Page 911 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 20 March 2019
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I believe there is great potential to develop strong relationships with the people of China to market Canberra as a great place to live, study, work or do business with. I would like to thank all of the officials who met with us, our guides, people who translated and, of course, the embassy officials here in Canberra who facilitated our trip. I would also like to thank all of the members of the delegation for their time, commitment and personal expense in travelling to China. I look forward to future delegations continuing to build ACT relationships abroad.
International Women’s Day
MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (6.45): I rise today to briefly talk about International Women’s Day, which we all know was last week. The international theme was “balance for better”—and I was shown how you are supposed to do that—but the local theme was “more powerful together”.
International Women’s Day is a time to take stock and celebrate achievements and acknowledge that there is still a lot more to do. As I attended various events last week I got a true sense of the power that is possible not only when women come together but when we work together with men and non-binary people to achieve gender equality. After all, gender equality benefits everybody. We all have a role to play and we must realise that there is no one solution. Rather, a suite of service options and solutions should be available for outcomes that suit individual needs.
I would like to focus specifically on one of the events I attended, the launch of voices for change, a joint initiative of the YWCA of Canberra and the Domestic Violence Crisis Service. The initiative was enabled from funding from the NAB and from Our Watch, the national organisation established under the national plan to reduce violence against women and their children and drive nation-wide change into the culture, behaviours and attitudes that underpin and create such violence.
This initiative trained and coached women with lived experience of violence to speak out. That might seem fairly simple on the surface, but I know that encouraging and supporting any victims of sexual abuse to talk about their experiences can be traumatising, causing flashbacks to harrowing and painful events and leaving them feeling exposed and vulnerable.
I commend DVCS and the YWCA in the way they supported women to find their voice. There were enlightening presentations by Lulu, Jess and Kristen, who spoke clearly and powerfully about their experiences. The importance of sharing these stories cannot be underestimated.
The project was a realisation of the fact that victims can contribute towards the narrative. They highlighted that it is likely that we all know someone who has been or is being affected by domestic violence. In any room in any given day and in any context there are likely to be survivors of gendered violence. In many cases survivors stay silent for fear of being blamed or not believed. But this silence also contributes to enabling such violence, and this project aims to break down the silence.
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