberals, a member for Balwyn, said that he was open to the idea of quotas for the Liberal Party but that that was for the party to decide. Three leaders later there are still no quotas and, as I said earlier, only four women over the aisle. Quotas do matter, and that is why we implemented quotas in the Labor Party and why we brought in affirmative action. Why? Because as Jon Faine said about the Liberal Party, blokes kept getting in the way of good, talented Labor women. So we fought for and we achieved affirmative action quotas in 1994, when women represented only 14 per cent of the federal Labor caucus. We now have over 50 per cent of women in our Victorian Labor parliamentary caucus and we have over 50 per cent of women in the federal caucus. We have 14 female ministers. This week we celebrated Joan Kirner’s 85th birthday, and we owe her a huge debt of gratitude for the gains that we have made for women, gains that are so central in this budget. This would not have happened before; this would not have happened without women on this side of our chamber.

I want to pull out a conversation that I had a number of years ago with the Presiding Officers when I was a member of the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee in our first term of government. I was horrified on arrival here to find out that any menstruating woman in this place who was caught short had to go to the gift shop and had to ask the person working there if they could please pull out a sole tampon or pad from the bottom drawer. If we were caught short – we cannot leave this place, we cannot run down to the pharmacy, and for the men in the room, sometimes you do not want to run when you have been caught short – we were stuck; we had nothing. I asked the Presiding Officers, ‘Why do we not have pads and tampons in our toilets?’ And they said, ‘Oh, we do. We’re renovating the toilets; they’re coming in.’ I went out and had a look, and I called bulldust. There were not any. It took them a while to sort out, but eventually they got there, and this is why we have pads and tampons in our toilets. Our male Presiding Officers were embarrassed to realise that they had actually not provided this. And I have a look –

A member interjected.

Vicki WARD: Pleasure. This experience also reminded me of Pauline Toner talking about how when she first came into this place there were not actually toilets for female MPs, that she was expected to run all the way from the chook house or wherever she was to the toilet that is over here at the front of the chamber. That was to be her toilet. ‘Bugger that,’ she said, and she took over one of the male toilets, because this is what happens when women are in Parliament. Women change spaces. Women change the way things happen. Women have their own views and have their own needs, and we put them at the table. This is why it is so important that our party has made this transition and we have such strong female representation here on our side of the chamber.

Federal Labor committed to removing the GST on menstrual products in 2018, for which I was very grateful. I will, as an aside, tell you that I bought about eight or 10 months worth of pads and tampons before the GST came in because I was so angry about paying GST on them. Finally the Morrison government removed this unfair tax in 2019 – this discriminatory, sexist, unfair tax. In 2019 we became the first state or territory in our nation to introduce free pads and tampons in every government school. There will be not one woman in this place who did not wish they had a spare pad or tampon handy at some point; we have all been caught short.

With this important change comes the conversation about menstruation – destigmatising it and changing the conversation. Having your period should not be cause for embarrassment, yet for years, decades, centuries and millennia women have been forced to be embarrassed about a natural bodily function that happens to all of us. It is outrageous. The sad thing is that sometimes this belittling, this embarrassment, still happens. Pads and tampons are not a luxury; they are a necessary healthcare tool – a healthcare tool we cannot live without – and I am so happy and so proud that this government brought in to over 1500 public schools free pads and tampons, something that will continue to be supported in this year’s budget. This will be life-changing for so many girls and women. Girls who go to school and who cannot afford them or who have forgotten and want to sort themselves out can do so without fear or favour. It is fantastic policy. It is important policy, but it also shows how much this government understands what women and girls need, understands the challenges that they have and actually does something about it, and understands that this is not a taboo topic that should not be talked about and should have euphemisms used around it. We are quite happy to stand here and talk about it and talk about what we can do to make menstruation easier. Having easy access to pads and tampons is one less stress to deal with.

We have built on this. We have committed $23 million in this budget to ensure that women and girls can access period products wherever and whenever they need them. This means that there will be around 1500 dispensing machines at over 700 sites across this state. It includes places like the State Library, it includes places like hospitals and it includes places like train stations, like the Melbourne Museum, like TAFEs and like the law courts. So many places will have these products available for women who need them. Women will know that this government sees them and not only understands many of their challenges but will act on them. For far too long menstruation has been weaponised against women. It is a rare woman who has not had to deal with comments about her anger, her assertiveness, her indignation, her crankiness or her being busy being attributed to her menstruating – ‘Oh, you’re only cranky because you’ve got your period’, ‘Oh, you only said that because you’ve got your period’. No, we said it because we are just bloody angry. It has also been seen as something dirty, something to be hidden. From an early age girls are regularly taught to hide the fact that they are menstruating. Other young people, often boys, use it as an insult to belittle and disempower young girls.

Plan International Australia has reported that one-fifth – around 19 per cent – of boys in Australia think periods should be kept secret and are not something to be talked about in polite company. When asked what words boys associated with periods, almost three in five said ‘messy’, while almost a quarter said ‘embarrassing and dirty’. In addition, more than four in 10 said they have also witnessed bullying around periods. Research in 2021 found that almost a third of Australian girls aged 10 to 14 were missing school because they were embarrassed about their periods, while almost half of those aged 10 to 18 said that they were afraid of being teased. It is outrageous that girls and women can feel shame about menstruating and that their menstruation can actually impinge on their movements. And I am not talking about period pain; that is a whole nother 15-minute debate in this place. The fact that the actual act of menstruating is something that you can be embarrassed about and limit your freedom of movement by is outrageous. It is terrible, and it should not be happening.

It is also outrageous that so many males do not understand how menstruation actually works. I have heard a number of stories of guys like this. For example, a male employer demanded to know why a woman needed to leave a meeting to use the bathroom, and on being told that her period had started, he said, ‘Well, can’t you stop it?’ He thought that periods were something that you can control. We know that, particularly in coercive, violent relationships, there are men who think that their female partners are having their period just to annoy them. We have really got to do some work on actually helping boys and men understand how periods work.

We need to implement policies that remove any stigma and shame about menstruation, and this is a very important part of our very long journey towards gender equality, a path this government is treading with care and with determination. It matters that we have a Premier who speaks openly about access to menstrual products, who speaks openly about endometriosis and who speaks openly about menopause. It is so important to have leaders in this state and in this country talk about the things that happen to women in a natural way, in an empowering way and in a way that takes away any sense of shame over things over which there should be no shame.

In 2021 we became the first state to introduce gender-responsive budgeting, and now every year we analyse and consider the impact of investment decisions on women and girls at every stage of the budget process. With the Victorian budget this year we have kept improving our decision-making processes, and we have considered the ways in which the decisions we make affect people differently – and women in particular.

While I have devoted much of this speech just to what we are investing in with pads and tampons, to me it underpins exactly what we are doing as a government, which is empowering people. We are helping people. I found it quite interesting that the member for Murray Plains, for example, and the previous coalition speaker spoke about the cost of living. We are actually saving women money by providing them with free pads and tampons, and to not understand how important this is to so many women and girls in this state is to be incredibly out of touch. You go to any neighbourhood house, you go to anywhere that is doing food share or you go to any school and you will find girls and women who are experiencing poverty where they cannot afford pads and tampons, you will find that there are families where fathers refuse to allow money to be spent on these products and you will find cultures where this is such an embarrassment, the fact of women menstruating, that women are shunned and their access to being able to buy these products is hindered.

For this government to stand up and make sure that those girls and women can be filled with respect for themselves and have access to these most basic of products stands at the heart of who this government is and what this government stands for. This government should be applauded and celebrated for this fact. I do, as somebody who represents this party in my community, and I do it as somebody who is very happy to stand here and speak about the wonderful things this government is doing. For those opposite to belittle it, is shameful.