In 2002 the Australian Prime Minister John Howard announced that we are living in 'the post-feminist stage of the debate.' As Anne Summers documents in The End of Equality: Work, Babies and Women's Choices in Twenty-First Century Australia (2003), Howard cut funding for childcare, for the Office of the Status of Women, and for the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. He abolished the Register of Women in the Office of the Status of Women for government appointments, the Women's Statistical Unit in the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and the Women's Bureau in the Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs. Special services for women, given the achievement of gender equality, were obviously no longer required.