Status of Women committee  I think what you've moving on to now is the hard end of gender budgeting, in that ultimately, calling governments to account for their gender equality policies is what we've been on about for decades. There is no ready answer about accountability, except to use those processes th

Status of Women committee  When I say I've been in gender budgeting for 22 years, it's not just in Australia. I'm involved in advising governments and in providing technical advice elsewhere. In Australia, different forms of gender budgeting were undertaken by both the Liberal Party—which is our conservat

Status of Women committee  Of course.

Status of Women committee  One of the things your standing committee could do is find ways in which Parliament would oversee the process—that worked very well in South Africa for a period, and in Uganda—to get the politicians trained in this area and to make sure the questions are asked in Parliament, so t

Status of Women committee  I think the major impact initially was to just genuinely raise awareness that there were differential gender impacts across the policy spectrum, and people took that up in various ways. We did have impacts like debates around the dependent spouse rebate, where a tax rebate was pa

Status of Women committee  I'm familiar with many of them, and in my presentation I tried to go to the core of some of the key lessons that we keep in mind. I can't emphasize political commitment enough; I can't emphasize the diverse role of actors who have to be engaged in this process. One of the earlie

Status of Women committee  What I was saying was that in terms of the first 12-year wave, the model we used was one in which gender-responsive budgeting was driven by the women's policy offices within government. When the political and economic situation changed in 1996--and this is what you have to be war

Status of Women committee  The first thing I'd say is it did last at the federal level in a very explicit and visible way for 12 years, and that's not bad for any exercise. All the state and territorial governments introduced these, what I thought and what I now call the “femocrat”-based, gender-responsive

Status of Women committee  Okay. Under a neo-liberal framework, it's much more difficult to get increases in expenditure through the budget, but there are spaces for actions. We can more effectively use the budget reforms that have been going on that emphasize transparency, accountability, and participat

Status of Women committee  Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me. I'm going to speak to you today as somebody who's been involved in gender-responsive budgeting since its inception in Australia in the mid-1980s. It's been a journey of some 22 years. I just wanted to talk to you about some of the

Status of Women committee  I can, and I can see you well too. Can you hear and see me?