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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 3 Hansard (7 March) . . Page.. 725 ..

MS GALLAGHER (continuing):

Many women view International Women's Day as the yearly occasion to restate, review and act in support of women's rights in social, economic and political areas. This should always be done with a remembrance of the early days of our feminist movement.

Australia's first International Women's Day's rally took place in the Sydney Domain on 25 March 1928. It called for equal pay for equal work, an eight-hour day for shop assistants, no piece work, the basic wage for the unemployed and annual holidays on full pay. With the depression sinking in and unemployment reaching over 500,000 in 1932, industrial disputations began to rise as wages and working conditions of women and their families were undermined. A small but active vocal women's movement organised against these cuts for International Women's Day.

In 1929 women again took the opportunity to defend their communities from the depression through protest. A rally organised in support of the wives and families of striking timber workers was held in Sydney Domain.

The ideas and movement founded by these early working class feminists laid the basis for an International Women's Day and a women's movement which continues to agitate for and achieve significant advances today. Some of these advances have been:

• the removal in 1966 on the ban on married women working in the public service;
• the adoption in 1972 of the principle of equal pay for work of equal value;
• the entry of women into non-traditional occupations as, for example, tram drivers in 1975 and builders and workers in the steel industry in 1973;
• access to abortion through the liberalisation of the laws of most states;
• funding for child care;
• the establishment of women specific services like health centres, refuges and housing services;
• the Sex Discrimination Act outlawing discrimination on the basis of gender, marital status or pregnancy.

These are just a few.

As people active in politics we should also appreciate the work of early suffragettes and recognise that there is still much work left to be done in achieving representation for women in parliament and social and economic life.

The cause of the suffragettes in achieving universal franchise should be celebrated this Friday. The Australia Suffragettes Society, formed in 1889, was instrumental in getting women the vote and in getting all the women here today elected. The society argued for equal justice, equal privileges in marriage and divorce, rights to property and the custody of children in divorce. As suffragette and journalist Louisa Lawson stated in 1889:

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