By Anne Summers

Photo: Tony Abbott speaking at an International Women's Day morning tea in Melbourne. (AAP: Julian Smith)

In returning the women's advisory function to the policy powerhouse department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Tony Abbott should be applauded. But are there reasons for scepticism about his motives, asks Anne Summers.

Who would have thought that Tony ('women of calibre') Abbott would have been the one to heed the advice of so many women such as me that the women's advisory function ought to be returned to the policy powerhouse department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C).

Women's policy has been languishing in the kitchen of policy-making ever since October 2004 when John Howard dispatched the Office of the Status of Women (OSW) from his department to what was then the Department of Family and Community Services.

It was stripped of its bureaucratic status and, when given a name change to the Office for Women, its former purpose of advising government on how to raise the status of women.

In its new home, and under three successive prime ministers, the Office had to settle for being a policy outlier, seldom brought to the table when the big decisions were being made and rarely consulted by anyone outside its own bureaucratic neighbourhood on anything much at all really.

Now Tony Abbott is about to do what Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard refused to contemplate: to restore the women's advisory function to where it used to be under Whitlam, under Hawke and under Keating.

In the past, it has been the Liberal prime ministers who have downgraded women's policy.

Malcolm Fraser punted the unfortunately named Office for Women's Affairs from PM&C to Home Affairs (yes, you read that right).

Bob Hawke brought it back and gave the name that stated what it is supposed to be about. John Howard kept it at first although he downgraded its status, its budget and its effectiveness, and in the end, he got rid of it.

Now Tony Abbott is bringing it back, to "ensure that these key whole-of-government priorities are at the centre of government", as he put it in a statement yesterday. Indigenous Affairs and Deregulation are also moving to PM&C.

Speaking as a former head of OSW (in the Hawke era), I applaud this move. However, we are not talking real estate here and location is not everything. The policy brief is what counts.

If Tony Abbott has brought women's policy back to his own department just so he can closely supervise the further winding back of women's equality, then we are no better off.

Of course, we should give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that his motives are sound (in the sense that he wants to give women choices) but there are at least three reasons for scepticism.

First, his views on women's participation in the wider world outside the home as represented by the gender composition of his ministry are cause for alarm.

Even John Howard had more women in his various ministries than Tony Abbott, in 2013, has been able to manage. And it's not that he can plausibly argue that women of talent are absent from his backbench. No, Abbott has deliberately passed over women such as Kelly O'Dwyer and Sharman Stone who have proven capacity.

This does not bode well for how women's policy will proceed under his stewardship.

Second, we need to look at what has happened to other relevant and equally important policy areas under Abbott's new Administrative Arrangements Order.

Take childcare policy, for example. What on earth is that doing in Education? Under Labor it was linked to workforce participation as, in my mind, it should be.

If Tony Abbott is going to rerun the wars of the Whitlam years over the relative merits of childcare versus early education, we are going to be running backwards at a million miles (and dollars) an hour.

Childcare is an essential service for women wanting to participate in the workforce and that is its primary purpose. If childcare policy is not linked to workforce participation, then the $4 billion or so we spend on the policy each year is money not well spent.

Which brings us to the third point, Tony Abbott's political pet, the $6 billion-a-year paid parental leave scheme (PPL) which, he likes to argue, is going to help 'women of calibre' stay on in the workforce after they have children.

If that is its purpose, why has he put it in Social Services?

This suggests the policy is seen only as a payments policy, like the age pension and the other benefits administered by this department, rather than just one arm of a comprehensive and integrated policy that seeks to encourage women to return to employment after they have had babies.

There are some people, and I am one of them who have long suspected that Tony Abbott's PPL scheme is not so much an employment objective as a natalist policy.

That he just wants women - especially women of "calibre" - to have more babies. That is the most likely effect of paying women up to $75,000 to have a baby (that sure beats John Howard's $3000 baby bonus).

Tony Abbott, of course, claims differently: "Paid parental leave is an important economic reform, very important economic reform, that will boost participation and productivity", he said earlier this year on the ABC radio program AM.

If that really is the intent of the policy, then administrative responsibility for it needs to be linked with childcare policy because it is childcare, not six months on full pay after the birth of a baby, which determines whether women are going to return to employment.

It is not enough to say that's what you want, you have to have in place the policy settings to make it happen.

The government’s principal childcare policy is to refer the entire matter to the Productivity Commission. This is fine but it ought not be done in isolation from PPL.

The Productivity Commission has already done extensive work on PPL (at the direction of Julia Gillard when she was Minister for Employment) and it would make sense to ask them to report on how to best integrate PPL and childcare policy so as to boost women's participation and productivity.

It would be logical, therefore, to have the two policy areas sitting together in the bureaucracy and not, as now seems to be the case, in departmental homes that appear to be at odds with the stated aims of policy.

That might well have to be the first thing the Office for Women points out to its new boss, the Prime Minister, when they make their long awaited move back to the centre of power.

Anne Summers is editor of the free digital magazine Anne Summers Reports. View her full profile here.

Australia's new PM for Women has a lot to learn - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)