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Victoria's plan for gender equality is a reason to move to Melbourne

Anne Summers

I am seriously thinking of moving to Melbourne.

Not for the coffee, or the food, both arguably better than Sydney's, and certainly not for the weather. And I'm not really keen on footy, which means I'll have nothing to talk to Victorians about. But I might have to suck these up because of an amazing thing Victoria has done this week.

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'End the sausage party'

Dressed as sausages, a group of protesters storm the red carpet at the AACTA awards claiming gender inequality in screen industries.

If I move, it will be for the equality.

On Monday, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and Fiona Richardson, the Minister for Women and the Minister for Prevention of Family Violence, launched a gender equality strategy for the state. It is a radical and exciting plan to make Victoria a truly equal society. No other state, and certainly not NSW, has done anything like it and yet, as a nation, we have never needed it more.

We rank 46 in the world's nations according to the current World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index, down from 36 last year. In 2006 we ranked 15th in the world for gender equality. Look at us now.

Victoria is perhaps the last place you'd expect to lead the way here.

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Victoria was the last state to give women the vote, in 1908, and took until 1923 to let women run for Parliament.

Victoria is the state that's given us Eddie Maguire, Sam Newman and AFL crowds that booed Adam Goodes.

Yet Victoria also set up the first Royal Commission into Family Violence and pledged to accept each of its 227 recommendations. It honoured that promise this year by allocating $572 million to meet the 65 most urgent recommendations, including $152.5 million "to begin a housing blitz to shelter more victims so they don't have to choose between homelessness and returning to an abusive relationship".

Oh, to have such thinking – and spending – in NSW.

The title of the strategy is both confronting and comforting. Safe and Strong puts ending violence at the centre of how we achieve equality. It is a formal government acknowledgement of the family violence that is the black heart of modern Australia. We cannot be strong and equal unless we are safe.

The royal commission found gender inequality to be a major driver behind family violence and while this strategy was well underway before that report was released, it has provided powerful ammunition for Fiona Richardson to make her case that equality provides an economic, as well as a social, benefit.

Safe and Strong has a three-pronged approach. It sets up the Prevention of Violence Agency with a remit to focus on "generational and ongoing" improvements to women's equality by preventing violence.

Secondly, it sets targets and timeframes for each of the 10 founding reforms of its plan. "We know that good intentions have never been enough to deliver gender equality," Richardson told me on Thursday.

Thirdly, the strategy shines a light on how gender inequality impacts on men, to their disadvantage, and how it hurts the economy.

"We never ask what the cost of gender inequality is to society," Richardson says. Yet, she points out, closing Australia's gender employment gap, by increasing women's workforce participation, would boost GDP by 11 per cent.

With our GDP declining you'd think the federal Treasurer would be rushing through bills to improve childcare cost and availability and end tax penalties on working women – the two proven means of increasing women's workforce participation.

Instead, in Canberra, they are making both worse. Which means we will fall even further down the WEF index next year.

Richardson says that family violence costs the Victorian economy $3.4 billion a year, including the $800 million the police spend each year on family violence-related incidents.

It is these numbers that helped Richardson get agreement from her cabinet colleagues to launch this impressive and, let's hope successful, strategy.

The plan is massively detailed, covering business, sport, the media, Science Technology Engineering Mathematics and Medicine training, the arts and cultural activities. It includes big thinking, like the 10-point plan for business to eliminate gender inequality, and individual items like an all-women trade delegation to China.

Victoria will bring in a Gender Equality Act, similar to one Iceland enacted in 1976 and which embodied the commitment to gender equality that sees Iceland top the WEF index every year.

Victoria's new initiatives will include gender budgeting, a tool for measuring how government policy affects women that was pioneered in Canberra in 1984 by the Hawke government and successfully copied around the world in the decades since. In 1985 Hawke also created the National Agenda for Women to improve the status of women – the language used back then – that also included targets and timeframes and had violence as its centrepiece. Sadly, both these initiatives lapsed in the early '90s.

A quarter of a century on, the Victorian strategy is giving us a second chance to embed equality. This time it must not be allowed to fail. Lives are at stake. We know now that it has to happen. That's why I – and you – might have to move to Melbourne.

Twitter: SummersAnne. Anne Summers was head of the Office of the Status of Women from 1983 to 1986.

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