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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Thursday, 5 August 2004) . . Page.. 3561 ..

What is actually going on there? What is discouraging one gender from taking on that role? How can we address those underlying questions in a positive way, as opposed to introducing some form of quota? Discriminating against women is not going to attract more men to female dominated professions, just as discriminating against men is not going to make that job more attractive to females.

If there is a belief that there are not enough male teachers, we should continue working with the Australian Education Union to win proper pay for teachers. Teachers’ pay needs to reflect their skill and experience so that teaching becomes a more attractive career choice for creative and high achieving people, who would make the great teachers of the future, regardless of their gender. That is the key issue in the debate about male teachers and female teachers and how boys and girls do academically in school. We need to move further to value our teachers.

The proposal put forward by the opposition is an ill-conceived attempt to undermine discrimination laws, and it would not fix the problem it was intended to address. The Democrats will not be supporting it, but we hope that moves will be made to work at the underlying issues that Mr Stefaniak seems to indicate exist. I hope that we will value our teachers and professions and address the underlying reasons why some professions end up dominated by one gender, which to an extent locks out other genders. There is work that can be done without making this ill-conceived law change.

MS TUCKER (5.58): I will speak first to Discrimination Amendment Bill 2004 (No 2), which amends section 27. We will certainly support this bill. This bill is hopefully the final resolution of a problem that was first raised in November 1998 when the Administrative Appeals Tribunal delivered a new and problematic interpretation of section 27 of the Discrimination Act in a case relating to a disability group home.

A case was brought by a resident of the home against ACT Community Care because Community Care had decided that an additional person should move into an existing four-bedroom home by converting the staff bedroom into a bedroom and the lounge room to a lounge room-cum-office-cum-staff bedroom. The residents appealed that decision on the basis that a person without a disability would not have had that decision made without their consent.

I understand that the tribunal found no discrimination in Community Care deciding to do that, but found that there was discrimination in the process—that is, no consultation. The department appealed and the decision was overturned on the basis of section 27. The argument put during the case—not the appeal—was that society cannot afford to meet the demand.

Prior to that decision on appeal, section 27 had generally been understood to be about allowing affirmative action. This new interpretation allowed a service to discriminate against individuals from that group effectively on the basis that it was a service designed to support that group. Changing the law to remove this interpretation has proved to be difficult.

The then Liberal government prepared an amendment bill in 1999, which was debated in December 1999. There were problems with the wording, and Jon Stanhope prepared an

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