zaterdag 27 oktober 2012

Visual storytelling IAW event Towards Equality Melbourne 2012 #IAWMel


Entrance Queen Victoria's Women's Centre were International Alliance of Women Melbourne event was. Special of QVWC is the Shilling Wall.



More participants than earlier brought their own devices: laptops and tablets. And there was the first live reporting by Twitter #IAWMel

Helen L'Orange, WEL Australia Chair, inspired us by telling how Women's Electoral Lobby (WEL) recruits younger members (below 30) and uses Facebook and Twitter in a successful manner as networking tools @welaust 

Unique of IAW is 
Helen L'Orange: institutional sustainability: its consultative status and influence with the UN since 1948!
Lene Pind, Secretary-General IAW: a real NGO working from the grassroots level through national, to regional onto international level.
Speaker Susan Ryan has a strong focus on gender equality in politics and now is Age Discrimination Commissioner. Australia has to support a UN Convention on the Rights of Older People, including a right to information and to learn new digital skills. 

Melbourne Girls' College with the Purple, White & Green  - feminist colours - who want to lead & achieve. In 1993 I visited an exhibition with the same title about Suffragettes in London 1906-1914. 'Purple ... stands for freedom and dignity, white stands for purity in private and public life ... green is the colour of hope and the emblem of spring.' Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, 1908
Sri Samy Candidate for Lightwood Ward of City of Greater Dandenong. She is a small business owner and one of 664 women candidates (just over 33%) in the local government elections in Victoria. I helped her door knocking. We spoke to 45 people, got 13 banners confirmed and distributed 350 flyers.
Last results: 34% of Councillors in Victoria are women ranging from 1 woman to 6 women. Unfortunately Sri Samy is not elected at 27th of October. 
Switch Cover image 300px
Initiative by Victorian Women's Trust for women & girls: A switch in time restoring respect to Australian politics by Mary Crooks. Launched in September 2012 is a call to action in gender equality, strengthening democracy and climate change. See also blog Women in Politics

A contribution to 'she is young, she is fifty' are fiftyshadesof50.com.au/ She is 50+, confident, healthy and has a mid-life opportunity. Online? Of Course!


dinsdag 23 oktober 2012

Women in politics in Australia: WEL, feminists, misogyny and Julia Gillard #IAWMel

I attended two events of which the Women´s Electoral Lobby (WEL) was one of the organizers. The first was the International Meeting of the International Alliance of Women in Melbourne and the second was when WEL NSW celebrated 40 years in Sydney. WEL is a national, independent, non-party political, feminist lobby group. 
The most interesting speeches were about first female Prime Minister Julia Gillard in Australia: the way she was treated, her 'Gillard labels Abbot a misogynist' speech in parliament - which has more than 2 million views at YouTube - and feminists. Misogyny is a synonym for sexism. 

1. Speech Clare Wright

Quotes out of the speech ´Gender and power in Australia: The world is watching´ by Dr. Clare Wright delivered to #IAWMel 11/10/12. She is a feminist historian who produced the beautiful one-hour documentary Utopia Girls about how (white) women got the right to vote and stand for Parliament in Australia in 1902.



´´Julia Gillard herself delivered a blistering attack on the Federal Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, labeling him a misogynist and forensically dissecting his appalling track record of sexist comments in parliament and elsewhere. 

This is the moment that so many of us have been waiting for. Gillard is a smart, tough, canny, intelligent woman ... 


This week, she seems to have said, ‘Bugger it. Enough’s enough’ and adopted the activist logic of Anne Summers, who earlier this month, in her well-publicised expose of the sexist barrage of abuse hurled at Gillard on a daily basis in the online and commercial media, challenged us all to say ‘It stops with me’. This week, it stopped with the Prime Minister, and some would argue it’s the first time that she has shown the moral compass of true leadership. ...
The full 15-minute speech has been downloaded from YouTube a staggering 400,000 times. According to the ABC’s website, overnight ‘Gillard’ was one of the world’s top trending words on Twitter, ‘her Question Time tirade’ making headlines in the US, Britain, India, South Africa and Canada.``


2. Speech Melanie Fernandez 

Quotes out of the speech by Melanie Fernandez WEL NSW Convenor 19/10/12 when WEL NSW celebrated 40 years in Sydney.
 Half of this WEL Executive are women under 30!
´´When Julia Gillard became our Prime Minister I was pretty much as excited as you would expect a feminist to be. But somewhere between intense discussions of the Prime Minister’s marital status and lack of children and the ditch the witch signs I started to realise just how far we have not come. I asked myself would a man have been asked that? Would a man have had that said about them?
It was great to see a woman in position of Prime Minister – but frankly it felt pretty awful to see her treated that way. It brought into sharp focus the persistent sexism in our culture.
Then the Prime Minister made THAT speech. It was the culmination of all the treatment she experienced and that women around the country have watched with growing horror. THAT speech actually saw Julia Gillard’s Prime Ministership do what I never expected it to do: smash the equality myth.
The myth that young women were sold growing up – that we have achieved equality; that we are living in a post-feminist era where all the battles for gender equity have been won.
THAT speech told a different story. Yes, Australia can have a female Prime Minister, but it won’t treat her the same way as it has treated generations of male Prime Ministers. She will have to withstand more personal and vitriolic abuse, and be held to different standards. Men and women are not treated equally – not yet anyway.
Now more and more women are saying that they have had enough.``


In do not know recent speeches and events attacking so outspoken sexism in political life in the Netherlands and connecting feminists and history! Do you?