Welcome to Feminist Acts (Trailer)

Hi. My name's Kate Seear. I'm a professor of law at the Deakin Law School and the co director of the Centre for Law as Protection. I'm also one of the hosts of this podcast.

It's so good to see you. I'm Becky Batagol. I'm a law reform expert from Monash University from the Faculty of Law. I love law reform. I'm so glad that we're doing this project.

For me, law reform is where it's at. It's about making a difference rather than sitting at university and writing articles that no one reads. I really wanna use the position that I'm in to do things like this. What's the podcast about, Becky? I think in Feminist Acts, we've tried to create something that hasn't been done before, it's trying to put into practice law reform and what it would look like from a feminist perspective and to create gender justice for everybody who lives under the law.

And it's really exciting because the podcast looks at a diverse range of issues from access to toilets, to voting rights, to constitutional law, to the protections needed for victims of crime. And the really exciting thing is that we dig into a whole bunch of questions that are really at the heart of law reform for these populations. Things like, why is it that law might be problematic for these groups? Can we reform the law in ways that better protect the rights and needs of women and gender diverse populations? Are there interests and tensions sometimes, and how do we reconcile those?

And what are the pitfalls of trying to do law reform?

We're not the first feminists to look at law reform. There have been decades of work on thinking about how the law harms women and how to respond to that and how to change the law. There are so many pitfalls in it. We know that so many of the so called feminist law reforms that are being put into place haven't worked, maybe they've been implemented in ways not intended, or there are consequences that weren't thought about at the time.

And so what we've done in this podcast is to bring all of that together across this series and to think about how to respond to some of the concerns about law reform, let's say from First Nations women's perspective, from trans women's perspective, from women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, and how to actually make those laws in a way that doesn't create gender harm. We've got a number of proposals across the episodes for new laws which are there, they could be picked up. This podcast, of course, is a companion to our book, The Feminist Legislation Project. What someone could do by listening to this podcast is to learn about that area of law reform and then follow on through the show notes and actually see a completed law reform proposal. It's practical, it's simple, and you will be able to take the proposals for law that are there and simply put them into place.

Yeah. It's ready to go. So we're really excited to share this work with all of our listeners and can't wait to launch into the discussion. So we ask you to subscribe or follow this show so that you get access to all of the podcasts as they come out. We also want you to share the podcast with your friends, with your colleagues.

Let others know about it. Post about it on LinkedIn or social media. We'd really love to spread the word. And, particularly, if you're so inclined, do reach out to members of parliament. Let them know about this work.

Ask them what they're doing to reform laws in ways that are gender just, and let's keep the conversation going.