THE WOMENS LOBBY - NETWORKS, COALITION BUILDING AND THE WOMEN OF MIDDLE AUSTRALIA

The 'women's lobby' or the 'powerful feminist lobby' has been held res ponsible for a range of evils including the undermining of the traditi onal family, public expenditure on community services, social engineer ing and the imposition of 'political correctness'. To what extent is t here a 'women's lobby' working from inside or outside government to in fluence public decision-making? In this paper we explore this question , using data from a social network analysis of the Australian women's movement conducted in 1992-3. Our findings are that there is a large, very loosely connected network of organisations engaging in advocacy o n behalf of women. Density of ties is less than is found in a comparab le study of the Canadian women's movement but there are more ties betw een non-government groups and government agencies. Issues of organisat ional philosophy have inhibited the development of a 'peak body' for t he non-government women's movement and led to reliance on issue-specif ic coalitions. Latterly, awareness of increasing fragmentation has led to a series of attempts to create more effective national networking.