The Federal Government's efforts to ride out the storm of protest about the imposition of the GST on sanitary products says a great deal about their attitudes to women and raises again the issues which led the AEU and many other organisations to oppose the introduction of the GST.

An extraordinary level of Internet discussion and protest has now moved into the daily media and the Government's responses are becoming increasingly shrill. The Federal Minister for Health and Shaving Cream has now apologised for his comments last week about tampons having no greater claim than shaving cream. Since then, National Party MP De-Anne Kelly has been wheeled out to say that the issue was 'a beat-up, a Barbie doll issue to intimidate a largely conservative male cabinet'. She argued that the (recently defunded) Women's Electoral Lobby were seeing tampons as an old 1970's feminist issue, while women had moved on, and that anyway the cost would only be $4 extra per year and needy women and welfare recipients would receive compensation for the cost of the GST. (AAP 25/1)

Meanwhile Prime Minister Howard has claimed that there is no case for taking the tax off tampons and that an exemption would create a precedent. He intends instead to spend the next six months responding to concerns and pointing out the 'enormous benefits'. (The Age 24/1)

Whatever attempts are made to trivialise the issue, it is very clear that it won't go away. It won't go away because the number of women who are actively angry is growing.

The reality is that only women menstruate, and a tax on sanitary products is thus seen, rightly in my view, as a tax on women. Sadly, taxation is not covered by the Sex Discrimination Act.

The comments of the Minister for Shaving Cream have incensed women further as it has become obvious that removal of the wholesales tax on items such as shaving cream will mean that they are expected to become cheaper when the GST is introduced, while women will face a 10% GST impost on sanitary products. Items like suncream and condoms, incidentally, are reported to be GST free.

As Anne Summers has noted, many women have erroneously believed that tampons have been subject to luxury tax because they are so expensive, a matter about which two prices surveillance inquiries in the 1980's agreed. To add tax to an already highly priced item which only women are forced to buy is seen as adding insult to injury. The total 'feminine hygiene' market is worth $202.1m, so Australian women are set to pay about $20 million in GST. (Sydney Morning Herald 20/1)

Women overall continue to earn less than men, so this imposition adds to existing inequities. Apart from the principle of taxing women only, the notion that it is only $4-$5 extra per year (and thus, implicitly, not a problem) is also an issue. For many women, the needs and thus the costs will be considerably higher. More specifically, women in low income families are already confronted with a growing list of unsurmountable costs with the imposition of user pays across a wide range of areas and services. The 1997 Brotherhood of St Laurence study of 628 low income people in Victoria, for example, found that over 38% were missing meals in order to pay their children's educational costs. To women in such circumstances, the imposition of the GST on sanitary products may well mean further missed meals.

A contributor to ausfem-polnet has argued that Treasurer Costello was asked at the 1998 national women's round table whether the new tax package had been subjected to a gender audit process. Had that occurred, the Government would presumably not have found itself in this increasingly silly position. Instead, much of the women's policy forums has been dismantled.

The reality is that the current debate about the GST on sanitary products highlights the fundamental flaws of a flat-earth tax. Taxing all people's expenditure, and all items, at the same rate, creates inequities. Moreover there is a huge and uncharted minefield of differential and often unforseen impacts underlying the surface simplicity of the GST. The fact that the Democrats leader has been reported as saying that she had wrongly believed that tampons were already taxed (The Age 24/1) indicates both the complexity of the taxation process and the extent to which the likely impacts were not properly analysed before decisions were made.

National Day of Action

A National Day of Action for Australian women to say NO to the GST on menstruation will occur on 25 February 2000. Women have been invited to organise their own activities. There is a petition to sign and letters to federal politicians and to the Prime Minister to write.

Further details of campaign activity and the petition can be found on the Women's Electoral Lobby's Internet site

If we don't stop it now, you could well be angry about this every month for anything up to the next forty years.