Page 2858 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 22 November 1989
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activities and appropriate funding for them as an integral part of this Government's social justice strategy. I will not countenance any reduction in the expenditure on that or the other programs.
MR DUBY (4.07): Mr Speaker, I find this motion by Mr Stefaniak to be quite remarkable, given the level of debate we had yesterday, when the Liberal Party expressed great concern at the status of women and actually prevented the Government from raising funds which could presumably be spent on programs for the benefit of women. But now we have this situation where they are going to try to cut funding for a quite worthwhile cause.
The views that have been expressed, frankly, have come out of the 1950s. We are living in the 1980s and we are going into the 1990s. In this day and age it is quite appropriate and very necessary that funding be spent on women's employment strategies and women's enterprise and antidiscrimination activities. We cannot support the amendment.
MR HUMPHRIES (4.08): Mr Speaker, other speakers have criticised the Liberal Party on the basis that an attempt to reduce an amount allocated in the budget which is devoted to so-called women's antidiscrimination measures or women's expenditure is in some way a retrograde step and reflects badly on our attitude towards women. Has it occurred, I wonder, to those opposite that we might be of the view that women do deserve the special attention of government and ought to have endeavours made on their behalf by government but we do not see the particular sorts of expenditure to be entailed by this Government as the most appropriate way to achieve that? I am sorry to say that I see in what the Government has put forward in this instance a very clear indication of its view that the most appropriate way to deal with the problem is to throw money into administration, into the establishment of women's bureaus, women's offices and things of that kind, sections of the public service devoted in some way to the attention of women.
I do not, as I said, have any problem with addressing women's needs but I do believe that, if we are going to spend money in this area, it ought to be spent a little bit more directly than is the Government's proposal. I know that the criticisms I make here are not isolated to the Liberal Party. They have been made by respectable feminists and others involved for a long period of time in the women's movement about the thrust of the Hawke Government's expenditure on women's issues. It is not a cry of the rabid right, it is a cry that others have emitted, and I really do think the Government ought to give a little bit more attention than it has to these sorts of issues and consider whether there are better ways of spending equivalent amounts of money.
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