Sophie Mirabella (Indi, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to be making a contribution to this debate on the motion moved by the member for Ryan which recognises the importance of the UN Population Fund’s report titled State of the world population 2005: the promise of equality, gender equity, reproductive health and millennium development goals that was released last October. This motion is well worth debating, but from the outset we should avoid getting too sentimental about solving global poverty with a wristband or expecting the ills of Africa—be it HIV-AIDS or hunger—to simply be solved through increasing the pressure of the global aid water fountain. It is pleasing to see the Prime Minister commit to a doubling of Australia’s foreign aid by 2010. This announcement came with some important qualifiers—firstly, that recipients demonstrate a commitment to improved governance and, secondly, that they do more to weed out corruption.

Australia is a proud and realistic contributor to the fight against global poverty. We have doubled our support for the UN Population Fund to $4 million, and we are investing $600 million in the decade to 2010 to fight HIV-AIDS. We should all have as a goal, as this motion does, gender equality and the work of the Millennium Development Goals. The Australian government has consistently advocated this. At the Millennium Summit in 2000, Australia unanimously adopted the Millennium Declaration, which includes eight goals that address the challenges faced by developing countries up to 2015. We do as a nation have a proud record of helping those in need, both in the region around us and more widely throughout the global village, and I am sure this will continue well into the future.

An important aspect of this motion is the need to confront gender inequity. The UN, when launching this report, used the term ‘gender apartheid’. I personally think this is a gross misuse of the language and of the reality of the situation. Of particular interest is the report’s focus on what it calls ‘sustainable development though gender equality’. We can look at our own political situation here in the Australian parliament, and the significant steps forward in political representation taken by women in this place. We have come a long way. Just over 10 years ago, in the Australian parliament, women made up 9.5 per cent of the numbers in both houses. Now that figure is about 25 per cent. On my side of politics I am proud to say that this has occurred without the imposition of offensive and absurd quotas. To use some Australian rules football parlance, it is the Labor Party who looks to give women an easy free kick, whereas it is the Liberal Party who rewards a ‘hard ball get’.

If we were to get serious about gender equality, or the ‘gender apartheid’ that the United Nations mischievously speaks of, we would get serious about some of the harder issues of entrenched inequality that run against women in some parts of the world today. For instance, we would not have women being stoned to death in Nigeria for committing adultery. We would not have Northern Territory judges defending Aboriginal elders who admit to having sex with a 15-year-old girl who had been supposedly promised to him at birth. This is child abuse, not customary law. We would not have union leaders claiming, ‘It’s a sad day when Labor selects a bit of petticoat over a union boss’—an experience that Joan Kirner famously recounts.

But back to the essence of this motion being debated. We need to confront the unfashionable reality that Africa and the Third World’s ills will not be solved by simply talking about Africa’s debt and not its politics. Whilst falsehoods often hurt, the truth usually hurts more. This is particularly so in the debate on this very important motion. So the fight is not just in platitudes about empowerment and sustainable development; it is about righting the entrenched wrongs that exist in today’s societies, as uncomfortable and unpalatable as some of these are.

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