Pacific Currents: Import tax brings women's issues to fore in Australia

Topless sunbathing and euphemism-free condom advertisements are common here, and unremarkable. Humor tends to the scatological. "The Sopranos" and "Sex and the City," two decidedly adult-oriented staples of HBO programming in the United States, are shown on Australian network television, in prime time, without deleted expletives. These people are not easily shocked.

But even Australia has its limits. And women dressing up as giant replicas of feminine hygiene products, and pelting the prime minister with said products in public, is pushing them.

The issue, of course, is taxes.

On July 1, the government of Prime Minister John Howard will impose a 10 percent Goods and Services Tax on almost everything Australians buy. Exceptions will be made for such items as sunscreen, personal lubricants for men and women, incontinence pads and condoms. But not for tampons and sanitary napkins, which will jump in price.

That has angered women enormously and ignited the kind of feminist uprising Australia hasn't seen since the 1970s.

"The tax on tampons is unfair, because there will not be a tax on medical products like bandages, for instance," activist Rhonda Ellis said. "Only women bleed, so this is discriminatory. Condoms, for instance, will not have a GST. So sex is a necessity, and periods a luxury?"

When the controversy about the Goods and Services Tax erupted last year, Health Minister Michael Wooldridge made matters worse by arguing that the tax on tampons was not discriminatory and that tampons did not qualify for a health exemption because menstruation is not an illness. He compared the tax on tampons to that on shaving cream, which affects men more than women, and concluded the government's position was perfectly just.

That incensed Ellis, a 54-year-old veteran of the women's movement, who took drastic action. She morphed into Tanya Tampon and helped to make the tax on feminine hygiene products a national issue. After all, she argues, men can do without shaving cream. It is far more difficult for women to find substitutes for tampons and sanitary napkins.

Ellis created Tanya Tampon by wrapping herself in a cylinder of cardboard, putting a planter on her head and covering the whole structure with a gauzy white sheet.

"It's not easy to walk in, I can't sit down in it, and on a hot day, it's really warm in there, but I can talk from it," Ellis said.

When Prime Minister Howard appeared at Murwillumbah, a town far north of Sydney, in early February, Tanya Tampon and her comrades were there to greet him, carrying banners saying "We're bleeding voters too. Stick your GST!"

Protesting environmentalists were hurling slogans at the prime minister that day too, but while police pushed the environmentalists back behind barricades, they kept their distance from Tanya Tampon and her friends, Ellis said.

"I believe it's because the police were reluctant to approach the tampon," she said.

Radio interviewers asked her if she didn't think it "a bit over the top" to dress up as a giant tampon: "I said, 'I think it's a bit over the top to have a tax on tampons, and I think this is an appropriate response to the tax.'"

If Howard was unaware of Tanya Tampon at his appearance in Murwillumbah, he has had difficulty avoiding her fellow protesters since. Australians, who call their heads of state by their first names and harbor a strong skepticism about elected officials, are rarely shy about making their displeasure felt.

In late February, riot police were dispatched to break up a rally in Perth, as women protesting the tax showered Howard and his aides with tampons dipped in red dye. The women stood side by side with angry builders' labor union members protesting the use of non-union workers.

In Sydney, 100 red-caped women called The Menstrual Avengers marched on the offices of media magnate Kerry Packer and on the headquarters of Howard's Liberal Party. They, too, tossed tampons. On some college campuses, women have taken to wearing tampons as earrings, in silent protest. In Canberra, 60 women in red marched on the city center chanting, "I bleed and I vote."

"How very tasteless," said Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer after he and the rest of Howard's Cabinet were pelted by the Menstrual Avengers in one town.

None of this has done anything to budge the Howard government on the tax, however. If an exception were made for tampons on the grounds that they are a necessity, their argument goes, then the floodgates would be open to exemptions for such items as children's clothing, diapers and funerals, and the whole system would come crashing down.

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