Page 3071 - Week 08 - Thursday, 15 August 2019
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MS BERRY (Ginninderra—Deputy Chief Minister, Minister for Education and Early Childhood Development, Minister for Housing and Suburban Development, Minister for the Prevention of Domestic and Family Violence, Minister for Sport and Recreation and Minister for Women) (6.18): The 2019-20 budget has a number of new initiatives in my portfolio areas related to the Community Services Directorate and Housing ACT.
As Minister for Women, I am proud of the progress made through this budget to facilitate equal participation for women in our workplaces and community life. The ACT government is deeply committed to providing opportunities for women and girls to reach their full potential. In the 2019-20 budget the government has been taking action to achieve this goal, such as having reintroduced the ACT women’s budget statement as an accompanying document to the budget papers.
The statement highlights a number of significant funding initiatives. My ministerial colleagues will talk about some of these and have done so today when discussing their portfolio specific initiatives. But I take the time to highlight some of my own, particularly around what the government is doing to support women and girls.
For example, there has been a major investment in the Centenary Hospital for Women and Children and associated services which greatly benefit women’s reproductive health. The government has committed significant funding for the safer families initiatives, which will improve women’s safety and access to justice, particularly for women from an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander background. The government has also invested in major women’s sporting events by providing funding to host five games for the women’s T20 Cricket World Cup in February 2020.
Many of the initiatives funded in this budget take forward actions under the ACT women’s plan 2016-26. The first action plan to implement the women’s plan is now wrapping up and development of the second action plan is currently underway. I am pleased that there has been progress made against actions under the first action plan and the Office for Women is now working collaboratively with YWCA Canberra, the Women’s Centre for Health Matters and ACTCOSS to incorporate voices of the community in this next phase.
The second action plan will draw on the findings of this work and will be released for implementation next year. The key success for the Office for Women has been the ACT diversity register, launched in 2018 with an aim to support the government’s commitment to improve diversity in appointments to boards and committees and in leadership roles. I look forward to working together with the community to create more opportunities for women and girls in the ACT. All of these initiatives will work to make gender equality a reality.
We are a government who believe in cultural change and systemic reform. We believe in building community and government capability to address domestic and family violence in our community. There has been significant progress over the past few years in the establishment of the family safety hub. The family safety hub is a space for new ideas, a connector of services providers and a champion for change, co-designed with government and community sector partners.
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