Page 191 - Week 02 - Thursday, 25 May 1989
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technical and further education colleges and the ACT Education Authority. Mr Moore knows much more about the ACT Education Authority than I, but I immediately note that in the top three jobs in the hierarchy all are men. That tends to go down the line, and comparatively few principals of senior colleges or secondary schools are women. I know there are efforts in the education department to do something about that, but has it gone far enough?
I ask the Minister for Industry, Employment and Education, the Chief Minister and all of us here to address that issue. I think it is a very important concern. Similarly, the Australian National University - I recognise that is not our bailiwick in a sense - also has internal anti-discrimination orders and regulations that it tries to follow, and I used to be very much involved with that. But it had many difficulties, and attempts to achieve some of those things were not necessarily successful. I want to urge it to take even greater steps in the future. But we can do something about the CCAE and the TAFE colleges. In relation to those colleges it seems to me that the contacts are almost always with men. I hope that in future that will cease to be the case.
I certainly agree about the question of criminal assault. If I may be just allowed this hiccup, I hope that members here will see the film "Accused". If they do they will see the ways in which men are often incredibly violent and how the system allows them to be so, and we must attack that. I do not rise on this point in relation to something that might be called wowserism - not at all. Mr Moore noted this morning that I had had occasion, on behalf of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, to visit the new sex shop or sex cinema, or whatever it was, when it opened, and to comment on it, which indeed I did. Might I note that the womens unit at the Australian National University was particularly interested in these problems of pornography. From the point of view of the protection of women, the question of pornography is not just a question of censorship or no censorship - that is a very difficult issue, I recognise - it is also an issue of the degrading and demeaning of women.
The pornography industry is very much dominated by men; its publicists are men. If one has any dealings with that industry one knows that that is the case, in the attempts to get one to change one's mind on that subject. Here I make no particular charges - I do not think there is any point in that - but I hope the ALP will recognise that it is not appropriate for the national capital of Australia also to be the pornographic capital of Australia, which is an area that particularly demeans women.
MRS GRASSBY (Minister for Housing and Urban Services) (3.30): I rise in trepidation after Dr Kinloch's speech, which had much perspicacity. I am not sure whether I can speak as well as he can in this house. I say to Dr Kinloch that if we had had our whole eleven here, we would have had an even amount of women and men.
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