Page 1308 - Week 05 - Thursday, 25 June 1992
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Chief Minister is really interested in making some real gains in this area, she should consult with the private sector. As she said, it is the private sector that will provide most of the job growth in the future. So there is not much point in making all these grandiose statements about women in the work force until initiatives are taken in cooperation with the private sector.
Ms Follett speaks glowingly about her initiative for women in small business, an area with which I am very familiar. I wonder whether Ms Follett's business breakfasts have encouraged many women actually to enter the small business environment or given any of them the backup they need to take that large plunge. I also wonder whether the breakfasts have stopped any small businesses becoming one of the ever-growing bankruptcy statistics. There are many real problems out there for small business, and I am confident that we could do better in this area. We must address the real problems, and I do not know that having breakfast achieves that.
The area of child-care is one near and dear to my heart, as I am sure it is for all working mothers. Ms Follett talks about two new employer-supported child-care centres for ACT Government employees. She claims that these new centres will free up places in private day-care centres. That might be true, but will the new centres overcome the lack of facilities in Tuggeranong? Possibly Ms Follett thinks that the private sector will bail her out in Tuggeranong, or maybe she is waiting to get some of the extra $90m available under Fightback for child-care. I wonder whether the private sector will be willing to invest money in child-care after the debacle of leasing part of North Curtin Primary School for child-care when Peter Pan day-care centre is right next door. Part-time and occasional child-care are becoming increasingly important as more and more women are working non-traditional hours, and it is on this area that I believe the Government must concentrate very heavily. In the ACT at this moment there is very little child-care outside the hours from nine to six, and there are more and more women working those outside-normal-hours times.
Ms Follett refers to some of the problems experienced by women in the unpaid work force and by carers. She did not even mention the greatest problem carers face, and that is the chronic lack of respite services in the ACT. Again, perhaps the $10m that will be available under the Fightback package for these purposes will help solve these very real problems. I was pleased yesterday to support the Domestic Violence (Amendment) Bill and associated legislation. The Liberal Party totally supports the priority given to this area by the Labor Government. I sincerely hope that this sort of consensus in the status of women arena will pave the way to real progress, marked not by rhetoric but by action.
MS SZUTY (3.49): The Chief Minister has spoken in praise of the position in our community of ACT women and of the government programs which have assisted them to reach these levels. In fact, some of the initiatives outlined in her speech have been passed by this Assembly only this week, namely, the protection orders legislation and the amendments to the Domestic Violence Act and the Crimes Act. These are all positive moves for women and a part of what I see as the necessary measures to redress what society has condoned for far too long in this area, that is, domestic violence.
There have been many milestones for women to celebrate in the past 100 years, marking their progress to equality. The first, of course, was gaining the right to vote, where South Australia took the lead in 1894. The landmark we all looked to in recent times was the passing into law of the Commonwealth Sex
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