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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 5 Hansard (8 May) . . Page.. 1694 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

4.99. It was made clear to the Committee by young people that safer-sex education as currently delivered is largely irrelevant and ignores the reality of their experience ...

I want to link sex education to the question of condoms because that is the fundamental point here. The committee has received evidence that if you have sex education it makes you more discerning and thoughtful about sexual activities. That is recognised. I do not think anyone disagrees with that. We all agree that sex education is important.

This committee has shown that sex education is not being well delivered. It is particularly badly delivered to young people who are not heterosexual, but it is not good right across the system. It is inconsistent. That is somewhere we need to go, and the recommendation is therefore that we need to see much better sexual education.

I will return to the question of condoms. We know that a certain percentage of young people are having sex. Some of the young people who talked to the committee had carried out surveys of much larger groups of young people who we know are not accessing condoms from current outlets such as pharmacies, because they are embarrassed about doing that. We have had a 200 per cent increase in chlamydia, so we would think that, as a public health question, we would like to do something about sexually transmitted infections.

The availability of condoms for young people has been said by some to be a problem because it will incite or encourage young people to have sex. There is a United States study I can refer to. This is an extract from a study on condom availability in New York City public high schools and the relationship between condom use and sexual behaviour, in the American Journal of Public Health.

The study examined the impact of condom availability during a program in New York City public high schools by comparing rates of sexual activity and condom use for New York students and similar students in Chicago. I won't go into all the detail of the actual study, but I am happy to table this. The conclusions were that condom availability has a modest but significant effect on condom use and does not increase rates of sexual activity. These findings suggest that school-based condom availability can lower the risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases for urban teenagers in the United States, and there is no reason to imagine that it wouldn't apply here. I seek leave to table that study.

Leave granted.

MS TUCKER: On the question of young people and whether or not they engage in sex, it is very important to understand that there are so many pressures on young people about sexuality that you cannot put your head in the sand and say, "This will be the definitive thing that will encourage young people to have sex."

Having a condom vending machine in a school-I acknowledge-to a degree legitimises sexual activity. But the point is that sexual activity is occurring. The evidence supports the fact that to reduce sexual activity you do not worry about the availability of condoms,

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