Page 791 - Week 02 - Thursday, 10 March 2011
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I do want to also just acknowledge and thank Ms Hunter and Mrs Dunne for praising the work of women overseas who have devoted their lives to helping women in developing countries. Mrs Dunne was relating stories of fistula, and, although I know it is not normal practice to promote particular books, there is a wonderful book called Half the Sky which has come out recently and which talks about women in developing countries and the particular issues that affect them, and fistula is one of them, plus politics and women’s participation in education and some really practical solutions to enhance women’s participation.
Education was particularly highlighted as one way of giving women greater autonomy and more economic opportunities and as a way to raise women’s status within their communities and give them more standing and more confidence to be a part of their community. The book also talked about women in politics in developing countries. We know we have made progress here in Australia, in particular with representation for women, but when we look at our own political system there are very few women from Aboriginal backgrounds or from other backgrounds, and I think that is where we need to make progress in Australia. This book particularly looks at what we can do to enhance that and get women more involved in politics overseas. So I would commend people to look at that book; it looks at those issues and highlights them greatly. I thank Ms Hunter once again for bringing on this matter today.
MS GALLAGHER (Molonglo—Deputy Chief Minister, Treasurer, Minister for Health and Minister for Industrial Relations) (4.51): I thank members for their contributions today. It has been a female-led MPI for probably one of the only times that I can recall.
This week has been a fantastic week right across Canberra, with many different events celebrating 100 years of International Women’s Day—with all of the events I have been to and with the women I have spoken to. Whilst it has been very celebratory in its nature, International Women’s Day has also been about events where women have acknowledged that there is still a lot more to be done, both here and across the world, if we are to support full equality across men and women in both the developed and the developing world. The challenges in some countries, of course, are greater than ours.
But let us look back at how International Women’s Day started. It is 100 years of International Women’s Day being celebrated. You can see that it was the collaboration and determination of women across different countries who worked together to get an international day that was recognised.
Some may say that it started in America; others will say that it started in Europe. Even here in Australia, by the late 1800s, the 1880s, the first Australian suffrage societies were being formed across the country. Certainly by the early 1900s there was a very concerted effort to have a day where women would press for their demands on that day. International Women’s Day was born and honoured for the first time in 1911 in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, with more than a million men and women attending rallies and campaigning for women’s right to work, vote, be trained and hold public office and to end discrimination. In that same year, the tragic “triangle fire” in New York city took the lives of more than 140 working women, most of them Italian and Jewish immigrants. It drew significant attention to the working conditions
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