Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I would like to thank the members of the House who have spoken so passionately on this motion. Global poverty is an issue that should be of concern to us all. I am co-convenor, with Senator Guy Barnett, of the Parliamentary Friends of the Millennium Development Goals, and it is gratifying to both of us to see so much interest on this very serious issue. But the interest is not just within parliament. There are many people out there in the community who have been working very hard for a long time to raise the profile of this issue. We met quite a few of them a couple of weeks ago, on 14 September, when around 300 delegates of the Micah Challenge Voices for Justice descended on Parliament House and made sure that we were all well and truly aware of how concerned they were and how much work there was to be done. I would particularly like to thank John Beckett, who is the director for Micah Challenge, and Carlyn Chen, the coordinator for Voices for Justice, for the incredible amount of work they did in organising that event and for the wonderful ways they found to express their concern.

The MDG speed dating event was particularly successful, where each of us got to spend a few minutes with a group of incredibly passionate people and were grilled about our views on various things. One of the best ideas that I heard at the speed dating event was that one of the communities had imposed a toilet tax to remind people that many people in the world do not have toilets. So every time you use a public toilet in that community you are charged a fee, known as the toilet tax. It sounds quite frivolous, but of course it is not. There is education, for example. There are 75 million children still not in school—most of those girls. If you build a school without a toilet, only the boys go. You realise how important it is when you visit villages, as I did, in Cambodia and the Philippines, that have no toilets. You realise that for women in particular it leads to other medical issues—bladder infections et cetera—which are quite dangerous. It sounds frivolous, but I think the toilet tax was quite an interesting way for one of our communities to raise the profile of a very serious issue.

I also attended a wonderful function a couple of weeks ago, where a group of young soccer players and representatives of the Socceroos and the Matildas launched One Goal in Australia—a particularly good idea that uses the World Cup in Africa in 2010, one of the greatest and most well-known sporting events in the world—to focus attention on education. Again, as I said, there are 75 million children in the world who are not in school, and around half of those are in Africa. Football, as it is now called—I still call it soccer, I am afraid—is played all over the world. It is played in city stadiums but it is also played in the dust in small villages and refugee camps. It is played everywhere. The World Cup is an event which well and truly attracts the attention of the world. What an extraordinary idea to use that event to promote the need for education around the world.

One has to ask why so many people are so passionate about this. The answer is very simple: the story of poverty in the world is truly appalling. Because of the global financial crisis, between 200,000 and 400,000 additional children will die each year in the next five or six years before we reach the 2015 target. These are appalling figures: 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty. It is gratifying to see—and I know that every member of parliament would agree with me—that our communities, particularly young people, do not let us forget it.

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