INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY HIGH TEA CELEBRATION

A speech by Cr Judith Klepner, Deputy Mayor, City of Port Phillip on Sunday March 8, 2009 at South Melbourne Town Hall.

Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to our beautiful South Melbourne Town Hall!

On behalf of the City of Port Phillip and all of us, let me pay my respects to the people and elders, past and present, of Yalukit Willam and the Kulin Nation, and acknowledge any elders who may be here today. We acknowledge and uphold their relationship to this land.

I acknowledge the Mayor, Cr Frank O’Connor, my fellow councillors, Jane Touzeau, Rachel Powning, Janet Bolitho and Serge Thomann, special guests, the Mayor of Yarra, Cr Amanda Stone, former Councillors Melanie Eagle, Carolyn Hutchens, Helen Halliday, Julie Johnson, Liz Grieb and Janet Cribbes and of course those special guests who have come to inform and entertain us, Kavisha Mazzella, Dr Carolyn Whitzman, Kellie Burns, Dr Janet MacGaw, as well as all of you distinguished guests, too numerous to name.

Welcome to the City of Port Phillip’s International Women’s Day Celebration. It is great to see so many women (and some men) here today, to celebrate women and to reflect on how women are faring. Especially in these times of extraordinary loss due to the magnitude of the recent bush fires here in Victoria, when we celebrate, we remember the women and children who are suffering enormous displacement at this time, and acknowledge the support afforded these affected communities.

Thankyou also for your donations today to Good Shepherd Youth & Family Services whose 25 years of services in Port Phillip we celebrate.

International Women’s Day is always a time for reflection, to acknowledge the long years of struggle all over the world for women’s rights and women’s liberation – and a cause for celebration of the solidarity, strength and joy we share as women.

It is also customary to acknowledge the origins of the day, celebrate the courageous contributions of many ordinary women in the pursuit of peace, the vote, wage and working justice, maternity benefits and health, to reflect on progress and on current and future campaigns.

The first International Women’s Day was celebrated in 1911 in Germany, Austria, Denmark, Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe.

Less than a week later, the tragic Triangle clothing factory fire in New York took the lives of more than 140 working women, mostly Italian and Jewish immigrants.

On International Women’s Day in 1917, women textile workers in Petrograd, now St Petersburg, struck and their actions precipitated the March and ultimately the October revolutions.

1928 saw the first International Women’s Day celebrations in Australia, and 1931 the first in Melbourne.

Some of us here today enjoyed the biggest Australian celebrations for International Women’s Day in 1975, during International Women’s Year and at the height of second wave feminism and the women’s movement.

Today, in 2009, we celebrate all the women and all the work of women in this community.

While Port Phillip has since 1996 had five women mayors, and the current and council still has a majority of women councillors, you will know that this remains unusual at the most senior levels of public insitutions, at every tier of government in Australia and at the corporate, statutory and not for profit board table. Feminism has made some inroads, but women are still far from having equal status, from being equally regarded or equally paid.

At our IWD celebrations last year, we particularly focused our celebrations on the efforts of some incredible local women.

During last year, in Victoria we made great improvements to women’s rights to make their own informed decisions about pregnancy, which we will not readily see revoked.

This year, nationally, we will need to continue to campaign to achieve much awaited improvements to paid maternity leave entitlements, with the usual suspects seeking to justify their opposition on the grounds of uncertain economic times.

We will work to remove the ban on provision of Australian international aid to women’s health programs that provide the range of information and services we are able to enjoy here.

In and from Port Phillip, we will continue our efforts to achieve widespread access to affordable quality childcare and children’s services and also aged care services, both of which are imperative if women are to be able to work and make their contributions in the wider society.

But allow me a couple of minutes to justify and reflect on our chosen theme: women and urban planning, and to open the conversation on what we might also spend some energy with you in creating better and more liveable places and spaces in our own backyard.

Your female dominated (numerically at least!) Council wants to look with you at what is our role as a local government in defining the challenge and working with the community, those who want to plant to use & enjoy, with those who want to build & profit, & with other tiers of government to together find public planning solutions which create safer public spaces.

Our own Triangle site comes to mind. I am sure we all have our own take on why we, as a city, confronted such high levels of dismay and disappointment as the community became aware of what the project eventually was likely to constitute.

With all the issues around the Triangle, whether disappointment at the notion of the UDF as aspirational, whether as specific as view lines, it was the unsettling concerns relating to the scale of commercial activity, the dominance of alcohol serving venues & the scale of night clubs, the morphing of what has always been one of Melbourne’s most casual playgrounds into a commercial “activity centre” and whether that would leave space for community wellbeing.

There was indeed a long and complex process of community engagement which resulted in the Urban Design Framework for the Triangle site, but there has been a lack, a crisis of confidence, that its outcomes would genuinely deliver the spaces, the uses and the safety that such engagement led everyone to hope for.

Most of this has been about what objectors & protesters don’t want rather than what we do want.

We have to move into positively imagining the buildings & the spaces between them, how they can function best for us & for future generations.

How they can invite us out of our little houses & apartments & expand our sense of home, of where we do our real living.
This is what your Council wants to create with you, to work with you to achieve.

To make the public domain safe, available & inviting to women & their children, the old & the young, for democratic and environmentally realistic & responsible uses

What are the physical ingredients in urban planning, how do we design in those ingredients and include all users in that design process, so that we create practical accessibility for women & men, their small children, their teenagers & their elders, to enjoy a democratic sense of useability, of practicality, of comfort, of relaxation, play & excitement which doesn’t use up the space, access & opportunities of others?

It’s about confidence & safety

It’s about how our places & spaces support & encourage respectful behaviour.

So it is about how we create a sense of place & what are the ingredients of that place. It is about creating places that are useable, enjoyable and include the ingredients and the facilities that we need, that can create democratic opportunities to gather safely in spaces that we feel allow us to connect with and enhance rather than use up our environment.

Our public places don’t have to be “iconic”, we don’t mind if they are, but they have to be useable, they have to be liveable.

I look forward to the revisioning of this precinct around our beloved South Melbourne Town Hall & other precincts throughout our city, as we look at our planning opportunities through new & not so new creative lenses. It has been done before in our city & it will be again.

I am confident that today’s speakers will help to generate a renewed and positive conversation amongst us, as women, as constituents and as citizens with a sense of belonging and purpose in our future planning.

Happy International Women’s Day.

Judith Klepner - 2009