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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 3 Hansard (7 March) . . Page.. 735 ..

MRS DUNNE (continuing):

Looking further afield, I echo the sentiment of my colleague Mrs Cross, who said that we should be grateful to live in the country of our birth because in Australia and in Canberra we are indeed privileged. I would like to pay testament to the people for whom traditional International Women's Day festivities are just like the activities of every other day. It is drudgery; it is carrying water; it is living without electricity, without power; it is probably not even knowing what a rose is.

Many of those in abject poverty are there because of the actions or the inactions of those of us in the First World. We tend to keep people in poverty in West Africa, Asia and South America because of our own benightedness, our insistence on maintaining people in debt and our insistence, as I said yesterday, on visiting First World mores on people in emerging countries.

I would also like to pay testament to the women of Canberra, who, as Ms MacDonald said, are the glue that makes society stick-the mothers who will get up in the morning, cook the lunches, make breakfast, pack the lunches, get the kids off to school, go to the canteen, run Meals on Wheels and perhaps work for a little while. We must remember that not every woman works. Some women are retired and contribute to the community. Some of them choose to stay at home. The tenor of what we say here tends to demean those who choose to stay at home and by their actions every day uphold the rest of us-the ones who choose to stay at home, who have the time that I do not have to go and hear the reading in our classrooms, who have the time I do not have to attend to preschools. We should be grateful to those women.

Despite all the pie and sky about the achievements of women and what women really need to do, at the end of the day, at the end of the festivities and at the end of the pie in the sky somebody has to do the washing up. That is the job that falls to women.

At 5.00 pm, in accordance with standing order 34, the debate was interrupted. The motion for the adjournment of the Assembly having been put and negatived, the debate was resumed.

MRS DUNNE: I feel a need to introduce a slightly sour note. One of the themes that emerged in what was said today by Ms Gallagher and Ms Dundas was something that is an emblem of what appears to be the international women's movement, which is a reliance on what they call women's right to choose but what I would call abortion rights.

I would like to put on record that you do not have to be a feminist and you do not have to be in favour of abortion deregulation and liberalisation to be a feminist. I have many friends who are active feminists. I count myself as one who would consider that humming the mantra and embracing the emblem of abortion do nothing more than enslave women. It is time in the year 2002 that we started to take notice of the fact that women who subject themselves to abortion are often coerced into doing so and as a result they risk increased rates of suicide, depression and breast cancer. I know we do not like to hear about it. I close by quoting Dr Janet Darling from the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Centre, who said in a recent publication:

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