Principles
The Greens NSW assert that all women have a right to:
1. Respect, safety, opportunity and self-determination in society.
2. Opportunities for full participation by all women:
- In all areas of life - government, business, economic, community, social and domestic;
- Including first Australians and other women who experience added barriers, such as women with disabilities, trans women and women from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds, acknowledging that these women often face intersectional discrimination.
3. Equitable participation in all decision-making processes.
4. Legislation to reform and remove sources of direct, indirect and systematic discrimination against women.
5. Safety, both psychological and physical, for all women at home, in the community, and in the workplace.
6. Full bodily and reproductive autonomy and to make decisions in all aspects of their lives including lifestyle, sexual identity, health, education, and career choice.
7. Recognition of the distinct and different needs and aspirations of all women including women from diverse backgrounds.
8. Equal access to all forms of education, training and work.
9. Affirmative action to ensure equality of opportunity in education and in the workplace.
10. Ensuring that all Greens policies are developed with consideration of the impacts on women and with input from women.
11. The particular needs and rights of First Nations women to self-determination and full access to social, economic and health services that ensure their full participation and rightful status in their communities and society.
Aims
The Greens NSW will work towards:
A. Public participation and decision making
12. Ensuring that any reform is consistent with Australia's commitment to the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
13. Applying affirmative action to ensure equitable representation of women:
- In decision-making processes including all levels of government;
- In all public and corporate boards and committees;
- On legislative and judicial bodies;
- Within senior level positions within the public service;
- Within senior faculty and administration positions in the tertiary sector.
14. Ensuring that in the domestic sector and those industries where women predominate that women have at least equal representation in environmental planning and decision-making.
15. Implementing strategies to ensure that women's needs and advice are considered in the area of urban planning.
16. Mandate the monitoring and reporting of equal opportunity and anti-discrimination strategies and programs.
B. Affirmative action
The Greens NSW will:
17. Enact affirmative action procedures within party activities including:
- Providing appropriate funding and support for an annual Women’s conference;
- Using a progressive speakers list at all meetings and events that ensures equity of male and female speakers;
- Holding an annual women-hosted SDC with appropriate funding for speakers and workshops;
- Ensuring that at least 50% of facilitators at Greens events are women;
- Providing support and funding for programs and strategies to enable women to develop skills to be effective candidates and members of parliament or local councillors, and actively encouraging and promoting women to stand as candidates in elections;
- Providing support and funding for a leadership program that develops skills to enable women to actively participate in the Greens NSW at all levels.
C. Health, safety and elimination of violence against women
18. Continually reviewing all laws that have a bearing on violence against women including:
- Assault and treatment of survivors and perpetrators;
- Stalking, harassment and exposure via social media or internet;
- Intimidation and bullying; and
- Sexual consent laws.
19. Developing further solutions for the protection of victims and for naming of perpetrators.
20. Addressing victim-blaming and ‘slut’-shaming by promoting change in societal attitudes to violence and the right of women to self-determination.
21. Using culturally appropriate publicity and educational campaigns to bring about a change in the way violence is viewed in our society, including strategies to educate men that violence against women is a crime
22. Supporting education from early primary school onwards on a. non-violent conflict resolution; and b. the meaning and importance of consent.
23. Addressing the health effects, both physical and emotional, of violence against women, through adequately funded, appropriate health and education programs.
24. Establishing a national inquiry into all forms of sexual assault, including assault within marriage and relationships, and implementation of uniform sexual assault laws.
25. Expanding crisis services for women, with and without children, by:
- Providing refuges, including specialist women’s refuges and services to victims of rape, incest, female circumcision and domestic violence;
- Ensuing that these services receive a long-term funding commitment and are adequately resourced;
- Ensuring that these services are community or publicly run and not for profit.
26. Making special provision for rural and remote communities, and providing services that are culturally and linguistically appropriate for First Nations women, refugee women, and women from ethnically, culturally and socially diverse backgrounds.
27. Ensuring access by women, including refugee women, to safe and secure accommodation through a comprehensive housing policy and the provision of adequate emergency housing.
28. Increased joint Commonwealth/State funding of community-based Women's Health Centres.
29. Ensuring research and development funds are allocated equitably for research into women’s health problems.
30. Ensuring education of health providers with regard to women's health issues.
31. Improving women's access to information and support services regarding their health in order that appropriate personal decisions can be made.
32. Repealing all laws that restrict the right of pregnant people to choose abortion and/or restricts their access to services.
33. Ensuring access to legal, free, and safe abortion services for all people who are pregnant, including decriminalisation, and ensuring provision in the public health system and enactment of safe access zones outside reproductive health services.
34. Providing strategies for more women medical practitioners to enter those specialisations where women are currently under-represented.
35. Supporting increased provision of midwifery services.
36. Ensuring that legislation prohibiting female genital mutilation is enforced, including in situations where the person has been taken overseas.
37. Ensuring a strong focus on prevention of female genital mutilation, including continued funding of necessary education programs focusing on the dangers and lifelong health implications of female genital mutilation.
38. Introducing legislation that makes forced sterilisation illegal.
39. Ensuring access to safe contraception on demand for all women, and to information on options available.
40. Ensuring all women have real choices of where and how to give birth and to information about available options, including educating women about the process of childbirth so they are empowered to make informed choices.
41. Ensuring that the critical bond between mother and child is preserved and that all possible and reasonable steps are taken to enable children to grow up in the care and responsibility of their natural parents or family of origin.
42. Ensuring increased provision of parenting programs that support young mothers and babies.
43. Ensuring sufficient funding of supporting parents benefits to provide for women and their children.
44. Supporting equitable access for women to recreation facilities, coaching, sports education, competition, media coverage and funding.
45. Raising awareness of women's rights to equal recreation and its importance.
46. Actively advocating improved access and participation of women in sport.
D. Participation in the workforce/building economic power of women
The Greens NSW will work towards:
47. Ensuring apprenticeships and training programs provide equal opportunities for women.
48. Ensuring equal opportunities for workers with family responsibilities.
49. Ensuring the provision of adequate child care facilities in the workplace.
50. Encouraging flexible and secure working conditions.
51. Providing centres for continuing education and training for women workers.
52. Providing maternity and paternity leave equal status in order to encourage the sharing of the parenting roles and equality of gender in the workplace.
53. Providing parental leave on full pay and entitlements for a period of up to twelve months.
54. Taking steps to facilitate re-entry, without loss of occupational status, of people who exit the workforce for parental or family responsibilities leave.
55. Undertaking programs to raise awareness of issues of gender equity in the workplace.
56. Giving priority to the needs of First Nations women for education and employment opportunities.
57. Ensuring equal pay for equal work, and that women are free from systemic discrimination in workplace conditions, employment relationships and opportunities for promotion or advancement.
58. Actively collaborating with unions to improve pay and conditions for women workers in low status roles where women have traditionally dominated and ensure provision of leave for domestic violence for all women.
59. Ensuring women are adequately and equally represented in the enterprise bargaining process across all sectors.
60. Ensuring changes brought about by strategies relating to the elimination of sexual discrimination do not place undue and unequal responsibility upon women and add to women's workload.
61. Ensuring allocation of funding and awards is not discriminatory and allows equal opportunity for women.
62. Ensuring that women have access to adequate income and secure housing in retirement by:
- Improving superannuation systems to eliminate gender gaps; and
- Ensuring that publicly funded pensions meet the cost of living with dignity.
63. Ensuring that sole parents, the majority of whom are women, receive sufficient income until their children reach independence.
E. Education
64. Maintaining high quality educational outcomes for women and girls.
65. Eliminating gender-based harassment in school and educational institutions.
66. Ensuring that teacher-training for new and continuing teachers critically examines the patterns of sex-role-stereotyping that occurs in our society.
67. Maintaining curricula and programs to overcome the attitudes inherent in our society that result in different expectations for girls and boys.
68. Maintaining existing, and establishing new, programs that promote girls' and women's participation in areas where their participation is under-represented.
69. Ensuring that leadership roles within all school systems are shared equally among women and men.
70. Fostering and developing state programs to maintain girls' and women's participation in school, TAFE and university education, especially in science and technology disciplines.
71. Maintaining the application of affirmative action to increase the number of women in senior, policy and decision-making positions in educational systems, including universities.
72. Enhancing bridging courses for women to facilitate their entry into the formal education arena.
73. Developing strategies to offset any disadvantage to women caused by the impact of fees on women's participation in tertiary education, including TAFE and post-secondary education.
74. Supporting the right of school students to wear unisex clothing.
75. Promoting policies to achieve a higher retention rate of women at higher degree levels in universities.
F. Prevention of discrimination on the basis of gender
76. Opposing the production, performance, and display of pornographic material where it discriminates against women and children by presenting them as suitable objects for violence or sexual exploitation, and validates forms of power and pleasure achieved by disempowering and injuring women and children.
77. Promoting the use of legal complaints procedures and processes in cases of discrimination.
78. Encouraging critical examination of news and entertainment industry’s reportage and framing of violence against women and children.
79. Encouraging critical examination of the role of media, entertainment and advertising industries in perpetuating gender roles, gender based stereotyping and the normalisation of women and children as victims of violent and sexual exploitation.
80. Strengthening laws that prohibit the portrayal of women or children as objects of violence or sexual exploitation.
81. Removing sexist language from existing laws, and ensuring future legislation is non-sexist and does not assume assignment of roles according to sex, including but not limited to what constitutes a 'family' and a 'woman's' role in family relations.
82. Repealing criminal laws relating to sex work and supporting the full decriminalisation of consensual adult sex work.
83. Ensuring workplace health and safety standards and anti-discrimination protections for sex work are implemented across the industry.
84. Examining, updating and reforming laws protecting women, such as anti-discrimination legislation, equal opportunity and sex discrimination, affirmative action and equal pay, property and family rights.
85. Adequately funding women’s legal and social resource centres that specialise in laws affecting women across all of the above sectors, including women’s refuges.
G. Justice
86. Support the provision of services that address the needs of criminalised women, in particular, services that divert them away from prisons and provide alternative programs to incarceration, particularly for mothers and First Nations women.
87. Support women who have experienced imprisonment to access community based services on release to re-establish themselves in the community, particularly housing.