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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Thursday, 4 March 2004) . . Page.. 768 ..

institutional models for peace building and laid the foundations for cooperation between people divided by ethnicity, religion and political affiliation. In areas of explosive conflict, other civil society organisations have failed to generate or sustain ethnic mixing; yet, in working to improve the situation and status of women in their communities, women have succeeded in transcending ethnic and religious divides and demonstrated an ability to sustain the lives of their dependants and their communities.

Whilst that is an incredibly positive thing and is something many women in Australia support, the Women Building Peace and Women in Black organisations that work here in the ACT actively support the role that women around the world take in peace building. There is a UN resolution, which carries the same weight as all other UN resolutions, which recognises the important specific roles women must take in peace building. However, there is a great gulf between such small-scale women’s initiatives and the power structures in which ceasefires are agreed and constitutions negotiated. Women do the groundwork to build peace but it is still men who make the decisions at the higher level, which means that those conflicts sometimes reignite. We must recognise the role women play in peace building and support their part in the peace-building process all the way to the top level.

Women’s organisations make an important contribution to our society as they allow women to actively participate in our community as social participants and social leaders and also to argue about women’s causes in the social and political economic agenda. I think this is important because, across the world, there is a gulf between women’s agendas and political power structures. Created and controlled by a shrinking elite of men, political and economic power structures are concerned with the development model of unlimited growth of goods and services, money revenue, technological process and a concept of wellbeing identified as an abundance of industrially produced commodities.

In contrast, feminists have long argued that women’s caring roles and their responsibilities in society produce different priorities, concerns and needs from those of the predominantly male elite who control economic globalisation and govern political power structures. It is because of that that it is most important for us to support women’s organisations and help them to contribute to the political agenda.

With that point in mind I refer members to the status of women report, put together by a committee of this Assembly, tabled in November 2002. In the report the committee quoted extensively from a submission from two women’s organisations that work here in the ACT to support women—the Women’s Electoral Lobby and the YWCA of Canberra.

Arguments were put forward that the provision of operational funds to women’s advocacy groups would allow those groups to engage in grassroots consultations and improve the quality of advice offered to government; that operational funds would enable mechanisms to open participation to broader and more representative groups and mean also that the few volunteer hours that are available to women, many of whom already work a double shift, can be spent on policy development and advocacy and not on the baseline tasks of administration. I remind the Assembly of recommendation 49, where the committee recommends that the government investigate the provision of ongoing funding for women’s advocacy services.

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