Page 5159 - Week 16 - Wednesday, 27 November 1991
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appropriate for us to continue to support a situation where there is, in the words of many women - Christian women activists particularly - an unnecessary exclusion of them from clerical service.
It would not hurt this Assembly to debate this a little bit tonight and to put some views on the record. Let us not be put off by the fact that Mr Stevenson, to my great disappointment, has turned what should have been a very interesting, fairly swift intellectual debate into a mechanical exercise that induced a level of boredom. The fact is that there is a high level of male domination in certain of the religious denominations in this country, and no clear way for women in some significant areas.
I accept that this is not a matter that the state should press - it is not for secular intrusion - but elsewhere in this Bill we have intruded in a host of other probably sensitive areas. I stress that this provision can be used for certain dominant groups who could call their exercise religious but who in fact are developing a policy of ascendancy for one gender or the other.
Working backwards, I need to address clause 30. Members may recall a very large and somewhat mischievous article in the Canberra Times during the consultation period, in fact on Monday, 11 February. I regret to say that it was an article by Marian Sawer. It was written by someone who should have known better. She should have consulted with my then officers or me before writing a very unfortunate article for the paper. She wrote that the then proposed clause, which is now clause 30, provided an unlimited exemption of all ACT legislation and subordinate legislation. She said:
This can only be described as an ambit claim on the part of the ACT Administration - and it renders the Bill a travesty. The ACT Government wishes to make discrimination unlawful - unless that discrimination is required by its own laws or regulations.
The equivalent exemption in the Commonwealth Sex Discrimination Act gave a two-year grace period for Commonwealth and state legislation to be brought into line with the Act, plus a loophole for further exemptions by regulation - a loophole that the Senate Standing Committee on Regulations and Ordinances is now closing.
In response to Marian Sawer, may I put on the record that it was unfortunate that those comments went in, because there was, of course, no attempt to evade the actual purposes that she sought to make out. The fact is that, because of all of the catch-up work that we have to do, it is necessary to provide some time for us to go through progressively and amend a lot of legislation. We need to
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