After a decades long campaign, in September 2019 we finally achieved abortion law reform in NSW – giving anyone with a uterus the right to make their own decisions about their bodies. It wasn’t easy, but by working together with our Greens colleagues, community campaigners, health care professionals, civil liberties and human rights groups, we finally got it done.
But there is still so much to do to ensure full gender equality.
It's past time for women to have equal pay, equal representation in Parliament, and safe housing for women escaping domestic violence.
The Coalition Government is failing women. Seventy-eight domestic violence assaults are reported to the police every day, while the reality is likely worse. Not only do the Going Home Staying Home reforms not work, they actively infringe on a woman’s ability to leave an abusive domestic situation, and they create a bottleneck crisis in a service that is already under-resourced and struggling to meet demand.
The gender pay gap is widening and many women continue to face discrimination in the workplace while pregnant.
The Greens have been fighting hard to protect women's rights and bodies. We initiated a federal senate inquiry into domestic violence. We were part of the successful campaign to restore funding to a number of women-only refuges in the inner-city, and we continue to demand that other specialist services in regional and western Sydney have their funding returned too.
The Greens are committed to:
- Prioritising family violence as an issue that must be addressed by government.
- Defending women’s specialist services and ensuring that crisis services are run by women for women.
- Supporting additional resourcing and training to enable police to respond effectively to domestic and family violence.
- Protecting a woman’s right to safety, both psychological and physical.
- Recognising that women come from different cultural backgrounds, and that laws and services must be inclusive of all women.
- Ensuring equal access for all women to reproductive health services.
- Working towards reducing the gender pay gap in NSW.
- Ensuring that women are properly represented at all levels of government.
