Verity M.
There is no suggestion that the Commission Report is deliberately
structured to discriminate against women.
However, any reforms that are designed to protect privilege and ensure the working class pay for the mismanagement and profligacy of the rich, will impact unevenly on women, whether its restrictions on aged care, pensions, health or education, in fact almost any area of public spending.
Just being female in Australia carries a greater risk of
being impoverished by social structures such as fewer employment opportunities,
gendered divisions of labour and lower paid work.
Women make up the bulk of those in aged care; if they don’t
have disabilities themselves, they are caring for those who do, either parents
or children; they are the low wage earners or part- time workers, or subsisting
on part-work part-welfare, or are on
single parent benefits or are the majority of aged pensioners; they are the
lowest category of superannuation recipients because of disrupted paid work due
to child and family caring. In almost
all of the disadvantaged demographics women are over represented.
As child bearers and carers women are dependant, as they
should be, on community services. They
rely on good schools, accessible health care for themselves and their children,
on affordable child-care. Any cuts in
public services whether it is child-care, health, education, disability support
or aged care, impact on many aspects of women’s lives. Any privatising or outsourcing of public
services will benefit capital, but it will disadvantage women and raise the
cost and limit those services on which low paid women and their children
depend. For single-parent women low-paid
work, part time work, or no work means a continuous and debilitating struggle
to pay rent, pay school fees or extra education costs such as excursions, camps
or-out-of school sport or maintain a car, resources considered essential
requirements for the average Australian family but from which many women and
their children are locked out.
0lder women are amongst Australia’s
poorest demographic and feature increasingly in homeless figures. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare
quote a figure of 4800 Victorian women seeking homeless assistance an increase
of 34% in 2012-13 over the previous year, a figure that can only be relieved by
increased social housing, something we are not going to see any time soon.
Another recent report “Older
Women’s Pathways out of Homelessness In Australia” (women over 55) commissioned
by the Mercy Foundation and conducted by Queensland University attributed their
homelessness to the high cost of rental, unemployment, broken relationships or
partner death or family violence but underlying all causes was lack of secure
housing. Australian house prices have
risen by 150% whilst incomes have risen by 57%.
City rentals have risen by twice the rate of inflation and the report found
there was a national shortage of around five hundred thousand houses. At the same time, demand is rising. In the
five years to 2011 the number of older women renting privately jumped by
70%. All of this is compounded by women’s
limited access to superannuation.
The medium level of
superannuation for women is $48,000 - if
they have it at all.
Australia is a low taxing economy
and spends less on social security than almost all similar economies. In Australia we spend 8.6% of Gross National
Product on social security compared to an OECD average of 13%. The
International Monetary Fund (2013) found that Australia collected between 70%
and 74% of its tax capacity, so compared to others we (and primarily the rich
and the corporations) are paying less tax than others and providing lower
levels of social services for community well-being.
A meaningful mining tax and a tax
on banks and other super profits could help relieve the situation for the short term. But we know that in all capitalist countries
a trend that is going to intensify, according to almost all economists, is a
continuing increase in the gap between the rich and the poor.
In fact fear of social unrest is driving
bourgeois economists to write books about the dangers of too much inequality
whereas social unrest to generate social action is just what is needed to drive
fundamental social change and a redistribution of wealth to eliminate poverty
and growing inequality.
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