Page 4850 - Week 16 - Thursday, 29 November 1990
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this virus has opened the community's eyes and made discussion of these issues acceptable. A few years ago I could not imagine an open discussion on condoms or their use or public hearings that dealt with those issues in any parliament, and yet this is certainly the case now.
One of the difficulties that we have to deal with is our own biases to those marginalised groups. When we look, on Saturday, at women and AIDS, it is of great interest to look at women who are most involved with the sex industry - prostitutes. That group has been marginalised for many years, but the interesting part of the evidence within Australia is that prostitutes appear to have an even lesser rate of HIV infection than that present in the normal community. Of course, one would expect that in one sense because there are very few men within that group. On the other hand, the potential for the spread of AIDS through prostitution is incredible, and it would appear that women in the sex industry have managed to accept a role and see their own health as being important; which is only natural, of course. It is important for us to recognise the need to be able to deal with prostitution to make sure that that does not change. That is one of the issues that our committee is dealing with.
Our committee is also dealing with that other marginalised group, the intravenous drug users. They are the group that has accounted for the vast majority of infections in women within Australia. There is something in Mr Humphries' speech that I need to draw his attention to. He commented:
By the turn of the century that annual number of new AIDS cases among women is expected to equal those among men.
While I accept that as a worldwide figure, I think it is highly unlikely to be the case in Australia. Worldwide you gave the figures as three to five million, so make it half. In Australia it is much less than that, and in the ACT in particular I think you said it is one in 10. So, I think that that is highly unlikely to be the case, but the important thing is that we do not rest on our laurels as far as this goes but continue the hard work that has been done and be prepared to take the next step.
Last Friday at public hearings we had representations from the haemophiliac group of the ACT. Some of the sad stories that I learnt of from there and from then talking to other people are of young children who, first of all, are disadvantaged anyway because they have haemophilia and, secondly, have picked up the AIDS virus through the use of contaminated blood. When we hear of those stories we are inclined to allow our hearts to go out and to say, "Yes, we need to protect those people. We need to have in place the discrimination legislation" - the sort of thing that Mr Collaery presented earlier today - "in order to protect them". But that same protection of those same rights ought to be available to the marginalised groups, and we must be
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