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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 01 Hansard (Thursday, 12 February 2004) . . Page.. 277 ..

However, it is interesting for me to hear Mrs Burke, as a woman, saying that a lot has been done for women. I do not want to misrepresent what she is saying. Maybe she is saying that she thinks that is good. I am assuming she thinks that is good because I am assuming she understands that it has been necessary to do a lot for women, and it still is, because women have been treated inequitably from the beginning and women have been less than men in the eyes of men, who have controlled society.

I was trying to get figures this morning, but I have not had time to get the most recent figures Australia wide. However, I gave a paper recently at an international conference, so I will give you those figures. Women are the largest and fastest growing proportion of the world’s poor. Of 1.3 billion people living in poverty, 70 per cent are women. Women and girls are two-thirds of the world’s 900 million illiterate. Women and children are 80 per cent of the 25 million refugees and internally displaced people. Violence against women is the leading cause of injury and death among women aged 15 to 44 years. Gender violence accounts for more death and disability than cancer, malaria and traffic injuries all put together. Those figures are from the International Women’s Development Agency.

In Australia, we do not have the issues about literacy so much, but we certainly see a disproportionate burden of poverty and violence for women. The numbers suffering from violence and domestic violence are huge. We still see women very disempowered in our society. It is very basic and obvious. Yes, a lot is being done for women. More needs to be done for women, but that is not to say that there are no issues for men. I stress again that that is why I have always asked for gender audits and analyses: when you do them, you find out that women are doing pretty badly. However, you will also now find that men between the ages of 30 and 50, from memory, have a high rate of suicide at the moment. A gender analysis brings those things out.

When Mrs Burke says, “We do not hear much about men”, we also have to think about what we do in this Assembly. How many of us here have talked about poverty, housing, employment or kids at risk and said that those with behavioural issues are mostly boys? I talk about that; other people talk about that. Mental health services: we talk about that. That is about men. The point is that there is a constant debate in this place about services to meet the needs of people in the ACT, and those services are there for men.

In particular, Mrs Burke focuses on the question of fathers. Of course, we know that there are many fathers who have gone through divorce and who have the capacity to have a reasonable working relationship with their ex-partners. They work well with that; they have the capacity to do that. There are men and women who do not have that capacity. Their relationships become totally dysfunctional and break down. That is a pretty tragic thing, but we are talking about what kind of services we have to support those sorts of men.

Of course we need to look at crisis accommodation and so on, and we have done that in this Assembly. However, if you want to look at questions related to fathers and relationship breakdown, then let’s talk about mental health services and about the counselling services that are available. Those issues are coming up constantly in terms of the mental health debate in this place, so I do not think it is fair to say that we are not talking about these issues.

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