Vending machines offering free pads and tampons will begin operating at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne Museum and the Royal Exhibition Building, as well as hospitals, libraries and Tafes, as part of an Australian-first government initiative aimed at ending period poverty.
The Victorian premier, Jacinta Allan, will on Thursday announce the first 30 locations where 50 vending machines will be installed as part of the pilot program, which also includes the Melbourne Immigration Museum, three Northern Health campuses, the Royal Women’s hospital in Parkville and the Sidney Myer Music Bowl.
“Pads and tampons are not a luxury – they’re a necessity. And women and girls should be able to access them whenever and wherever they need them,” Allan said.
Eleven libraries and 10 Tafes across Melbourne’s suburbs will also receive 32 vending machines, stocked with products designed to last women and girls several days.
Fifty machines will begin operating between Thursday and 20 January. By the end of 2025, it is expected there will be 1,500 machines across 700 locations, which will include other public places such as courts and train stations, and possibly shopping centres and sports grounds and facilities.
Making free pads and tampons available in public places was a key election commitment the Labor government took to the 2022 state election and is expected to cost $23m to roll out.
While the announcement prompted outraged from some men on social media and scorn from conservative commentators, it was popular with women and young voters.
The minister for women, Natalie Hutchins, said the initiative would “ease cost-of-living pressures for Victorian women” and prevent them from having to choose between buying period products and other necessities.
She pointed to not-for-profit organisation Share the Dignity’s Big Bloody Survey, published in August, which found three in five respondents, or 64%, struggled to afford period products.
Nearly one in five (19%) respondents had to improvise on period products due to cost, with some resorting to items such as tea towels, tote bags, toilet paper or socks instead.
“Women spend thousands of dollars over their lifetime on these basic necessities – this nation-leading program provides cost-of-living relief for women while providing them the basic dignity they deserve,” Hutchins said.
Affinity Outdoor has been selected as the government’s official supplier of the vending machines after an expressions-of-interest process.
Michelle Davis, the company’s chief executive, said the first vending machines to be installed would be larger models with touch screens, which can track inventory levels in real time.
She said the pilot phase would help determine the right stock levels and gauge demand at each site.
“From our experience, often it can be the smaller sites – such as community centres – where the demand is the highest, because of the clients that come through and return for more,” Davis said.
“It isn’t always the bigger sites with higher traffic that see the most use. It’ll be a real learning to see which sites are the busiest.”
She said she expected the vending machines would help a wide range of women – from those who unexpectedly find themselves without a tampon to those who struggle to afford period products.
“Ultimately, we want period products to be as available and accessible as toilet paper.”
Donna Stolzenberg, chief executive of the National Homeless Collective, said the program “removes the humiliation of not being able to access sanitary items”.
“The experience of homelessness is a horrific, frightening and shameful situation. Adding lack of access to sanitary items and forcing people to beg for a tampon creates an even greater trauma with added humiliation,” she said.
The Victorian government has made pads and tampons free at government schools since 2020, distributing more than 6.5m in total.
Similar vending machines with free period products have been funded by at least one council – with public toilets in Sydney’s inner-west local government area supplied with them – while the charity Share the Dignity has also provided pads and tampons from machines across the country.
In Scotland, pads and tampons must be made available to anyone who needs them under laws introduced in 2020, while Seoul, in South Korea, has seen free period products distributed in 10 public places as part of a pilot program in 2018.
• The headline on this article was amended on 14 November 2024 to reflect that similar vending machines have been supplied by at least one council and a charity, and Victoria’s scheme is not the first in Australia, as it previously suggested.
