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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 01 Hansard (Thursday, 12 February 2004) . . Page.. 275 ..

MS DUNDAS (11.11): When Mrs Burke was putting forward this motion, I heard her speak a lot about fathers and their role. Mr Stefaniak also picked this up. I was thinking about the debate that we had just two days ago. I will be careful not to reflect on that debate, but there was a lot of discussion in this chamber about the role of a mother and a father and the family unit and how they have an important impact on bringing up a child. More references were made to the role a community has in bringing up children. That is another cornerstone of the debates that we have been having over the last two days.

When I look at these terms of reference, I find them very narrow. We see only the father and his role in the family unit, when we need to be looking more broadly. In that context, we should be looking at the family, the community and all the people who affect children’s lives and provide them with role models and guidance, and how that affects their future.

Mrs Burke, in moving this motion, talked a lot about the need to explore making further services available for men and for fathers. No 3 in the terms of reference is “the availability of government and non-government support”. She asked why we have an Office for Women and why we have women’s health centres? I was disappointed to hear that because I thought we had had this debate. I thought we had been having this debate for 100 years.

We live in a society where men are dominant, where men control the political processes and where men have amazing sway over the economy, and services have been dedicated to the men in society, as they have been throughout history. We are still working to overcome and change that and to make our society more inclusive and more aware of how programs affect different members of the community differently.

We do still need an Office for Women and we do still need women’s health centres because so many of the structures that are currently in place are there to support the community at large, but in a very male-oriented way. What we really need to be looking at is the impact that the community and the entire family have on children. By having terms of reference that are so narrow, that specifically look at fathers, we again devalue the role of mothers and we again devalue the role of aunts, brothers, sisters, uncles, family friends and the broader community, and the effect they have on the family formation.

I would like to have a broader discussion. We should be discussing paid paternity leave and how that affects childrearing. We should be talking about childcare and the inadequate systems that mean that mothers are leaving the workforce because it is better for them, in an economic sense, to look after the children and not work. Those structures in place at the moment need further exploration. That is something that should take place in this Assembly, it is something that should take place federally and it is something that should take place more broadly in the community.

I want to read another quote from a book called Manifesta by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, which I have quoted from many times in this place. They write:

Our expectations of dads are so much lower than our expectations of moms that dads don’t get such a bad rap from their daughters. We also let them off the hook

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