[00:06.0]
A gender impact assessment is being able to pull together
a lot of information that we already know about our community and apply it to the design of services that we provide to our community. We really would have done it anyway because it's the right thing to do. I'm Justine Linley, I'm the Director of Sustainable Development at Corangamite Shire Council.
[00:25.1]
Corangamite Shire Council is a local government based in western Victoria, and we have a population of around about 16,000 people over a dispersed area of 4000km². So rolling pastures, but also flat grazing land and the beautiful coastline down at the 12 Apostles in Port Campbell.
[00:44.2]
My name is Belinda Bennett. I'm the Community Safety and Resilience Coordinator with Corangamite Shire. We did a gender impact assessment on our infringements policy, because we had a feeling there was a gender bias there or gender impact in that policy, but we didn't really know what it was or what it could be.
[01:02.3]
Most infringements we issued were predominantly around women so we had a closer look at that. What was surprising was that women were primarily animal owners, and we were more likely to issue infringements for animal offenses rather than other local laws offenses.
[01:17.6]
And that's mainly because women were undertaking the administrative tasks, or it fell to women to undertake the administrative tasks for families, and it wasn't necessarily their responsibility, but they ended up bearing the financial burden and the financial cost. The other thing it helped our team do was really just an increased awareness around some of those biases, and especially awareness around family violence.
[01:39.9]
It can change some of our approaches for how we deal with that issue and that offense, so we're not causing further burden to people in those situations. We needed training for our staff
around understanding gender impacts understanding things like family violence, so we can consider that in our day to day roles.
[01:58.1]
This is really important for the work that the local laws team do, because they are very on the ground working with people every day, so it's really important that our team are equipped to be able to recognise that and be able to respond to that in how we go about doing our work.
[02:19.6]
The gender impact assessment for us really looked like talking to different members of our office staff, but also people out on the ground. We have a diverse workforce at Corangamite, and it really assisted us in the process because we got people engaged. We asked them what it was that that they knew about our infringement policy and animal registrations, and everyone loves their animals, but the diversity of opinion was really important.
[02:52.4]
Our biggest advice would be, you’d be surprised by what you actually find out. Don't make assumptions that this particular policy isn't appropriate. We would have initially thought that infringement policy, is a very statutory regulatory approach, but what we've uncovered is the ability to really find that there is an impact and there is a difference, and there is a gender bias out there for a range of different things.
[03:15.2]
So we really encourage you to just get in there and have a go. Don't treat it as a tick box exercise, bring other people into the discussion, because that brings so much value into the process and the benefits you get from it, and the benefit for the community in the long term is totally worth it.
[03:31.8]
So the future for us, as a result of having undertaken that gender impact assessment on our infringement policy, means that we can use that as a template for other policies’ development across the organisation and into the future. One of the things that we have changed is making sure that we talk to other members of our organisation and teams when we're looking at applying our infringements policy now.
[03:52.0]
We didn't do that before. We'll cross-check data just to make sure that we're not adversely impacting on women and women's ability to have a good life in our community.
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