Some days it is really hard not to start a bonfire

I live in Adelaide, which isn't great if you are a progressive activist woman in business. The state that was the first place for women to stand for Parliament and the home town of Australia's first female PM is also the place that has never had a female Premier or Treasurer.

I try to be inspiring and to focus on the positives, but some days there aren't many positives left. Today is one of those days.

Maybe a bonfire is what is needed? It certainly would look really pretty. Start it all again with new systems and structures and processes.

But I'm not the bonfire type. I'm a reformer which means trying to work within systems to change them and make them better. Working from the inside to make things incrementally a bit nicer, a bit fairer.

But those systems really aren't very fair.

How do you reform systems when you don't have the structural power, the budget, the resources or the media team? Do you just keep going and hoping that with good will and a bit of sparkle that there will eventually be enough of a movement to change things?

Yes. Because it's the only thing that ever has.

The systems and structures we work within aren't fair. They aren't equal. Right now for many they feel worse than ever before.

But having a belief that they will get better is what makes it worth continuing. If you didn't feel it was going to get better - if I didn't believe it was going to get better - then there wouldn't be any point in trying.

I've seen enough change in my 40 years of life to know that change is indeed possible. I've seen new ideas come and sparkle and the world get better in so many beautiful multi-coloured ways. The biggest of them all - marriage equality.

Marriage equality wasn't even a term back when we started advocating for it. It was an intentional term we adopted as the campaign picked up speed. Something that demonstrated we weren't asking for extra rights, just the chance to be the same.

When the votes came in from that unfair ballot there was something undeniable - there were more Australians who wanted equality and fairness than those that wanted continued disadvantage and unequal treatment.

So what do we do about gender?

Gender equality is far from the reality in Australia. I've had enough conversations with friends who fear for their lives through domestic violence to know that there is such a long way to go. There is a really really long way to go.

The resources are scarce and the formal power is scarcer still. Boys with football dreams wield all the power while women and a few men continue to battle for scraps.

But you've got to start somewhere.

So we'll start here, knowing it isn't fair and it isn't equal. Burning things down isn't likely to help, so we'll inspire and make it sparkle instead.

Because we have to.

We don't want extra rights. We just want to be the same.