Page 788 - Week 02 - Thursday, 10 March 2011
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development, the redevelopment of the Attorney-General’s office in Barton, the recently completed redevelopment of the Edmond Barton Building, work that is being done possibly at the ANU—I am not sure about that—and a whole lot of other things. And then there are all the school halls and housing projects under the stimulus package. All of those could potentially be affected by this ill thought out policy. She said that what she wanted was no more good intentions but outcomes. The outcomes Kate Ellis wants is for young men to lose their jobs in favour of women who are not qualified to do the jobs and who probably do not want to do them.
In this debate today I also wanted to look at development issues across the world. We spend a lot of time talking about gender pay gaps, and these are issues of significance and importance, but a 17 per cent gender pay gap, it seems to me, pales into insignificance when you are a women in a developing or war-torn country and are subjected not only to bad health conditions, with no access to water and insufficient food, but also to rape, being a weapon of war and being trafficked.
Quite frankly, I want to pay tribute today to some people that I consider great role models—the women who are working in development. I want to just highlight a few. One of them is a friend of mine, Kim Vanden Hengel. She is the CEO of CNEC Partners International, an organisation which does not receive Australian government funding and which has been operating since 1943 and doing amazing things.
I have spent many an evening with Kim as she has described to me the work of the fistula hospital that they run in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She has talked compassionately about ethical and creative measures that they take in their missions in Chile, China, the Conga, Kyrgyzstan, the Philippines, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.
While we are on the subject of fistula hospitals, it was only recently that we again had the privilege of being visited in Canberra by Catherine Hamlin who, together with her late husband, established the Addis Ababa fistula hospital. These women in the Congo, in Ethiopia and in Afghanistan are working to put dignity back into the lives of people whose lives have been ruined by war.
Let me just give you one example. Fauzia is 35 and comes from Afghanistan. Fauzia is a young woman who has been suffering from fistula problems, an obstetrics fistula, for 25 years when at the age of 10 she gave birth to a stillborn child after she was raped. So at 10, raped, pregnant and losing a child, and on top of that suffering horrific injuries as a result, school was out of the question. Making friends was out of the question. Who would come near her because of her injuries? Her injuries were horrific and have been with her for 25 years, but her story has a happy ending. Fauzia has recently left hospital. For the first time in 25 years she is not wearing a continence aid. There are hundreds of stories, thousands of stories, like that across the country, and I pay tribute to the people who look after those people.
I would also like to pay tribute to another hero of mine, a small, now very elderly Italian nun named Sister Eugenia Bonetti, who has been one of the foremost advocates for anti-trafficking law reform in Italy over many years. Although a nun, and nuns do not talk about prostitution—or that was the general view—she has been a prophet for this movement across Italy and across the world. I pay tribute to this
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