Page 3584 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 12 October 1994
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INTERNATIONAL YEAR OF THE FAMILY
Ministerial Statement and Paper
Debate resumed from 23 February 1994, on motion by Ms Follett:
That the Assembly takes note of the papers.
MR HUMPHRIES (5.43): Madam Speaker, it is a great delight to start to debate the Government's ministerial statement on the International Year of the Family something like 9½ months after the international year began. That is more of a comment on the way in which the Assembly has conducted its work than on the International Year of the Family. This is a significant year and one which, I hope, has been successful. Since it is now almost over I can say that. It has been successful in attempting to focus some policy and community work on the nature of problems facing Australian families and the way in which we, as an Assembly, can move towards strengthening the environment in which those families live and work and ensure that there is more resilience in those family structures than, unfortunately, has been the case in the last few decades.
We would all share the view that stability in these structures is in the broader community interest; that it is important for us to work towards that; and that the International Year of the Family presents some opportunities to start to put those strategies in place. I attended a conference, organised by the Federal coalition a few months ago, on the International Year of the Family. There was considerable discussion about the way in which families were under pressure; what sorts of issues they were facing; and how those pressures could be alleviated. Even at that conference, there was some of the broader debate that has been, I think, destructive in trying to define exactly what it is that a family might be. I certainly have a view about that. No doubt all of us in this place have a particular view about what a family might be.
An author called Henry Thowless - I think he was an American - wrote a book called Straight and Crooked Thinking. He argues that one of the fallacies, often advanced in debate to help to defeat an argument about what something is, is that, because you cannot clearly define it, it therefore cannot possibly exist. The argument that he used to disprove that is this: If you take a tin of paint, which is 100 per cent black, and make it one part white and 99 parts black, then 98 parts white and two parts black, and so on, over a period of time you go from fully black to fully white; and the fact that you cannot say that it stops being black and starts being white at any particular point does not prove that either black or white does not exist.
Mr Moore: Why do we have black and white families?
MR HUMPHRIES: Black and white families? No; Mr Moore, you must go back to sleep. I am sorry to wake you. The fact is that we apply the same logic in respect of families.
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