Media Centre

The World Economic Forum calculates that we are still 131 years away from achieving gender equality. This means that, based on average predicted lifespans, a girl born in 2062 still won’t see gender equality achieved in her lifetime. This is unacceptable. We must beat this ticking clock and accelerate change. If not, we risk locking out billions of girls around the world from participating fully and richly in life, and the benefit of their contributions.

Plan International Australia condemns the ban imposed on local and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) by the de facto authorities in Afghanistan, preventing women from working.

As our closest neighbours battle to keep COVID-19 from claiming millions of lives and spreading across borders in Asia and the Pacific, Australia must now pull out all stops to step forward and stop the region from collapsing under the health, economic and social pressures.

To hear Prime Minister Scott Morrison say this week that the pandemic has “nothing to do with politics” was strange, I thought. Politics, at its best, is about holding society together and playing a meaningful role in the world. What could be more political than a global crisis?

Some 34 million people around the world are a step away from famine, but just one day of global military spending could change that.

Girls in Australia should be growing up believing anything is possible, not being forced to choose between their leadership aspirations or their own safety working in parliament.

But, sadly, after a spate of reports of sexual misconduct in our national parliament, women are increasingly disinterested in pursuing political careers.

As Australia emerges from the worst impacts of COVID-19 and our lives start to return to some semblance of normality, it’s vital we keep the devastating impacts of the virus on others in our region at the top of our minds – especially girls wishing to finish their education.

It was the images that flashed across our screens for those long, terrible weeks of the Australian bushfires last summer that became a tipping point for me. Pictures of kids in boats, wildlife destroyed en-masse and birds falling from the sky, of entire ecosystems made uninhabitable. Of course, I had been acutely aware of climate change up until then.