Page 189 - Week 02 - Thursday, 25 May 1989
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place some emphasis on the role and the place of women in our society and the things that we should be doing for them.
I do not intend to read the Liberal Party policy on the issue. It is a statement that runs, I think, to about six or seven pages and it covers all the areas in the work force, the home, health, employment and all of the sorts of things about which the Chief Minister spoke. I do not intend to traverse that. We need to show some perception of the kinds of things that we ought to be doing. The Chief Minister talks about equal opportunity, particularly in the workplace, to allow everybody the opportunity to participate if they want to. I think history shows that legislating for these things is not necessarily effective. I was working in the Office of the Public Service Board in 1974 when affirmative action programs for women in the public service were the rage.
So they have been there for at least 15 years, to my knowledge, yet I will guarantee that I could walk into any office of this building that we are in and I am sure that in general terms we would discover that there is not equal representation in the work force in terms of women being there. We can go to individual areas of the work force which might have 100 per cent women. So we have to ask why. The answer is obvious. It is not a question of legislating; it is a question of changing public attitudes, and we have been trying to do that, to my certain knowledge, for nearly 20 years now at least, yet we do not seem to have achieved the desired result for everybody in this community, whether they are male, female, youth, aged, ethnic, coloured, Church of England or whatever. We have not achieved that perfect society where everybody is respected for what they are and where they get equal opportunity.
So I am merely suggesting that in a new assembly, starting a new life, perhaps we ought to be looking for different options. Perhaps there is something there which others have not discovered and which might be the secret to this. While I support all of the things that the Chief Minister says that we have to look at to make sure that there is equal opportunity, first of all we cannot force people to take advantage of equal opportunity if they do not have a mind to, or if they are uninformed that the opportunities are there, or if for some other reason they just simply do not want to. We cannot force them to participate. That might be a reason why there is still inequality, that some women choose not to participate. I do not know the answer because I have not done any research, but that may be so.
Perhaps what we ought to be doing - and perhaps a much longer term project - is what I suggested this morning with respect to the ageing population. Perhaps we should be breaking down that category of the population called women into its various components and saying there is this kind of woman and that kind of woman, and that all those kinds
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