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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 2 Hansard (6 March) . . Page.. 670 ..

MS GALLAGHER (continuing):

This year, as well as presenting awards to a number of women whose outstanding achievements have enriched the lives of others in our community, we will also be presenting a new community award. This award recognises that, in order to enhance the status of women, we need to work together as a community. It provides and opportunity to acknowledge people or organisations that may have contributed to improving access to services to women, developed family friendly work practices or worked in some way to encourage more women to participate in an aspect of community life. Those celebrations are on tomorrow evening and I look forward to seeing members attend them.

MRS DUNNE (4.52): On the day before the eve of International Women's Day, I rise to pay tribute to most of the women across the world and across Canberra for whom International Women's Day is just another day and the celebrations will go unnoticed.

I am always concerned that things like International Women's Day are designed to make middle-class women, like us, feel warm and fuzzy. I am concerned that we do not actually carry our efforts beyond International Women's Day to address the real needs of people across the world. I am also concerned that we have preconceived ideas about the sorts of things women should be doing in regard to International Women's Day.

We should remember, Mr Deputy Speaker, that most of the women in the world will mark International Women's Day by doing what they do every other day-carrying water, grinding millet, looking for sticks to make fire to make bread for their family if they are lucky enough to find the grain or to find the water. For most of the women of the world, International Women's Day will be another day of poverty.

For most women in Canberra it will be another day of getting up, cooking breakfast, making sandwiches, running people around and looking after people. Most of them are doing many things that we, in this place, do not have the time or the inclination to do-running meals-on-wheels, running community organisations, and going to school to listen to my children read because I do not do it.

These are the people that we should pay tribute to-the people who are not at the forefront, who are not at the barricades, who probably do not even know that it is International Women's Day; and probably, if you told them, would not particularly care because they are getting on with their lives and making a difference in their world. These are the people that we need to pay tribute to. We should not be here telling them they should be doing something better or something worse.

Those of us especially of the First World who, because of our actions or inactions, consign many people to poverty, should be doing what we can. We should be going beyond International Women's Day and ensuring that every day is a day for these women and for their children, husbands, fathers and brothers. This is a day when we take stock, but we must do more than take stock because otherwise it will be just a meaningless gesture that we go through every year. We go to a breakfast and we feel smug about ourselves, when most of the people in the world will wake up on Saturday morning to no breakfast.

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