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Say "Femocrat" these days and you risk a blank stare. Once you might have got a rude expletive, or at least a hostile sneer, but now no one cares enough for that. According to Sarah Maddison and Emma Partridge, authors of a new report from the Democratic Audit, How Well Does Australian Democracy Serve Women?, the femocrat is an endangered, if not altogether extinct species. She appeared on the scene in the early 1970s, a creature of the Whitlam government, although ministers were as comfortable with her then as Jupiter was giving birth to Athena. Even in the femocrat's heyday there was always an uneasiness, an expression of a deep patriarchal malaise far too complex and contested to delve into here. The femocrat's emergence coincided with other changes, not only in the elected government but within the public service itself.

It was under Whitlam that the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet became the rival of Treasury as the central coordinating department, a development strengthened further under Fraser and arguably even more so under succeeding prime ministers. Femocrats had their start in Prime Minister's, and the issue of their place in that department became, over the years, one of their key concerns.! Another significant change was the gradual removal of the public servant's cloak of invisibility. It became more acceptable for bureaucrats to speak publicly on matters within their competence, and femocrats were at the forefront here. This was not always an easy experience. I remember one time when I went to talk about equal opportunity to a gathering of local government officials and was greeted by a man who had put on a corset for the occasion. Oh, that gender issues could be so wild and woolly today. How would you have spotted a femocrat?

Though most of us were female, there were a few males among us, a pattern that continued through the years. But whatever our sex we were doughty feminists, ''appointed to positions in the bureaucracy with a specific directive to improve policy outcomes for women''. Maddison and Partridge go on to demonstrate that the slow, sad demise of the femocrat has been inextricably linked to the retreat of Australian governments from the push for women's equality, especially at the federal level. The femocrat consciousness was responsible for the creation of one of the most innovative forms of bureaucratic machinery, known in the literature as ''the wheel model''.

Described as a central ''hub'' with ''spokes'' in other departments, it sought to make policy-makers gender-aware throughout the range of government, while avoiding ''ghettoising'' the function as it might have been in a separate women's department. Australia gained an international reputation for this innovation and although Maddison and Partridge maintain that the grass-roots women's movement became increasingly quiescent as femocrats took on more of the role of advocacy, the machinery was remarkably successful in making governments responsive to women's perspectives and concerns. Yet federally it always depended on the chief women's policy unit being in Prime Minister's, which in turn tended to rely on Labor being in government, though for eight years under Howard and two under Fraser the Office of Women's Affairs stayed in that department. In 1977 the first of its removals occurred, but that probably wouldn't have happened if an antipathetic secretary hadn't persuaded Fraser that it should go.

The ''wheel'' remained intact, but its ''hub'' in the junior Department of Home Affairs lost any real power to make the apparatus work. A lot of energy went into getting the Office of the Status of Women back in Prime Minister's, and with the 1983 election of the Hawke government it returned. There it stayed until after the 2004 election, when for the second time it was removed. The office lost its status, becoming the Office of Women, substantially stripped of its policy role, and submerged in the Department of Families, Communities and Indigenous Affairs. By that time, though, most of its clout even in Prime Minister's had gone, and unlike the protests attending its earlier exile, barely a squeak was heard. A women's policy unit remains in Howard's department but in a much reduced capacity, and with little or no reference to sophisticated gender analysis. All of this is contrary to the provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) to which Australia is signatory, and the UN committee for its oversight has rapped us over the knuckles for our ignominious retreat.

The reasons for this have nothing to do with the inappropriateness or efficacy of the model, but everything to do with its context. The authors of this report sum it up succinctly: ''The model of policy machinery that developed here relied, at least in part, on a 'specific moment' in the history of the Australian state, on a broad social democratic consensus, and on external pressure from a visible, united, highly mobilised and state-focused women's movement.'' And how that moment has fled. Years of economic emphasis at the expense of social effectiveness have weakened the service delivery and redistributive functions of governments, and what was once called ''the women's movement'' has become, in Elizabeth Reid's words, a ''movement of women'', in which the stress has been more on the achievements of individual women than on the forceful collective demands of women on their governments. If the crucial question of policy and the machinery for its development is now a problematic one, other benchmarks the authors use also show a flagging commitment on the part of Australia's governments (with the exception of South Australia).

Compared, say, with the United States, anti- discrimination measures were relatively slow to be adopted in Australia. South Australia was the first to pass its Sex Discrimination Act in 1975, in honour of International Women's Year; Victoria and NSW soon followed. It took almost a decade, however, for federal legislation to be enacted, and not until the 1990s did Queensland, Tasmania and the territories outlaw discrimination. Maddison and Partridge concede that anti- discrimination laws are not to be evaluated solely on the basis of sanctions, that their role in educating the public and reducing discriminatory behaviour is invaluable.

That said, the prosecution of these laws has been hampered by narrow definitions and exemptions, the cost of taking cases through the courts and a paucity of administrative resources. ! Responsibility for both the federal acts (the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 and its companion Affirmative Action Act 1986) has rested with the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, but overall its capacity for case-handling has diminished and the Sex Discrimination Commissioner and Affirmative Action Office have undergone changes which have reduced both their powers and staff. Pru Goward, the current Sex Discrimination Commissioner, has had a good run in the media, but appears to have been no more successful in persuading the Government to take on her reforms than other, less media- adept incumbents.

While representation of women in our nine parliaments has undoubtedly grown, women on average still account for about a third of these bodies, and their participation in local government is not at all as high as might be supposed. As far as any benefit for women in general goes, our female politicians have been a disappointing bunch. Political ideology and the restraints of party discipline have meant that they cannot always be relied on to promote women's interests. Yet the successful cross-party women's vote on the abortion drug RU486 indicates that more women in Parliament could make a significant difference if we get the right women. As for a renewed strength of feminism in the bureaucracy, what could this mean to women out in the community? A lot, according to the authors.

In the absence of effective resistance the Howard Government has been able to implement tax measures, for example, that while looking good on the surface discriminate against many women and all of us in the long term. Family Tax Benefit Part B particularly discourages many mothers from entering the workforce, penalising those families needing two parental incomes. The contraction of community childcare services and the escalation of fees for day care have been retroactive as well. Without even going into the effects of WorkChoices, the report makes it clear that women's place in society has become more difficult, except for stay-at- home mothers with high-earning spouses, and even for those there are long-term implications for self-esteem and careers. The virtual collapse of women's policy into policy-making for families shows only too well what our current Prime Minister thinks of when he thinks at all about women.

And what about women's views on this? If the Government's punches have hit hardest in the arrangements for women's policy, it is in the area of consultation that its moves have been most Machiavellian. Beginning in 1975, when a $2million allocation was set aside for funding women's projects, a host of women's organisations have been supported by governments for their ongoing and one- off expenses. This financial assistance accords with CEDAW and other international instruments as a means of furthering services to the community and facilitating consultation between women and their

governments. Early in its administration the Howard Government ''streamlined'' this function by taking four peak organisations the National Council of Women, the YMCA, Business and Professional Women and the National Rural Women's Coalition and putting them in charge of funding smaller groups. Though administratively cost-effective, what these arrangements did for a wide range of groups (and the women they represented) was effectively cut off their access.

Not only that, there is evidence to suggest that any group critical of the government risks losing its funding, as was the case for the Coalition of Australian Participating Organisations of Women, or CAPOW!, in 1997. Women's Electoral Lobby the most effective feminist lobby to date and most trenchant critic of governments was only belatedly included in this process and remains unfunded. Sarah Maddison, a University of NSW political scientist, co-author of this paper and the book just out called Silencing Dissent, has been a spokesperson for WEL, and the Government's parsimony in relation to WEL's funding may have been the goad for her current focus. For Maddison and Partridge mount a convincing case that women's collective voices have been stifled under the present Government as a trade-off for their funding. This is a serious state of affairs, even more so should it be replicated in other areas of governance.

I have only one criticism of this meticulously researched, excellently argued and hard-hitting document. In sticking strictly to the definitions laid down in the international instruments for its framework, How Well Does Democracy Serve Australian Women? is compelled to ignore the media, surely one of the most important elements of a healthy, working democracy. Now, as in feminism's halcyon days, the media have had an enormous influence on the way women see themselves and how others see us, and though it's looking different from what it once was, and in some ways it's better, it's not looking good. In summary, while the broad principles of feminism have been adopted in Australia few could argue today, as it was argued as late as the 1970s, that university education for girls is a waste of time and money and community awareness of issues such as sexual assault and domestic violence is higher, the actual position of ever-increasing numbers of women is being increasingly circumscribed, and the evidence is there that women are experiencing more violence than ever.

And while our understanding of gender has become ever more sophisticated, the depiction of women in the media has become disturbingly narrow and may in fact contribute to that violence. So what does this old femocrat feel, reading of the dismantling of policy machinery, the stifling of Australian women's voices, the distorting effects of recent childcare policies. It's dismaying, to be sure, but I'm still convinced that all the time and anguish and effort we put in was worth it, if only because it shows what can be done, and will be done, that anything is possible when somehow, some day, the political climate too starts changing.

Sara Dowse was the first head of the Office of Women's Affairs (later the Office of the Status of Women), appointed in 1974 to lead the bureaucratic support unit for the first prime ministerial women's adviser, Elizabeth Reid. How Well Does Australian Democracy Serve Women? is available as a free download from the Democratic Audit webpage: http://democratic.audit.anu.edu.au.virtual.anu.edu.au/ Limited numbers of hard copies are available: first copy free, subsequent copies at $10 each (contact details as per webpage).