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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Thursday, 5 August 2004) . . Page.. 3571 ..

The proposal was to involve the creation of additional scholarships and not to impact negatively upon the existing scholarships currently being offered. It was also stipulated that this was to be only one element in an overall strategy to address the gender imbalance in primary school teaching. I note that the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission stated in its decision that it remained uncertain about the validity of the reasons advanced in support of the exemption. These were the very same reasons that Mr Stefaniak advances in support of his bill.

Finally, but not of least importance, the bill is incompatible with the Human Rights Act 2004. It is incompatible with section 8 of the Human Rights Act, which provides that everyone is entitled to equal and effective treatment against discrimination on any ground. It is allowing that discrimination cannot be held to be a reasonable limit to the right to equal treatment under section 28, which provides that human rights may be subject only to reasonable limits set by territory laws that can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

For one thing, the measures you take must be in reasonable proportion to the importance of the objective you want to achieve. The bill proposes potential discrimination on the basis of sex to achieve higher numbers of the opposite sex in a particular workplace. The immediate purpose of the bill is to provide more and, by implication, better male role models for children than they currently have.

Discriminating against competent female teachers and promoting the employment of male teachers simply because of their sex does not have a rational relationship with the objective of providing good quality education where the basis for employment should be merit. The means used must provide a reasonable way of achieving the objective and there must be as little interference as possible with the rights or freedoms of those affected. Sex-specific discrimination is not integral to the objectives and outcomes of the education system.

Four inquiries at the Commonwealth level have questioned this perception. These inquiries concluded that, while schoolteachers are in a position to provide children with appropriate role models, the qualities necessary to demonstrate good teaching are not innate to either sex and the priority of all education systems should be to attract teachers of the highest quality.

The Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training, in its 2001 report Declining rates of achievement and retention: the perceptions of adolescent males, concluded that it is the quality of the teacher that matters to the educational outcome of school students, not the sex of the teacher. So did the Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training in its 2002 report addressing the needs of boys.

In 2002 the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Training investigated ways of addressing the fact that boys seem not to be coping as well as girls at school. Its report is called Boys: Getting it right. The committee concluded that, to generate positive effect on boys, the emphasis should be on attracting the right kind of men just as it should be on the right kind of women; that is, the criteria should be based on merit.

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