The Newcastle Greens have committed to investigate equality weighting for the city's tender decisions and a review of council policies for gender discrimination.
The party wants to deliver a new domestic violence prevention strategy and gender sensitive urban design framework in the next council term.
The design framework would review the council's policies, strategies and budget allocations for gender discrimination.
Greens councillor and lord mayoral candidate Charlotte McCabe said it would also "ensure future infrastructure is designed for all users", by prioritising separated cycleways for women, children and vulnerable cyclists and extending the length of time allocated to cross roads.
The Greens also want to explore adding equality quota weighting for tender decisions to address the construction worker gender disparity. Women make up two per cent of the country's construction workforce.
"I believe local government plays a key role in promoting and creating safe environments through our role as planners, but also as civic leaders with wide and diverse community networks," Cr McCabe said.
The domestic violence prevention strategy would include commitments to ensure community facing roles are trained in responding to disclosure of violence and targeted community consultation with women and women from diverse backgrounds, Cr McCabe said.
"We're proud of the fact that the City of Newcastle was one of the first councils to introduce domestic and family violence leave in 2018, alongside other female friendly working conditions and have recently celebrated achieving pay equity," she said.
"The domestic and family violence statistics are higher than the state average in Newcastle, and must be addressed by all levels of government."
Greens candidate for ward three Sinead Francis-Coan said too often women, elderly citizens and vulnerable communities did not feel safe in the city.
"We see this when women pay for taxis because they don't feel safe on public transport, or taking the long route home to avoid walking through dark places," she said.
"Urban planners have historically focused on getting people to work and home, but this has left women, children, older people and carers with a city that hasn't been designed for their needs."
"Council's social strategy and use of crime prevention through environmental design is a first step, but other cities are streaking ahead of Newcastle in this space."
The Newcastle Liberals have issued their pitch to boost events by introducing a city activations strategy.
"The Wallsend Winter Fair and Hamilton Carnivale are two iconic Newcastle events with broad appeal that have fallen over in recent years," Cr Pull said.
"Those events were led by the business community and were ultimately killed off during the pandemic. The council has the ability to help those events get up and running again.
"A City Activations Strategy would provide a clear framework and outline our expectations of how council can support these events in the future.
"Neighbouring cities have regular activations that we can look to as examples. Maitland's TASTE festival is a project I'd like us to consider having in our urban centres."
