Page 190 - Week 02 - Thursday, 25 May 1989
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
of women have their own needs; identify what those needs are, quantify the problem and see whether we cannot set about a comprehensive program of rectifying the deficiencies.
Certainly some of those categories would float to the top as requiring urgent and immediate attention: women who are subject to criminal assault in the home, and I accept that term; and women who are economically deprived because the family has broken up, the husband has left, and the woman is left with the children and perhaps no income to support them, so she is on the poverty line from square one.
There are categories of women who clearly need attention ahead of other categories of women. But I would like to sound the note that perhaps we can be a little more perceptive in this issue than others have been elsewhere, draw from past experience where things have been done but simply have not worked, examine why they have not worked and then perhaps take a slightly different approach in trying to solve the problem in our small community of less than 300,000 people.
DR KINLOCH (3.25): We very much honour the statements by the Chief Minister and support, too, much that Mr Kaine has said. Personally I regret all the times when we look as though we are talking tokenistically. I really wish we could not do that, and it is very hard to avoid. On behalf of the Residents Rally, may we indeed apologise in a strange way to the community that there are not eight of us here. If there were eight, we would also have Joan Kellett, Marion Le, Catherine Rossiter and I would hope Sue Douglas. I am sorry we do not have those eight here.
Mr Kaine: Why didn't you put them on top of your list instead of at the bottom?
DR KINLOCH: May I speak to that? Perhaps it was a lack of understanding, but we thought we could have a list within the d'Hondt system in which people could vote for individuals up and down the list, and we regarded ourselves as equal. We know now that it is not the way it worked, and I very much respect the system of the Labor Party which had woman, man, woman, man down the list. It seems to me that some of us in the future could go that route. So I would ask our colleagues not to cry "shame" at us. We tried. There were at least three women whose names we wanted at the top of our ticket. I assure you, I am not going to go into this, but some of us were trying very hard to attain that. I want members to know how much we want that to be the case, so we join with the Chief Minister and Mr Kaine in complaints about discrimination.
In an area of concern of my own - that is, tertiary education, for which I am the spokesperson for our party - I would like to draw the attention of the Assembly particularly to problems in the Australian National University, the Canberra College of Advanced Education, the
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .