It's time the government got serious on 'women's issues'

Anyhow, yonks later, OfW is still in PM&C - and it is barely breathing. Never heard of it? It's the policy advisory unit for "women's issues" within the public service. I like to think of it as a think tank, advising and guiding. Unfortunately, since 2013, the Coalition has sought neither advice nor guidance from public servants about any bloody thing, except maybe directions to the bar. Honestly, I had a little leap of happiness when the Prime Minister said last week: "We'll be valuing public servants and respecting them."

And we have a real Minister for Women, Senator Katy Gallagher (let me also acknowledge Tanya Plibersek's excellent work as shadow during the traumatic period of the Morrison government). Yes, a real minister instead of the parade of Coalition crumb maidens, so there will be a shift.

The first thing which must change is the way the head of OfW is recruited. It's been passed from pillar to post without once having any glimmer of procedural transparency - not to say that there haven't been tremendous women in that position during this period. There have been, but they've been kept powerless and silent. You only have to look at the frequency of movement to know how miserable these women must have been.

Trish Bergin, with massive public service experience in human resources, lasted less than two years. Louise McSorley, a senior public servant for 20 years, lasted about one year at OfW. Amanda McIntyre? One year and one month. When she left, I pleaded with the PM to appoint someone who wanted to stick around. What I didn't realise at the time was how unrewarding the work was. Head after head left because their advice was rarely sought, and when sought it was never acted on. No wonder retention was impossible.

Bergin is utterly heartbroken about her time there. She remembers OfW as being influential on public policy in the '80s - but all that influence had disappeared by the time she arrived.

"It had been utterly relegated to the backblocks [despite] the great people there," she says.

"When I found out that I'd been successful in ... becoming the next head of the Office for Women, I nearly died and went to heaven. I thought, this is my dream come true. My dream job, my everything.

"But quite honestly, it was it was so, so, so depressing, because we had no influence - [we were] no longer in the mainstream of policy development. We should have had real integration with policy, using the perspective of gender, and we didn't have access to any of the mechanisms that could actually draw that material in."

She was despondent, and left just as the election was called in 2019.

"I could not believe how relegated we felt as a group. I couldn't stand it anymore. I felt like an apologist for government."

But she also says there were no longer any processes in place to make anything happen. OfW had been so neglected - abandoned - that no-one paid any attention to it. It had been demeaned to such an extent that its reputation suffered.

And politicians themselves saw the OfW as "women's advocates" - as if that was a bad thing. As if these extraordinary leaders were merely dogmatic feminists without a care for what else was going on.

There also needs to be a massive influx of staff. If you want to change the country, you have to provide the evidence. And you can't provide the evidence with the handful of people currently in OfW.

Louise McSorley ran both the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) and OfW in 2015 and 2016. She describes it as an exercise in "the art of what's possible".

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"We needed to keep ministers' confidence while advocating for good gender policy, and [trying to] promote the value of the WGEA dataset and how it would support ambitions of the government and make a difference to gender pay gap and workplace conditions for women," she says.

McSorley describes OfW as having a human resource capacity which needs to be expanded. "They must continue to recruit economists and other experts, the 'best and the brightest'," she says.

Which is, I am sure, what Gallagher will do.

Bergin says she is filled with hope for the future - and not just the future for OfW, but for women in Australia. Gallagher is a strong performer, and Bergin describes her as a politician who will act on evidence. Her new role as Finance Minister will underpin so much of what needs to happen for women to get even - a good hard look at the tax system to see how it works against women.

I feel like it might be a good thing to move OfW out of PM&C, and it looks like the PM isn't shy of a shake-up.

And she will also need to be able to lead her colleagues in this realm. Are these men in the ministry feminists? God knows, but they've worked with strong women in leadership positions for years. Surely they don't need Jenny to tell them why women matter.

The way to show women they matter is to develop a gender action plan and, as Bergin says, address those core drivers of gender inequality where we seem to think women are always the secondary earners.

And do it before the October budget. I know a bunch of genius economists who can do the Housework, to get the information and wield the influence that we need to make change.