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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Thursday, 5 August 2004) . . Page.. 3565 ..

not a learning style only common to all boys. The boys’ lighthouse project, the Commonwealth study into boys education, has demonstrated that the methods used to produce successful learning outcomes for boys are matters of quality teaching, not gender, and thus are equally applicable to all in the classroom.

The Australian Council for Educational Research support this argument. They comment that the quality of teaching and learning provision is by far the most salient influence on students’ cognitive, affective and behavioural outcomes in schooling, not teacher gender. We need to encourage male teachers to remain in the teaching profession and to offer them enough incentives to do that. It is irresponsible of us to weaken the Discrimination Act to address a problem that has much deeper social causes and that research indicates will not be solved by this sort of measure.

MR PRATT (6.10): Mr Speaker, I rise to support this bill. There has been a tradition in society since time immemorial to positively discriminate where capability needs to be developed or operated or where people in society need to be protected. Of course, there has also been unacceptable discrimination in society. As society modernised, these discriminatory practices needed to be broken down. For the most part, this has happened successfully. However, it is now time to obtain sufficient flexibility in law and our administrative procedures to ensure that, where we still need to positively discriminate to either provide better protection or develop better capabilities in our community services, this can be done without cries of “discrimination” arising.

Taking an example at the national level, I refer to the military, where certain combat positions within the ADF continue to be identified as male positions, despite strong time and energy wasting, politically correct campaigns to break down that convention. Happily, commonsense has prevailed, and in that case discrimination has been overlooked.

For over 40 years, there has been a concerted campaign to break down stereotype barriers in recruitment, job positions and club membership and to address discriminatory practices against gender, racial, sexuality, political and other groupings. This was necessary and represented the most important of all the progressive movements in the necessary liberalisation of modern society, which commenced when I was a young man.

To my mind, the most important progressive initiative undertaken in more recent decades was the lifting of female student performance and the creation of more opportunities for young females in schools, universities and then the workforce, although pay disparity is still an issue not yet resolved. Lifting female student performance was a classic case of positive discrimination.

It is true to say, however, that the politically extreme in society have attempted to take this progression too far, which undermines the need for this act to be put in place. The politically extreme have sought to flatten out the sensible, time-honoured practices relating to all functions in society from jobs to the institution of marriage. To a point, society has weakly bent to these pressures and, in my view, thrown out thousands of babies with bathwaters in what has been a significant period of retrograde action, paralleling the progress that we also had to have.

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