Dave Sharma (Wentworth, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Let me associate myself with the remarks made and the tribute paid by the member for Sydney. The Hon. Susan Ryan—Officer of the Order of Australia, a true groundbreaker, a crusader for justice, a champion for equality, a role model for many—arrived in the Senate in 1975, the ACT's first female senator and a single mother of 33 years at the time. She went on to become Labor's first female cabinet minister when the Hawke government was elected in 1983, and one of her enduring legacies is her private member's bill to outlaw discrimination on the basis of gender, which became the Sex Discrimination Act 1984.

Susan Ryan was born in Sydney in 1942—the same year and the same town as my mother. My mother was involved in feminist causes and groups when I was growing up. She, like many of her generation, had left school at 16 and, in the 1980s, with her children, at a young age, she'd gone back to university to finish her high school education and to obtain a degree. As a child growing up I remember that Susan was often someone spoken of in hallowed terms by my mum around our dinner table and held up as a role model to myself and especially my two elder sisters. Susan Ryan said in a newspaper interview in 2017:

I felt from the youngest possible age that it was unfair, intolerable really, that females were regarded as second-class citizens.

This was the same lesson my mother sought to instill in me and my two sisters.

As others here, including from the Labor Party, who know her life and career much better than me, have said, much of which we now take for granted today is only possible because of the trail that Susan Ryan blazed. As she said in her own words, this was a trail that would allow women to be able to pursue opportunities 'unencumbered by stifling stereotypes', that 'There should be no unfair obstacles put in the way of their achieving independence,' and that 'Women and men should be judged on their merits, not on how far they reinforce some socially useful or commercially contrived norm.' As she wrote in an opinion piece last year on Bob Hawke's legacy, she entered national political life at a time when 'it was not unlawful to sack women who married or became pregnant' when 'maternity leave was scarcely available' when 'women could not get home loans' or personal finance loans' and when the educational opportunities afforded to girls were highly restricted.

After leaving parliament in 1987, Susan Ryan went on to hold roles as the Age Discrimination Commissioner and the Disability Discrimination Commissioner. She brought the same sense of purpose and justice to these roles as she did to her parliamentary career, to compel her fellow citizens to recognise that older Australians and Australians with a disability deserve to live a life of equal dignity, purpose and opportunity as the rest of us.

The causes that Susan Ryan championed remain with us today, and there is more that must be done—but we have a good role model to hand. To my mind, she is Australia's equivalent of a Ruth Bader Ginsburg in terms of the role model she provided for women and the enduring impact she has had on stifling social legal norms which held back our country. Susan Ryan's championing of the rights of women, through the force of her intellect, the persuasion of her arguments and the power of her example, allowed her to shatter glass ceilings at a time when the ceilings were made not of glass but reinforced concrete. She blazed the trail in the true meaning of the term, burning a pathway through a dense forest where none had existed before, for others to follow in her turn.

I extend my condolences to her partner, her children and her grandchildren. May her legacy inspire us to continue to fight discrimination in all its forms, and may her memory be a blessing to us all. Thank you.

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