Fair Agenda

For more than three years Fair Agenda members have been campaigning to win changes that help bring us closer to a fair and equal future.

Whether it’s winning vital resources for the services women rely on to escape domestic violence; or blocking cruel cuts to 79,000 working parents’ time to care for their newborns – the Fair Agenda community has proven that together we can shift policies that will change lives.

And with increasing attacks on women’s rights and attempts to undermine the progress won by our foremothers – our community’s work couldn’t be more important.

So, earlier this month, we asked you – Fair Agenda members – what you want our community to be focusing on over the coming twelve months.

Here’s what you said:

Overall: The overwhelming response to this member survey was that Fair Agenda members care about a whole range of issues affecting women. In fact, when asked how important you considered a dozen different issue categories, overall Fair Agenda members told us they considered every issue somewhere between important and very important.

Priorities:  When asked which issues should be our community’s number one priority for the coming twelve months, the most popular responses were:

1. Addressing gendered violence 
2. Improving women’s representation (e.g. in decision-making roles);
3. Protecting reproductive rights – including decriminalising abortion in Queensland and NSW 

Improving the accessibility and security of housing (including homelessness of older women) was the fourth biggest priority; followed by supporting the rights and wellbeing of marginalised women (including, but not limited to women who are culturally and/or linguistically diverse, or otherwise discriminated against because of their race or ethnicity).

Other issues that were ranked highly by members as priority areas were: tackling the gender pay gap, addressing broader issues of economic inequality and disadvantage (including issues like paid time to care and access to childcare), highlighting the gendered impact of changes to general public policy and services (like health and education), and calling out and countering sexism.

These results mean that over coming months we will:

• Continue to prioritise campaigns focused on addressing gendered violence – including our current campaigns to prevent and improve responses to sexual violence on university campuses.
• Step up our work to improve women’s representation in decision-making roles (watch this space), and
• Continue to work with partners to campaign to end the criminalisation of abortion in Queensland and NSW, and to push MPs to vote yes in an upcoming vote to create safe access zones outside reproductive health services in NSW.

As always, we will also seek to campaign on other issues of importance to our members wherever possible, including: issues of housing and homelessness, and issues that disproportionately affect women who are marginalised because of their race, culture, sexuality or any other reason. We will also continue working to ensure that all of our community's campaigns consider the experience of women who are marginalised wherever possible.

But as a small organisation with just two team members supporting our 37,000 strong membership – we don’t yet have the resources we need to campaign on all of these issues.

If you’d like to help increase our community’s ability to change, please consider making a donation to power our work here.

Fair Agenda doesn’t accept donations that would compromise our independence, like government funding or donations from political parties. Instead, our impact is only possible with support from members like you. 

Please note that Fair Agenda can accept end of financial year donations, via our preferred donor relationship with the National Foundation for Australian Women.  If you would like to make a tax-deductible donation to Fair Agenda, you can do so here by selecting Fair Agenda from the 'organisation or fund' list under 'Donation details'.  Unfortunately donations made directly to Fair Agenda are not tax deductible.

Thank you to everybody who made the time to answer the survey, and for all the Fair Agenda members who take the actions that make our community’s impact possible every day.