Page 3585 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 12 October 1994
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It is often said that you cannot define precisely what a family is because everyone has a different definition of what a family is; and that, therefore, there is some difficulty in actually advancing with the concept of promoting families, supporting families or giving them a better environment in which to operate. My definition is that, where adults care for children on a permanent basis, that is a family. We would all acknowledge that the relationship between adults and children is a very important part of a family relationship and that it is possibly more important than the relationship between adults who might not have any other link between them. That is not to say that all sorts of families work as well or face the same pressures. For example, it is undoubtedly true that single-parent families face a great deal more pressure than do what I might call traditional families. It is a fact of life that the ACT has the highest proportion of one-parent families in the whole of Australia.
At this time last year 11,900 people, or 4 per cent of the entire Territory's population, identified themselves as single-parent families. In addition, at that time, Canberra had 63,900 couple families; 30,300 families with dependent children; 4,900 families with dependent and non-dependent children; 5,400 families with non-dependent children only; and 23,300 families with no children at all. The percentage of one-parent families with dependent children was the second highest in Australia. The ACT had the second highest proportion of those sorts of families, with 8,100 families, or 6.4 per cent of our population. Canberra also had the second highest proportion of de facto couples in Australia; 10.9 per cent of our population identify in that category. There were 1,900 de facto couples with children, constituting 3 per cent of our population. These figures indicate a huge number of combinations of people living with children and caring for those children, or people living with other adults in some kind of permanent domestic or caring relationship.
Some would argue that these are not really families at all and that there should be some limits on what you call a family. I note that in an article in the Canberra Weekly a few months ago - in March, in fact - one Matthew Abraham, whose name rings a vague bell, wrote:
Yet what is a family? When faced with this question, our policy makers have, quite understandably, grasped the Vague Thesaurus with both hands, using language so all-embracing, so fuzzy, that it loses any value.
The appalling TV ditty for the International Year of the Family is the syrupy invention of an advertising system that applies the same feel-good manipulative techniques to convince us that cigarettes are suave, tampons are exciting, and ice creams are orgasmic. Somehow, it really says it all - families are everything and nothing.
However, it is equally true to say that what is vague and undefinable, nonetheless, can have a great deal of meaning for individuals. Another correspondent, Marion Frith, in the Canberra Times of December last year, wrote:
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