Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending various events in Fremantle and Perth to celebrate the important occasion of the centenary of International Women’s Day. International Women’s Day was adopted in 1910 at the second International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen and was first celebrated the following year. One hundred years later, thousands of events were held worldwide to celebrate the contributions and achievements of women, to acknowledge that there is more to be achieved and, once again, to commit to achieving these things together.

When I was attending public schools in Donnybrook and Bunbury in the south-west of Western Australia, I did not think I would ever work in a number of different countries for the United Nations or be a representative in the national parliament one day, but you can imagine how even more impossible those things would have seemed to girls back in 1911. One hundred years ago, when the first International Women’s Day was held, we were still 10 years from seeing Australia’s first female parliamentarian, Edith Cowan, elected to the WA parliament. In 1911 there was still 55 years to go before we removed the requirement that a woman who married had to resign from the federal Public Service, and we were still 32 years away from seeing the first women elected to the federal parliament: Dorothy Tangney, a Freo girl, and Enid Lyons. Even now, of the more than 1,000 members elected to the House of Representatives since Federation, fewer than 100 have been women.

Thankfully, we have made a great deal of progress in the last 100 years. As Paul Keating famously said, ‘Equal representation of women in politics is not just about women; it’s about democracy.’ My predecessor, Carmen Lawrence, was the first woman to be Premier and Treasurer of WA. In Julia Gillard, Australia now has its first woman Prime Minister. Across all parliaments in Australia, the Labor Party, through its affirmative action policy, has 37½ per cent of its 387 representative positions filled by women. That is a significant achievement, but we still have further to go. We should be proud that women now make up more than 50 per cent of bachelor degree graduates in Australia but acknowledge that the international violence against women survey has reported that 57 per cent of Australian women experience sexual or physical violence in their lifetime. We should take heart from the introduction of Australia’s first national paid parental leave scheme but remain angry that women are still discriminated against when it comes to equal pay for equal work.

If we look at the situation of aged-care workers, most of whom are women, they are taking care of the most vulnerable people in our community: our own elderly family members. They are carrying out backbreaking and often heartbreaking work, and yet they are among the lowest paid and most underappreciated workers in Australia. The inequities that confront women are amplified if they are poor, migrants, refugees or Indigenous, and they are amplified still further if they are women trying to eke out survival for themselves and their children in a developing country. In PNG, Australia’s closest neighbour, a woman is 242 times more likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth related complications than an Australian woman.

The recent launch of the new UN agency called UN Women is very timely as it will give renewed impetus to the empowerment of women worldwide. Gender inequality is one of the main obstacles to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, which are aimed at eradicating extreme poverty. Michelle Bachelet, the former Chilean President who now heads UN Women, said at the launch:

It is no longer acceptable to live in a world where young girls are taken out of school and forced into early marriage, where women’s employment opportunities are limited, and where the threat of gender-based violence is a daily reality—at home, in the street, at school and at work.

The neglect of women’s rights means the social and economic potential of half the population is underused.

                  …              …              …

… supporting faster progress for women is not only morally right; it makes good political and economic sense.

International Women’s Day reminds us that the struggle for women’s rights is a local struggle, a national struggle and an international struggle, and it is one that we must keep having if we are to truly ensure women’s place in the world.

There is more that we can do. We can be mentors to other women, we can get involved in our local communities and we can join with the national women’s effort in calling for an end to violence against women and for equal pay. We can get involved in the international women’s effort. As women, most of us in Australia have freedoms and opportunities that are beyond the contemplation of the women in refugee camps on the border of Sudan, the trafficked women in Kosovo or the little girls in the Pacific islands whose health and maternal prospects are so much worse than our own. We can get involved in politics at the local, state or federal level. In WA we have the example of Carmen Lawrence who, in her first speech to federal parliament, urged women to become more politically engaged. She quoted another feisty woman, Sara Henderson, and I think these are appropriate words to sum up women’s struggles for rights and equality over the years:

Don’t wait for a light to appear at the end of the tunnel, stride down there and light the bloody thing yourself.