WorkChoices & Welfare to work
In the first decade of the Twenty-first century, an Australian woman wants at minimum a room of her own, as Virginia Woolfe argued more than a hundred years past, even though we are once again in the grip of an affordable housing crisis.
The Australian woman in 2005 wants a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, as the late Edna Ryan argued, and as well to look forward to a living standard in retirement of reasonable dignity.
Most women combine family responsibilities with paid work. Only 4% of young Australian women aspire to be full time at home with family in mid-life. Australian research into the aspirations of young Australian women has demonstrated that, by the age of 35, 98% want to be in a relationship, 96% want paid employment, and 91% want children.
Public policy frameworks set the scene for the Australian woman to meet these wants, whether she is married, single, supporting children, living with a disability, from a migrant or refugee background, an indigenous Australian, a country or a city dweller.
The Commonwealth Budget of 2005 saw some very important changes in the policy frameworks affecting women of working age.
The entire range of income support programs to which women of working age might turn for assistance has been transferred from the Department of Family Service (FaCS) to the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR). The underpinning philosophy is encapsulated in the rubric ‘welfare to work’. The objective is to encourage (by means of both incentives and disincentives) a move into paid employment wherever possible. These changes are set out on the DEWR web site: Portfolio Budget Statements 2005-06 - Fact Sheets
As well, the Commonwealth Government has announced very significant changes to the Industrial Relations framework, including the proposed restriction of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission, a move to the preferring of individual workplace agreements, and a forecast take-over through the Corporations Power in the Commonwealth Constitution, of the States’ own industrial relations frameworks.
workplace.gov.au web site: Workplace relations - our plan
Without pre-judgement of the policy changes, the National Foundation for Australian Women, in collaboration with a strong alliance of national women’s organisations, has decided to follow them up.
NFAW is part of a joint project of three of the secretariats for national women's organisations which are funded through the Commonwealth Office for Women, viz., the Australian Women's Coalition (AWC), Security for Women (S4W), and the WomenSpeak Network.
The project sought to examine the potential impact on women of working age, and in particular on low income women, of the Budget 2005 changes to income security payments ( 'welfare to work'), the proposed changes to the industrial relations framework, and the likely interaction of the two sets of policy changes.
The project partners developed a set of factual background papers. These have been posted here as well as on other relevant web-sites. We held a small invitational workshop, then summarised discussions at the workshop.
The workshop papers have been made available as an information document for women's organisations, and used as a basis for any relevant input to the Commonwealth policy development process.
The following phase involved submissions to the HREOC inquiry into work-family balance.
The three project partners will continue to monitor the evolving situation for women.
Contact: Marie Coleman