Page 961 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 17 June 1992
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
MR MOORE (3.23): I would like to take this opportunity to give my response to some of the comments on the status of women and Ms Follett's paper. We had full knowledge that this statement on the status of women was going to be and that provided us with the opportunity to prepare some comments.
In July Mr Connolly will be representing the ACT at a Federal Attorney-General's meeting. At this meeting Mr Connolly will need to represent our views on proposed legislation, Project Choice, to do with regulating the availability of certain sexist material. I wish to make some comments on this issue that I sincerely hope Mr Connolly will take with him to that meeting.
Mr Connolly: Back to Rubens.
MR MOORE: Mr Connolly interjects, "Back to Rubens". I hope that, by the end of my comments, he will realise the nonsense of that statement. The recent report by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, "Half Way to Equal", addresses the status of women in the work force, their economic status, education and training concerns, access and equity issues. It seems that things are generally improving in the work force for women, albeit very slowly. In addition, today we have heard a number of comments from Ms Follett that also extend that and raise those very significant issues.
EEO and sexual harassment legislation have netted positive results in this area over the last few years. I doubt whether anyone, though, could deny that there is still a very long way to go. As the title of the report indicates, women are halfway to equal. In this respect Ms Follett commented earlier on the fact that this chamber leads the way in one sense in that we are the first to have a woman as Speaker and a woman as Chief Minister. But, if my memory serves me correctly, even in terms of the number of women in the parliament, we have just a little more than a third, and it seems to me that there is still a long way to go for that representation to be achieved as well.
Mr Connolly: It is the Liberal Party that drops the average.
MR MOORE: Mr Connolly quite rightly interjects that it is the Liberal Party that lets down the system. In her speech Ms Follett referred to sexist language, and I think sexist language plays a very important part in our understanding of the status of women.
Despite many battles that have been fought, and theoretically won, women seem to have reached a plateau from which they cannot rise, or they seem not to be able to rise. There are many women in Australia who believe that the reason this resistant plateau exists has much to do with the unchanging media image of women. Women are still degraded, put up to ridicule, and exploited in the media. If women must be seen in a debased way as every Australian enters the local shop, then it is questionable whether the female sex can be taken seriously and treated with respect when they reach the workplace. This undesirable image of women is not something seen by choice by a few people in the privacy of their own homes; it is an image seen by 100 per cent of the population, male and female, child and adult.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .