Women’s services decimated in NSW
Over the last 40 years, a network of women’s specialist support services has painstakingly been built in NSW. Like every other grossly under-funded sector in health and welfare services in Australia, this network has never been adequate to meet the need for services.
Yet, in spite of the conscious neglect of governments, the tireless, skilful and creative work of women in the sector established a group of specialised services for women with diverse needs – women who are often in extreme danger and experiencing complex trauma.
Now, after NSW Liberal premier Mike Baird has taken to the sector with a hatchet, 400 providers have been reduced to fewer than 70. Around 80 services have closed completely. Refuges, trauma counselling, migrant, mental health, Indigenous, disability, refugee, youth and multicultural women’s services have been hit.
In the past month, staff at Elsie Women’s Refuge – Sydney’s oldest – have been made redundant. Elsie was handed over to St Vincent de Paul on 1 September. This case is typical of the trend. Many services that haven’t been completely wiped out have been forced to amalgamate into welfare mega-organisations run by religious groups like Mission Australia and St Vincent De Paul.
Around Sydney, scores of women’s refuges have closed, including Lotus House Indo-Chinese Young Women’s Refuge – an astounding loss considering the need for culturally specific services.
In the state with the largest population of Aboriginal people, it is incredible to contemplate that ATSI-specific women’s refuges have been closed in regional centres like Kempsey, Eden and Wagga Wagga.
In some parts of NSW, because of closures, a woman may now have to travel more than 300km to find a refuge. That could be a life or death proposition.
Why has this happened?
The answer is economic competition and the sexism that capitalism relies on to sustain the structural oppression of women. Health and welfare needs have been turned into a commodity. Domestic violence and sexual assault are seen as providing a business opportunity for the provision of services that can be tendered to the lowest bidder.
Competitive tendering for the provision of health and welfare services is turning these sectors into a battleground where the for-profit companies and the largest organisations dominate. Service provision becomes a race to the bottom, with an emphasis on “efficiency” and a loss of the specialisation, quality, quantity and diversity required to meet human need, in this case the specific needs of women.
Workers from across the sector, clients desperate to retain services, women’s rights activists and unionists from the Australian Services Union are waging a battle to save what they can. There have been protests in Eden, the Blue Mountains, central Sydney, and the Great Lakes area of NSW. The campaign has called the government on the lie that it can’t afford to keep these vital services in their current form.
While Liberal politicians and their mates in big business file in and out of the Independent Commission Against Corruption in NSW, support Abbott’s billion dollar war in Iraq and rake in millions of dollars from the sale of Millers Point public housing, the rights of women and children to safety and support have been dumped. The fight continues.
