Waratah-Wynyard councillor Alwyn Friedersdorff has been elected president of the National Rural Women’s Coalition, representing all rural and remote women in Australia.
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Mrs Friedersdorff has been a councillor for Waratah-Wynyard since 2002, and is currently National Treasurer of Australian Women in Local Government.
Her credentials also include an appointment to the Board of the Tasmanian Women’s Council.
As the president of the NRWC she will be in a key position to work with federal and state politicians on issues affecting regional and rural women.
“I view it as I’m one of the top five women in Australia who has quite a strong impact on policy and dealing with politicians, and that’s because we have an alliance … of five women’s groups that the federal government funds for women’s issues,” she said.
The groups within that alliance represent a large number of women’s rural organisations, which allows for the coalition to have “a huge reach” and a strong influence, Mrs Friedersdorff said.
The NRWC’s fellow alliances funded by the federal government are Australian Women Against Violence Alliance, National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women’s Alliance, Equality Rights Alliance and Economic Security for Women Alliance.
This year the NRWC is working on the issue of economic security and empowerment for women, a brief that Mrs Friedersdorff will be following closely.
“That’s kind of the umbrella theme and under that will come, always, gender equality and domestic violence and those sort of issues, which we tend to address particularly with a rural lense,” Mrs Friedersdorff said.
“And of course it’s about connection, rural and remotely, making sure that the 25 per cent of the population that are rural and remote are connected.”
Mrs Friedersdorff said she was “honoured” to be elected president after being with the coalition for four years, and that she was looking forward to working with the NRWC’s board of directors over the next year.