Page 743 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 8 March 2016
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When we look at the underlying drivers of domestic violence we know that our attitudes about women must change if we are to ensure that women can live safely and those attitudes are simply not changing fast enough. A 2013 report of the national community attitudes survey highlighted many interesting points about the attitudes towards women and men’s roles in society, including that a significant percentage of people believe men make better political leaders, that men should take charge in a relationship and that women prefer men to be in charge in a relationship. These are the kinds of attitudes that put our community at risk of ongoing domestic violence, and we know it is more than just their attitudes about domestic violence that need to change; it is our entire frame about the roles that women and men play in our society.
When we recalibrate our expectations of what it means to have attitudes of equality towards women and then we look around and listen to social media and see commercial advertising aimed at both children and adults, we start to see destructive and negative attitudes towards women still being perpetuated on a regular basis, from the very sexualised advertising that occurs across the ages through to the profiling and packaging of toys that say to our very young children, “You are a girl. You like pink. Your place is the home,” and, “You are a boy. You build things and you shoot things.” We have become immune to the insidious gender messaging that pervades our society through mainstream and social media, and yet now we know that it is fundamental that we challenge this so that we can be part of challenging that destructive part of our culture where men have power over women.
The Greens are very supportive of the calls made in this motion calling on the ACT government to provide an annual statement to the Assembly that focuses on women’s safety in the home and the community; financial parity and equity of women in the workplace; health outcomes including weight, alcohol and tobacco usage; and social participation and perception of public safety.
We also support the call on the government to, where possible, collect sex and gender disaggregated data to make this reporting possible. This should already be happening across a wide range of agencies, but where it is not there must be ways of doing so. Having that data enables us to both measure our progress and identify those places where further effort is needed. The next step is to ensure that the data is used in a way that helps formulate policy responses that address the fundamental inequities in our community.
As Ms Berry has highlighted in her speech, on many key indicators the ACT is performing well. However, there are places where we can do better and we need to continue to strive to be better. Policies that ensure safety and good health for the women who live in this city are of paramount importance. We know that as we seek to build economic equity and security for women and as we see more women in leadership positions, we will also see attitudes towards women in our community shift overall. We need to ensure that some women are not left behind as others move forward.
While we review our achievements in Canberra in terms of women’s income, education and leadership, we have work to do on translating those successes so that every woman can live in our society and feel safe and valued. I thank Ms Berry for bringing the motion today and I am pleased to support it.
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