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The 2025 theme for International Women’s Day for 2025 (as adopted
by UN Women Australia) is ‘March
Forward: For ALL Women and Girls’. This year also marks 30 years since 189
countries unanimously adopted the Declaration
and Platform for Action on gender equality at the Fourth World Conference
on Women, held in Beijing. This collective action remains a high point for the
international movement to advance gender equality, with Australia having played
a substantial role. Specifically, the Australian delegation insisted that the
conference’s final agenda be a ‘Conference of
Commitments’ requiring monitoring and evaluation. This Flagpost reflects on
Australia’s engagement with the United Nations’ (UN) Women’s Conferences and
other gender equality initiatives before and after the 1995 Beijing Conference.
UN Commission on the Status of Women and International Women’s Year
In 1946 Australia was pivotal in establishing
the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), which remains the principal
intergovernmental body promoting gender equality. It comprises 45 rotating UN member
states across a geographic distribution. A formal framework for government
involvement in the CSW and UN women’s conferences began in the 1970s when Elizabeth Reid was
appointed as Australia’s first Women’s Advisor to the Prime Minister. Reid led
Australia’s delegation to the 1975
International Women’s Year conference in Mexico City.
Following the 1975 conference, the CSW drafted the Convention
on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which entered
into force in 1981. Subsequent conferences in Copenhagen (1980) and Nairobi
(1985) solidified 1975-1985 as the UN Decade for Women. Federal
parliamentarians that attended these conferences included:
Australian government machinery to advance the status of women
To support Australia’s international engagement, the
Department of the Prime Minister & Cabinet established the Women’s Affairs
section in 1974 (becoming the Office
of the Status of Women (OSW) in 1983 and the Office for Women in 2004).
This office has primary responsibility for Australia’s involvement in most
international women’s forums, including the CSW. After a 13-year hiatus Australia
was elected
to the CSW in 1982 and re-elected in 1986 for a four-year term.
Australia’s OSW used the forward-looking strategies
adopted at the Nairobi conference to form a new
national agenda (including implementation
reporting framework) released in 1988. While on the CSW, Australia also
pushed to have these strategies integrated into the UN’s planning systems. Australia
was re-elected to the CSW
in 1994, leading up to the Fourth Women’s Conference planned for Beijing.
Amid concerns about a lack of progress from previous conferences, the Australian
delegation (led by OSW head Ann Sherry)
proposed a focus on encouraging
countries to commit to pledges and resourcing their own identified
priorities. Ultimately 65 countries made statements of commitments in a
precedent for subsequent conferences.
The Fourth Women’s Conference in Beijing 1995
Alongside the federal MP Dr Carmen Lawrence,
other Australian delegates
at the Fourth Conference included Kathleen
Townsend (OSW Head) and four federal parliamentarian advisors:
The conference’s scale far exceeded any previous iteration;
an estimated 30,000 people attended the non-government organisations (NGO)
forum alongside the official 5,000 conference delegates. More than 3,000
journalists also attended to cover the activities. First Lady of the United
States Hillary Clinton gave a now famous speech
declaring:
If there is one message that echoes forth from this
conference, it is that human rights are women's rights - and women's rights are
human rights. Let us not forget that among those rights are the right to speak
freely - and the right to be heard.
While media
reports initially
focused on its surrounding controversies,
the conference’s enduring legacy remains the Declaration
and Platform for Action which established 12 critical areas of
concern. The Parliamentary Library published Australia’s
commitments alongside an abridged version of the Declaration and Platform for
Action as well as a conference overview
in 1995-96.
Dr Lawrence subsequently noted the importance of monitoring,
noting that, as the platform was not legally binding, ‘the
test for all of us now will be to see how well these commitments are
implemented’. A key support to this occurred in 1996 when
the UN Economic and Social Council expanded the CSW’s mandate to drive implementation
monitoring and progress review of the platform. Economic
and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific regional conferences have
also encouraged nations to reaffirm the declaration and accelerate gender
equality efforts.
As has
been often noted, no country has fully realised the 1995 platform. Coordinated
opposition to feminist policy influence has prevented subsequent world
conferences ‘for fear there would be slippage from the standards achieved
in Beijing’. Nonetheless, the platform’s impact has been measurably apparent;
for example, before 1995
only 12 countries had legal sanctions against domestic violence, whereas
today 193 countries have legislative measures. For its part, Australia’s latest
implementation
report was released in 2024, prior to CSW
69 Beijing +30 in March 2025.