Tag Archives: Society

A mother is found guilty, but what to do?

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The prosecutor said the case gave him no joy. The judge said he was pleased that the jury, and not he, had to make this hard call. The defence counsel said “gambling dens” were the real culprits.

And the accused stayed mute, but for her quiet weeping.

But when court adjourned after she was convicted of manslaughter, Jie Hua Yu, the mother whose toddler died of heatstroke after being left in a hot car while she played the pokies, sat sobbing, her head on her husband’s shoulder.

Her younger sister Yali, who had testified that Yu was a good and loving mother, wept in an alcove outside the courtroom.

It was the end of a long and, all parties acknowledged, tragic story.

It began on February 16 last year, when Yu, after dropping an older child at school, decided to stop off for 20 or 30 minutes’ play at a local gambling venue, the Ferntree Gully Hotel.

She left the second of her three children, 19-month-old Brian Yao, strapped in the car in an unshaded area of the hotel car park.

He was asleep, she later explained to police, and she thought she wasn’t going to be inside for long.

Two-and-a-half hours later, Yu’s husband, Benny Yao, woke at their home in Kelvin Drive, Ferntree Gully, and realised his wife and child were gone.

He arrived at the hotel looking for her. The couple found Brian unconscious and took him straight to a nearby hospital.

He arrived blue and convulsing.

Despite an emergency transfer to the Royal Children’s Hospital, he was later declared brain dead and was removed from life support on February 22.

Yu was charged with having killed him through criminal negligence.

This Supreme Court case was a quiet one. Barristers did not shout or bluster. Medical witnesses kept descriptions of distressing facts to a minimum. It was as if no one wished to add to the suffering that Yu had already endured.

Yu, a 40-year-old housewife, arrived each day dressed in unadorned suits with her face bare of makeup. She sat next to her Cantonese interpreter, her head bent to one side as she listened to the swift translation of legal exchanges. Had it not been for the misery etched on her face, they would have looked like girlfriends exchanging confidences.

Yesterday Yu’s defence counsel, Brian Burke, argued that this good and loving mother should not be branded a killer. He said her conduct did not deserve to be punished as a crime. He asked jurors to put themselves in her place.

He blamed the gambling industry for “wreaking havoc” on innocent people. “It’s a great pity it’s not the gambling dens on trial, isn’t it? They are not on trial; got the sanctity and blessing of governments from top to bottom.”

The prosecutor, Paul Coghlan, QC, told the jury that love and negligence were not mutually exclusive. He argued that leaving a small child locked in a hot car for two-and-a-half hours “so terrifically” breached Yu’s duty of care to her son that it called for the intervention of the criminal law.

“The question you will have to address is whether it can ever be said to be not unexcusable to leave a child in this sort of car, in this sort of car park, on this sort of day, for two-and-a-half hours. It’s just not on … for proper contemporary standards … Lines should be drawn.”

The jury took two hours to conclude that Mr Coghlan was right.

Justice Bernard Teague adjourned the sentence for a date to be fixed. He said he would consider punishments that did not involve prison.

First published in The Age.

Also see A Gamble With Life and Ending The Affair.

Homophobia still rampant, survey finds

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Eighty-four per cent of Victorian gays and lesbians have experienced discrimination or abuse ranging from insults hurled from a car to severe beatings, according to a new survey.

The incidence of bashings has fallen compared with results of a similar survey five years ago (from 19 per cent to 7 per cent of respondents). But verbal abuse during assaults makes it clear most attacks are motivated by homophobia, says the report, Enough is Enough, published by the Victorian Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby.

The report, based on a survey of 929 gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, is to be launched today by State Attorney-General Rob Hulls. Of those reporting discrimination or abuse, most had experienced it in relation to assault or harassment in a public place (79 per cent), followed by employment (48 per cent), education (31 per cent), provision of goods or services (28 per cent), medical treatment (27 per cent), police/law enforcement (20 per cent) and parenting (16 per cent).

Eleven per cent of men and 6per cent of women said they had been bashed because of their sexual orientation. Sixty-three per cent had been verbally abused in a public place and 25per cent threatened with assault.

By contrast, the report said Australian Bureau of Statistics surveys have found that fewer than 2 per cent of Victorians have been bashed or threatened in public.

One woman reported being attacked by a neighbor who found out she was a lesbian and another was set on outside a gay pub by a group of men who thought she was a gay male; when they found out she was a woman, they continued the assault on the grounds that she was “too butch”.

In the workplace the most common complaint was harassment (38 per cent), followed by being pressured out of a job (16 per cent).

One man said his fellow workers organised a gang bashing after he told them he was gay, while a woman wrote that “A fellow employee attempted to rape me to `change your mind about being a lesbian”‘.

The report found complaints about discrimination from medical providers had risen but complaints about police had fallen nearly 40 per cent, which it attributed to a review of police practices after the controversial 1994 raid on the Tasty nightclub.

Some discrimination related to the fact that same-sex partners are not automatically recognised as next of kin: one woman told the survey she was charged with “impersonating a family member” at the Coroner’s Court after her partner committed suicide.

A co-convenor of the lobby, Kenton Miller, said the report made a mockery of recent claims by the RSL that gay people do not face discrimination.

The lobby called on the government to outlaw discrimination based on a person’s sexual orientation, to extend the legal definition of “de facto” to same-sex couples and to legislate against hate language.

A spokeswoman for Mr Hulls said the government was looking at the issues and would discuss proposed changes to the Equal Opportunities Act with the independents over the winter recess. Anti-vilification legislation was also being drawn up.

First published in The Age.

Inside the male `no go’ zone

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IN MY early 20s, I moved to an area of work where I was the only woman among a group of senior men: a desk of subeditors. I was uncertain of my welcome in such a male enclave. I was not uncertain for long. A big, stony-faced man I had never met came over and threw a story on my desk, saying in a voice audible to all, “Sub this, moll.”

In genuine disbelief, I asked, “What did you say?” He repeated himself. I stood up and kicked him hard, once, on the shin. “Don’t call me a moll,” I said. And I sat down and took up my pen with trembling fingers.

Luckily for me, he took it like a man. He held no grudge and we later developed a straightforward, easygoing relationship. A boundary had been set and was respected. It seems like an advertisement for Helen Garner’s advice in ‘the first stone’ to girls being harassed: try a stiletto heel on his instep.

But I would never try such a tactic now. Now I know it’s not always that simple. Unfortunately, the fact that it’s not always that simple has been almost obliterated from view by a decade of media hysteria over “the Ormond College affair”.

The case’s notoriety has made “sexual harassment” a household phrase, but for all the wrong reasons. It has created a social atmosphere so fraught that it has in some ways become harder to deal with the problem.

This is because the public debate was conducted mostly around the terms Garner set. Why did the young women go to the police over minor allegations of touching? Why did they let it get to the point where a man’s career was destroyed? What lay behind their “ghastly punitiveness”?

The point Garner failed to get her head around is the same one that remains obscured today, and the one I had no sense of the day I administered that kick. It is the question of institutional power.

The direct-rejection approach is fine with your average drunk at a party. But it could backfire disastrously with a man who controls your work life or university career.

What if he takes it not like a man but like a weasel? He could go on to play “How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways”. In an office, he could confine the woman to low-status or difficult work, block her pay rises or promotions, or post her to the workplace equivalent of Siberia. On a university campus, he might compromise her marks, her scholarship or bursary prospects, or her references.

If a man grabs a woman’s breast at a party, it is indeed, to use Garner’s term, just a “nerdish pass”. But if the man is in a position to punish the woman for her knockback by manipulating her circumstances in a formal organisation to which they both belong, that is sexual harassment. This is particularly so if he goes the grope in the first place partly because he knows he has one over her.

The serial sleazebag with delusions of modern-day droit du seigneur poses the biggest moral dilemma for a young woman. If she stays silent, she knows her passivity will leave him free to harass other women. If he holds a position of trust – doctor, priest, the person overseeing pastoral care at a boarding college – his job offers him a bulk warehouse of potential targets.

But why should she be the sacrificial lamb?
Because that is the main lesson from the Ormond affair: that everyone will be scalded and nothing resolved, with the man’s career destroyed and the woman demonised as vindictive, unnatural and unwomanly.

Mass media that had been largely uninterested in sexual harassment issues gave splatter coverage to the first book on the subject that affirmed male anxieties. Commentators seized upon the story in ‘the first stone’ to call the Ormond women bitches, monsters, femi-nazis and man-hating harpies. Garnerism became a magnet for misogyny the way Hansonism became a magnet for racism.

Yes, everyone is more conscious of sexual harassment now. Observation of the gender niceties in many workplaces is the best it has ever been, although this is probably due as much to women’s increasing numbers as to raised awareness. But serious abuse is still not uncommon, according to the Equal Opportunity Commission, and harassment complaints have been steadily rising in the decade since Ormond.

Complaints that reach the commission are complaints that have not been resolved by employers. They are management failures.

I suspect the most profound lesson taken from Ormond has been “Cover thine arse”. A lawyer I spoke to last week told me that while many companies have terrific written policies, their complaints procedures often collapse quickly because managers’ first instinct is still to quash an allegation rather than investigate and resolve it.

The number of women reporting that they were victimised in the workplace because they dared to lodge a formal complaint has skyrocketed in the past couple of years, from 209 in 1997-98 to 346 in 1998-99.

Analyses of the Ormond affair trawled the women’s psyches and motives. But where was the analysis of the male-dominated group dynamic that dictates an organisation’s response to harassment complaints? This was, after all, the reason the Ormond affair was taken to so many arenas: the women believed they did not get a fair hearing.

The real question is not: Why can’t women just let it go? The real question is: Why can’t bosses deal with this without either party being shamed or losing their jobs?
Until that changes, there will continue to be women who limit discussion of dirty deeds to urgent undertones in the ladies’ room; who cop it sweet or handle it one on one, despite the risks of retaliation; who resign from workplaces where they were otherwise happy because they couldn’t bear to make a fuss. There will be women who shield male misbehavior from view and bear its consequences themselves, as women have done for centuries.

This means public spaces such as work and university are still dotted with “no-go” signs for women. Because that’s what harassment does; it tells women that this is a male place where they are interlopers. The unwanted touch and the sexual epithet amount to the same message: You’ll be judged here not on what’s inside your head, but on what’s inside your undies.

Is that what we want for our daughters?

First published in The Age.

The last stone – what the judge said this week

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LIKE DRACULA, the Ormond affair has resisted a natural death. One lawyer who has followed the case couldn’t believe it was back in court again this week: “I thought `Oh God, the hand out of the grave! Kill it! Kill it!”‘

This is probably the one point on which all the parties concerned could reach heartfelt agreement. But this week’s Supreme Court defamation case has not only reignited the story; it has resulted in the legal “outing” of the two young women.

This defamation case resulted from an attempt by the academic who had advised and supported the young women, Dr Jenna Mead, to respond to author Helen Garner’s 1995 book, the first stone. Mead’s 1997 book of essays, ‘bodyjamming’, included a chapter entitled “Sticks and Stones”. It was written anonymously by one of the young women, now known to be Olivia Mayer, and is the only public comment either has ever made.

In it Mayer described what it was like to be at the centre of such a maelstrom: “I could be driving my car, switch on the radio and tune into an argument between several strangers on the topic of my breasts.”
She did not write about the alleged incident with Gregory but did attack the way the complaint had been handled by the then vice-chancellor of Melbourne University, David Penington, and Suzy Nixon, the university psychologist he called in to conciliate between Gregory and the young women.

Nixon sued Jenna Mead and bodyjamming’s publisher, Random House, for defamation. In her statement of claim to the court, she argued that the chapter wrongly suggested she had breached professional confidentiality and used her position as conciliator to try to shut down the complaints.

Nixon’s statement says the chapter suggested that her recommendation that Gregory remain in his position was wrong and dishonest because “she was merely following the instructions of the Vice-Chancellor, to whom she directly reported”.

This week Nixon won a resounding capitulation: an out-of-court settlement that included a retraction, an apology, costs and an undisclosed amount of damages. “Random House and Jenna Mead now accept that this chapter contains serious errors of fact concerning the role of and behavior of Ms Nixon as conciliator and that the chapter was damaging to her,” the publisher’s lawyers told the court.

“Random House and Dr Mead unreservedly withdraw the false allegations contained in the chapter and apologise for the hurt and distress caused to Ms Nixon.”

The settlement came soon after the judge, Justice John Hedigan, had ruled that the two young women would have to give evidence under their own names, which had been suppressed for nearly a decade.

He said they could not expect to remain anonymous forever and it would be “curious and unjust” if they could write about the past anonymously while those they wrote about were denied such a “luxury”. By writing “Sticks and Stones”, Mayer had ignited “the fires of the past” and could not now expect to stay shielded. By the next day Mayer and the other original complainant, Kirsten Campbell, had been named in the press.

Mayer and Campbell are maintaining what is left of the barrier around their privacy. They still refuse media requests for interviews and their supporters will not reveal anything of the women’s circumstances.

Nor will anyone else associated with case talk about it, including Alan Gregory, who still lives in Melbourne.

Jenna Mead and her husband, poet and academic Philip Mead, have left Melbourne to lecture in English at the University of Tasmania. Author Helen Garner has returned to Melbourne after more than five years in Sydney. Suzy Nixon left Melbourne University in 1996 to set up her own practice as a therapist and organisational consultant.

All of them want to put this saga behind them. Only with hindsight will we know whether this week’s events give them their wish; whether this case is the final stake through the heart of “the Ormond affair”.

First published in The Age.

Staying home with children: a costly option

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Women who stay home to care for children are still not getting their full property entitlement at divorce because neither they – nor their husbands – value the homemaker’s contribution enough, according to new research.

The Australian Institute of Family Studies has also found that women in wealthy partnerships receive a smaller relative share of the matrimonial assets than women from couples who are less well off. This is because men and women tend to view a share of the marital home as the woman’s right but see other assets, such as shares or real estate, differently.

“The non-financial contribution made to these assets, particularly the domestic activities performed by one spouse that frees the other spouse to work directly for financial reward, are disregarded when property is divided,” write researchers Grania Sheehan and Jody Hughes in the latest issue of the institute’s magazine, Family Matters.

“The wife’s share of assets is reduced where non-domestic assets, such as investments, businesses and superannuation, comprise a high proportion of the couple’s asset wealth.”

The big exception was marriages in which both partners had shared work and domestic tasks.

“Women who report having taken a traditional role in household management – that is, primary responsibility for the day-to-day care of children and cleaning, while the husband had primary responsibility for household maintenance and paying the bills
– received a share of property well below the mean share for women overall.

“Conversely, women who reported sharing responsibility for all household tasks equally with their former spouse (including paying the bills) received a share of property above the mean share for women overall.”

The report, The Division of Matrimonial Property in Australia, is based on data from the Australian Divorce Transitions Project, a random national telephone survey of 650 divorced people held in late 1997.

The researchers said the future needs of dependent children appeared to have been the most important consideration at the time of settlement “and the financial needs of the former spouse may have been overlooked”. But men and women regarded such settlements as fair.

The assumption that the domestic sphere is where women’s entitlements lie produced this paradox: “The greater the percentage of asset wealth accounted for by domestic assets such as the family home and furnishings, the fairer men reported the settlement to be, even though the more domestic assets were in the pool, the more the wife received.”

Researchers found criticisms by men’s groups that women were unduly favored in settlements were not supported. The share received shifted in favor of the resident parent regardless of whether that parent was the mother or the father.

For men and women, being happy with the property settlement was strongly linked to being happy with the children’s arrangements. Men who reported the child support arrangements and property settlements as fair also tended to be men who had frequent contact with their children.

Arrangements with the other spouse were governed by the view that there should be a “clean break”, with no ongoing responsibility for each other’s welfare. Spousal maintenance was rare, minimal and brief, usually paid as bridging finance until property matters were finalised.

Women who had spent more than a third of the marriage out of paid work – those most in need of spousal maintenance – were the group least likely to support the idea. “This suggests that women, particularly those from more traditional marriages, may underestimate their entitlement to matrimonial property based on their own financial need (independently of the needs of the children),” the report said.

Another study based on the same telephone survey, Financial Living Standards after Divorce, found that women are still more likely than men to experience economic hardship but that single fathers are emerging as the most disadvantaged group of divorced men.

Researchers Ruth Weston and Bruce Smyth found that up to 65 per cent of older divorced women had low incomes, as did 44 per cent of younger sole mothers. “Like the patterns for women, the most disadvantaged men were those living alone (both older and younger groups) or as sole fathers (all of whom were in the younger group).

“The most advantaged group appeared to be those living with a partner and no children, all of whom were male respondents from the younger sample. Two thirds had incomes at the highest level, and only 11 per cent had low incomes.”

But overall, the rate of disadvantage for men was higher than observed in previous studies, with 16 per cent of young men relying on social security payments, compared to 2 per cent in a similar survey in 1993.

This report found that repartnering remains the main way out of financial difficulties for women, and hence their children, following divorce. But women are generally less likely than men to repartner, and the poorest among both sexes have the dimmest repartnering prospects.

Researcher Jody Hughes reports in Marginal Mates and Unwedded Women, a third Family Matters article, that repartnering is most common among men and women with an average economic profile.

It is unlikely for those with few resources: “In particular, women with inconsistent work histories and lower asset wealth were less likely to repartner, and men on the fringes of the labor market were clearly also on the fringes of the `mating market’. This suggests that unemployment, work insecurity and income inequality are influencing patterns of relationship formation and dissolution in Australia.

“Men and women who are unemployed, or in precarious or insecure employment, may be socially as well as economically marginalised, with fewer opportunities to meet people and establish relationships.”

Women with greater economic resources are less likely to remarry than other women, says Hughes.

First published in The Age.

Daughters’ lives better, poll says

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Most Australian women believe their lives are more fulfilled than their mothers’ and that they have a good balance between work and family – but few thank employers for it, seeing them as unsympathetic to working women’s needs.

In a national Saulwick Age Poll of 800 women taken last weekend, only 14 per cent said they believed most employers were sympathetic to working women’s need to juggle family and other responsibilities.

Forty-five per cent conceded that some employers were sympathetic but almost a third (32 per cent) thought few or none were sympathetic. Younger women were more inclined to see employers as understanding.

The results suggest that while workplace reform remains a priority in the struggle for equal opportunity the changing role of women has improved their lives dramatically.

A total of 73 per cent of women believed that their lives were better than their mothers’, with 40 per cent seeing them as much better. Twenty-one per cent said their lives were about the same, with less than 5 per cent reporting their lives to be worse.

The older a woman was the bigger the difference she reported between her happiness and that of her mother. This could be because the mothers of older women came from a pre-pill generation with fewer opportunities.

Most of the women polled worked outside the home (57 per cent, rising to 70 per cent of those aged under 54). Eighty-seven per cent felt they had a liveable balance between work, family and leisure; 65 per cent rated it as good or very good and 22 per cent as fair.

Labor-voting women were less likely to be satisfied with this aspect of their lot than coalition voters.

Among those who felt their balance was fair, poor or very poor, the main cause of their stress was work expectations (34 per cent), followed by lack of personal fulfilment (20 per cent) and lack of support from their partners (15 per cent).

For 9 per cent, child care was the main problem. Surprisingly, women with no children were only slightly more likely to report having a better balance.

Asked to choose the issue of greatest importance to them from a list of seven, 30 per cent nominated health and 23 per cent the effect on households of the goods and services tax. Education came next (14 per cent), followed by equal opportunity in the workforce (13 per cent).

Similar numbers nominated the environment (7.4 per cent) and child-care issues (6.6 per cent). Only 5 per cent nominated unemployment.

Surveys of this kind are subject to normal sampling variance, which in a sample of 800 could be up to plus or minus 3.5 per cent.

First published in The Age.

Gay women call for IVF law reform

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Haley Atkinson hadn’t planned on becoming a figurehead for gay rights. All she wanted was a baby. When she and a gay friend failed to conceive conventionally, they turned to IVF, which in Victoria is forbidden to gays.

They achieved the baby, notoriety and a court hearing. Ms Atkinson and Haydn’s father, Sergeant Mark Keen, then both police officers, were charged with having provided false information or failing to provide relevant information when applying for IVF treatment.

On Tuesday, they sat holding hands as the charges were dismissed by Mr John Hardy in the Melbourne Magistrates Court. He found there was no evidence against Ms Atkinson and insufficient evidence against Mr Keen. He awarded costs in their favor.

The media could not report the case until a suppression order on the proceedings was lifted yesterday.

Ms Atkinson, who has since resigned from the force, said she was relieved to have the ordeal over: “I have no regrets that I have a beautiful baby, but I wish it hadn’t had to have been such a big event.”
She said it was time the law was changed. “Every single person I have come across in shops or whatever has said (the charges) were a load of nonsense. People who know us say, `You’re good people; you deserve to bring up a child because you have a lot of love to give’.”

Ms Atkinson lives with her partner, Ms Joy Murphy, but Mr Keen is also involved in raising six-month-old Haydn. Both women regret that Ms Murphy has no legal rights over the child. She cannot adopt him without Ms Atkinson giving up her rights as a mother.

Ms Murphy said, “Legally, I don’t exist. But I see the look in Haydn’s eyes when I walk in the room. He loves me, and Haley knows it and Mark knows it.

“I may have no legal rights but Mark is the most decent man I have ever met. He wanted to buy a high chair when Haydn was born and he checked with Haley first about whether it would offend me. We are all good friends.”

Both women said that the Infertility Treatment Act contradicted the Equal Opportunity Act, which forbids discrimination in provision of services on the grounds of marital status or sexual orientation.

Dr Ruth McNair, convenor of the Fertility Access Rights Lobby, called on the State Government to make artificial insemination and IVF available to lesbians and single women.

She said New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania did not confine such treatments to married or de facto heterosexuals. International human rights covenants signed by Australia obliged governments to provide equal access to fertility services.

But the secretary of the Australian Family Association, Mr Bill Muehlenberg, said the rights of the child should also be considered, and the traditional family unit was the best way to raise children.

Mr Muehlenberg said the risk of child sexual abuse doubled in families where the child was not living with its biological father, and that in a homosexual relationship, only one partner could be a biological parent to the child.

The Minister for Health, Mr John Thwaites, was unavailable for comment yesterday.

Ms Atkinson would like more children, but she will probably travel to NSW for treatment.

First published in The Age.

We must protect the poor as we rush to globalisation

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SUPERSTITIONS supposedly developed when people noticed coincidences and interpreted them as meaningfully connected. An eclipse of the sun followed by plague? The gods must be angry; future eclipses must be accompanied by propitiatory offerings.

Is something similar happening with trade liberalisation?
It’s a force many westerners have come to associate with high unemployment, rural and regional decline and wages stagnation (for workers, that is). But it has become impossible to disentangle the consequences of trade liberalisation from those of an accompanying factor: the flight of government from its obligation to minimise the collateral damage, that is, the cost to human beings.

Easing the social harm caused by pursuing otherwise desirable goals is not a freakish concept even in business circles, where it’s called “managing change”. But according to a recent assessment by the International Labor Organisation, governments world-wide are struggling to adequately manage the changes wrought by lowered protection and globalisation because tax cuts have limited their ability to do so.

A recent untitled report, prepared for the ILO’s governing body by its working party on the social dimensions of international trade, found that, between the years 1986 and 1998, 67 out of 69 countries examined had cut the top tax rate of high-income
earners.

This near-universal trend towards lower taxation suggested that tax systems were becoming less redistributive, the report said. Those making pots of money from the new economic order are not having to share as much of their winnings with those who are being displaced by it.

The report was not written by “Seattle men”. In fact, it concluded that trade liberalisation was good because it stimulated economic activity, boosted productivity, and held out a prospect of raising standards of living, although “the process is neither instantaneous nor painless”. Neither the ILO nor any of the 69 countries it surveyed saw a return to protection as an option.

But the researchers found that, to date, globalisation had deepened the divide between winners and losers, as income gaps widened and states’ ability to improve the lot of their poorest citizens diminished. The report concluded that trade liberalisation alone did nothing to eliminate inequalities or promote social progress within individual nations. The rich are still getting richer and the poor are still getting poorer.

Is anyone surprised?

The ILO director-general, Juan Somavia, warned that “the world cannot divorce social and employment issues from other developments in the global economy if the processes of globalisation are to prove sustainable”. In other words, people won’t cop this indefinitely.

He’s right. Other surveys have found that the nations with the highest violent crime rates tend not to be the poorest but those in which the gap between rich and poor is widest. The fuel for social instability is not poverty alone but a mixture of poverty and resentment.

At this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair tugged their forelocks in the general direction of this problem. Both argued that the new order must take better account of social justice issues and the concerns of “little guys”. Clinton suggested the World Trade Organisation system should be reformed to give more weight to labor standards and the environment.

In this he echoed the ILO report. It advocates strengthening globalisation’s “social pillar”: improved education and training, secure social safety nets, and the adoption of labor laws that both encourage economic adaptability and protect vulnerable groups and core international labor standards.

The difficulty is that such measures require government funding and commitment, but governments worldwide are lowering taxes and winding back employment protections because they fear capital might otherwise flee to more accommodating climes.

If there can be international consensus on lowering trade barriers, there should be efforts to develop consensus on how to buffer those who will suffer from it. Pro-globalisers always try to dismiss this argument by pointing out that the current changes are helping the Third World. They see calls for buffers as self-interested attempts to shore up the unfair advantages of First World economies.

But if the ILO report is correct, the issue is not trade liberalisation itself but the way First World governments have failed to protect their own poor – in particular, unskilled workers – from bearing an unfair part of the burden of change.

Globalisation has an image problem. Opponents vilify it as multinationals using the club of capital to bend governments to their will. If governments continue to retreat from their role as protectors of the common good, they face losing more than just the propaganda war.

Seattle showed that people are becoming angry enough for violence. Future trade concessions should be accompanied by propitiatory offerings on social justice.

First published in The Age.

Women forced to fill `care’ gaps

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Victorian women’s lives had become harder because Kennett Government policies had transferred the responsibility of caring from the public to the private domain, according to the latest report of the People Together Project.

The report, Women: Balancing Social Justice with Economic Efficiency, said women are forced to fill the gaps left by early discharge from hospital, the closure of childcare centres and the tightening of criteria for respite services.

“Ancillary services such as the Royal District Nurses and many community health care services now incur fees, which many women are unable to afford,” the report says.

The report is based on information from a two-day public inquiry to which 53 organisations made submissions, and three “women’s audits” involving interviews and focus groups in city, regional and rural communities.

It is to be launched today by Ms Felicity Hampel, QC, president of Liberty Victoria.

The report challenged the former Kennett Government’s claim that its economic and social reforms brought a better quality of life for Victorian women through its “social dividend”.

“In fact, many women now carry heavier burdens than ever because of widespread cuts to services,” the report said.

The report criticised lower standards of care in public hospitals, closures of family planning centres and long waits for help from mother-and-baby units.

It said a lack of public housing had left an increasing number of women living in sub-standard accommodation, and many mothers were struggling to pay higher fees for kindergartens and cope with “voluntary” levies and fundraising activities for schools.

It said restructuring of school councils had discouraged women from standing, while the amount of time and responsibility required of women on kindergarten committees of management was frequently equivalent to a part-time job.

The report said caps on legal aid funding in Family Court matters forced some women to remain in violent or unhappy relationships or to represent themselves in court when trying to protect their own or their children’s entitle-ments.

“In one instance, a client instructed his barrister to keep a woman in the witness box for as long as possible so that her legal aid would run dry,” the report said.

It said the contracting out of health, education and community services – traditional employers of large numbers of women – had reduced women’s jobs, job security, and pay and conditions.

Ms Hampel said the report’s findings were “a shameful indictment on a society which prides itself on fairness, equality of opportunity and access”.

The shadow minister for women’s affairs, Ms Leonie Burke, said yesterday that the former Liberal Government had recognised carers of the aged and disabled needed support and had pioneered a four-year, $100million program to help them.

She said the Government had also consulted women over their needs, culminating in the Women on the Move report.

The People Together Project describes itself as a non-party political organisation that assesses the impact of government policies on social justice.

* CASE STUDY 1

“The intern was doing an epidural whilst the supervising doctor was not present. Twice her (sciatic nerve) was touched. On the third attempt her respiratory system was knocked out and plasma was required to resuscitate herThe supervising doctor arrived and (asked) why they were using a glass syringe. The intern replied that they thought because of the need to save resources, they’d use the cheaper reusable type of syringe, despite it being more difficult to use.”

* CASE STUDY 2

“Jennifer, a mother of two secondary-school aged children, approached (a charity) distressed that she was unable to afford her children’s school fees (voluntary levies). She was embarrassed when she attempted to negotiate payment arrangements with school staff. Jennifer said, `I was abused by the secretary and told that schools were not banks.’ It was then suggested that she apply for credit elsewhere.”

* CASE STUDY 3

“One woman was on the waiting list for public housing for 8 years. Then her daughter turned 16 and she was removed from the list altogether because she was no longer classified as a supporting parent.”

First published in The Age.

If abortion is a religious issue, why is the state involved?

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I ONCE met a woman who taught sex education in a Catholic school. She was warm and enthusiastic and transparently sincere. She told me Catholic schools had changed, and that she was able to teach girls they had choices about their sexuality.

“They can choose to be chaste until marriage, or they can choose to be the town bike,” she said, beaming. “Uh, huh,” was the most neutral response I could muster.

She was as entitled to her belief in the two absolutes – chastity or promiscuity – as I was to my belief that there is a responsible middle course involving neither. And her attitude was no skin off my nose because she was never going to impose it on me or mine; she moulded children whose parents sought out an educational system imbued with those values. Each to their own.

If only there were such a clear division between church and state in the abortion debate. This is an arena where those driven by religious belief often wield power out of all proportion to their support in the community.

Last week a visiting American doctor was detained and told he would be deported or imprisoned if he advocated “activities” in relation to abortion. This followed lobbying of the Immigration Minister, Philip Ruddock, by anti-abortion groups.

In America, President Bill Clinton has agreed to limit aid for international family planning initiatives that support abortion. Republican congressional leaders have for years refused to pass Budget legislation allowing the US to pay its back dues to the United Nations unless Clinton agreed to the restrictions.

Although pro-choice himself – heaven help any man married to Hillary who wasn’t – Clinton capitulated this time because the US faced losing its seat in the UN General Assembly if the debts remained unpaid. Now organisations funded by US money will be forbidden to lobby for liberalised abortion laws.

There will be little joy about that among desperate women in countries such as Nepal, where six women a day die from botched illegal abortions and two-thirds of women in prison are there for abortion or infanticide.

Like the sex ed teacher, these Republicans deal in moral absolutes: abortion is always wrong, never mind poverty or illness, rape or incest or despair. But, unlike the sex ed teacher, they are in a position to impose their views on others who differ.

The power of the American anti-choice movement is understandable. Opposition to abortion is strongly linked to church attendance, and a third of Americans regularly front up in their Sunday best, compared with only one-fifth of Australians.

The US is also a country in which the separation of church and state has favored religion. Its founding fathers, having fled persecution in the old world, focused more on protecting freedom of worship from state intervention than protecting the sovereignty of the state from religion.

But why is it that Australian anti-abortion campaigners – most of whom have strong links to churches – have so much political influence?

It’s certainly not because they speak for the community. Research findings released this week suggest only three in a hundred Australians oppose abortion under all circumstances.

Among the 2151 people surveyed, 97per cent said abortion should be allowed in cases of danger to the mother’s health, 92 per cent after rape, and 88 per cent where there was a strong likelihood of a serious birth defect. Most said abortion should be allowed for reasons such as poverty, unwed motherhood, or couples wanting no more children.

These views do not fit with abortion’s continued position in the Victorian criminal code. They do not fit with restrictions on the morning-after pill RU486, or the inability of many rural women to gain access to abortion services.

The report said the abortion debate remains very much a religious matter, with churchgoing the single most important factor differentiating opponents from supporters.

It concluded that “the separation of church and state” is actually a polite fiction that can be maintained only in the face of consensus about central values. Where the two do separate over values, there is friction, with abortion providing the clearest example.

The results of a previous survey tell us how Australians think such conflicts should be handled: only one-third believes it is appropriate for religious leaders to try to influence government decisions.

There is a case for churches to speak out on social justice issues because they are such big providers of services to those in need. Their dictates on reproductive morality are another matter.

Extremism in relation to abortion has declined in the past decade. Most Australians have come to understand that this painful, tragic, private business is a bad thing in itself, but justifiable if it avoids something even worse. They have abandoned the false certainty of black-and-white positions to grapple with the complexities of greys.

Some will see the shift away from the absolutism of “never” as godlessness. Most of us, though, will recognise it as a moral coming-of-age.

First published in The Age.