“If I want to be remembered for one thing,” the outgoing premier of Victoria said on Tuesday, “It’s this: I led a government that listened to girls about their health.”
As an aspiration, it sounded humble. But for a swath of women, it counted.
When Jacinta Allan launched a landmark inquiry into women’s pain in 2024, she provided a space for others to tell their stories and share their experiences. Ultimately, more than 13,000 women and girls seized the opportunity.
How history remembers Allan remains to be seen given her mixed legacy that includes the scandals surrounding Big Build projects, record state debt and the cancelled Commonwealth Games. But experts unanimously agree the inquiry into women’s pain, the first of its kind in Australia, dragged the issue out of the shadows and changed the face of women’s health.
Filmmaker Leah Filley told the inquiry of being so gaslit while seeking help for 25 years of chronic pelvic pain that one doctor offered her antidepressants instead of a medical certificate.
In her 3000-word submission, Filley spoke frankly about “the despair I felt at times, and the loneliness of chronic pain”.
The inquiry exposed the second-class treatment of women’s suffering so effectively, it was “extraordinary and momentous”, she said.
“It was incredible … women being listened to for the first time in a really legitimate way,” Filley said. Although doctors are still unable to diagnose the cause of her pain, that the state government declared it important, “delivered validation”.
Dr Karin Jones, the head of the Royal Women’s Hospital Chronic Pelvic Pain Clinic, said the inquiry was a significant milestone in health policy that “delivered far more than those of us working in the world of women’s pain ever thought it would”.
“Following the inquiry we have seen actual change,” Jones said. “More enthusiasm and interest from academics, health care workers, and from patients a sense that they are less alone and that they deserve answers.”
As a result of the inquiry, a new early intervention model was introduced at the hospital for those waiting to see a gynaecologist. A more holistic approach was supporting patients to find explanations for their pain, Jones said, “to help them make sense of what is happening in their bodies – not much to ask, but a fundamental step to taking back control of their life”.
For Allan, the pain project was no hard-hat stunt, but a personal passion. Her distress as she recalled the worst of her own endometriosis pain and accompanying fertility struggle was real when in 2022, then the deputy premier, she announced plans for the inquiry. It began in 2024.
Allan said at the time that when she started out in parliament as a 26-year-old, she kept quiet about her suffering and her fertility struggles because she didn’t think the workplace was an “authorised environment” in which to reveal it.
As happened to many women at the time, it took 10 years for the source of her trouble to be found – a diagnosis gap that is in part narrowing due to awareness via the inquiry she championed.
Professor Sue Matthews, the joint chair of the inquiry and the chief executive of the Royal Women’s Hospital, credits the investigation with having mainstreamed an issue once considered fringe by many.
“The way I would describe the legacy of the pain inquiry is it moved women’s pain from the margins and invisibility to the centre of policy, which is just phenomenal,” Matthews said.
“It is impossible to ignore now and that is the difference.”
The inquiry’s report, handed down in November 2025, produced immediate measures. The “green whistle” – analgesic inhalers to alleviate pain during gynaecological procedures like IUD insertion – were rolled out. A statewide women’s pain treatment standard was created, and an action plan is under development.
It led to the establishment of a statewide child and adolescent clinic run by the Royal Children’s Hospital, which offers reproductive health and pain-condition care for people up to the age of 18.
Fifteen women’s clinics have already been rolled out statewide, with a further five to come.
Perhaps as important as its 27 recommendations was the spotlight the inquiry placed on what it found were widespread “experiences of dismissal, disrespect, and inadequate treatment … leading to distrust in the system”.
Former health minister Mary-Anne Thomas, who oversaw the inquiry before announcing her retirement from politics in April, labelled the treatment of many women who shared what they’d been through as “medical misogyny and gaslighting”. Allan’s frankness allowed others to feel safe to discuss and demand more, Thomas said.
“Here’s the thing about Jacinta, she had her own lived experience of endometriosis, and she shared the challenges it presented to her when she wanted to start a family; the pain that she lived in for so long,” Thomas said.
“I just feel very grateful that she was so willing to share those stories so other girls and women would know they were not alone and that conditions like endometriosis do not discriminate.”
Thomas also noted Allan’s determination to ensure women across the state had a right to contraception and termination, despite a growing sensitivity around such issues in some sections of the community.
“Another issue she has been steadfast on, and much stronger than any other leader before … has been her determination that women and girls have access to abortion care – together, neither of us were afraid to talk about that,” she said.
During her premiership, Allan also expanded the state’s Chemist Care Now program to allow 850 participating pharmacies to supply the oral contraceptive pill without a doctor’s prescription for adults over the age of 18.
Women’s Health Victoria chief executive Sally Hasler said that under Allan’s leadership, Victoria became the national leader in women’s health provision.
“It is an incredible and really unique position for women in Victoria to have had a premier who chose to use her lived experience of dismissal in the healthcare system to drive meaningful reform and investment,” Hasler said.
“It’s a powerful example of how women in positions of power can drive more equitable outcomes.”
Hasler and others warned that given the pain inquiry’s recommendations are yet to all come to fruition, future state governments would need to be held to the standards the inquiry set.
Federal Assistant Health Minister Rebecca White and her predecessor, Ged Kearney, both credit the Victorian government’s work with improving women and girls’ healthcare in a way that would stand the test of time.
The inquiry “really shifted the whole medical system into a new way of looking at healthcare for women”, Kearney said.
“I was talking to the head of the emergency department at the Northern Hospital at Epping the other day, and he said to me because of all the work the [state] government has done around women’s health, they have completely changed how they triage women now when they come in.”
Kearney said Allan and Thomas’ insistence on highlighting substandard treatment of women in pain helped other governments realise the extent of systemic misogyny in the sector.
“I hope other women in leadership positions can see how appreciative women are when you speak up and make change on their behalf; I think that is a real legacy,” Kearney said.
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Wendy Tuohy is a senior writer focusing on social issues and those impacting women and girls.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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