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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 3 Hansard (6 March) . . Page.. 679 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

Paragraph (2) states:

We agree with that-although, as several speakers on our side have pointed out, there are considerable problems with the UN enforcing much at all.

Mrs Cross indicated that some of the countries that have already signed this have a very dubious record. I wonder whether our Zimbabwean friends have signed it. I saw not too long ago a very interesting film showing a terrified women-she was a farm labourer-and her little children being abused by some of Robert Mugabe's goons. It was quite horrible. I wonder whether that country, which is now going through an electoral process with the ruling government terrorising the population, is a signatory. I wonder whether some of the other wonderful beacons of light in the world have ratified this. There can be a lot of hypocrisy in the United Nations.

Australia has a very proud history in advancing women. We were the first country to introduce adult voting for women. We were many years in front of the United Kingdom, which waited until about 1926. We had full suffrage for women well before World War I.

We in the territory have a proud record too. The two longest serving chief ministers, by a country mile, were both women, and one of them was the first female Premier or Premier equivalent in Australia.

I have had the pleasure in recent years to serve as a minister with some very distinguished and capable women in various government departments, including Fran Hinton, who is still the head of a government department. I have the utmost admiration for the first female Prime Minister of Great Britain and the wonderful job she did, especially working, along with President Reagan, to contain Soviet imperialism .

We have had some particularly impressive women in Australia and throughout the world. But I have some concerns about how effective the United Nations will be. We should do it. It is right and proper that we do it. These conventions do have some effect. They are better than nothing in protecting human rights.

Perhaps the greatest advancement for women in the last 12 months has resulted from action by the British, the Americans and us-primarily the Americans-in getting rid of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which was most backward in its treatment of women. I do not know whether Afghanistan ratified the convention. I am not quite sure what Afghanistan's status in the UN is. The Taliban regime had a shocking record in women's rights. I do not know how much better the new regimes will be, although it seems that some progress has been made in the rights of women. That was not a result of the convention; that was a result of military intervention.

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