Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I do thank the member for bringing this motion before the House today. I want to associate myself with previous comments made in terms of the importance of women's role and service in the Australian Defence Force, acknowledging the pressures that that has brought to bear for many women and their families, and the great strides that Defence has made in trying to redress what has been a pretty horrific gender inequity that has existed in ADF services over many, many decades. I know from my time with the Joint Standing Committee on Defence, Foreign Affairs and Trade that whenever I saw the chiefs, the first question I had for each of them was their enrolment and recruitment figures for women. Air Force was always the one that came out on top, followed by Navy and then Army—which is, I think, the first to acknowledge that they have a hard road ahead of them in terms of trying to recruit increased numbers of women, and more importantly, retain them in the Defence Force.

I did want to take this opportunity to talk about one example of just how far we are going with making the Australian Defence Force more inclusive. I had the great fortune to recently launch an exhibition in Newcastle during Pride Week that was called Serving In Silence. At that exhibition I met a really remarkable woman by the name of Anna Van Netten. Anna had a really horrific story of when she was a young private in the army. She was based at Singleton barracks, in my neighbouring electorate of Hunter, back in the 1980s. She was told she wouldn't be able to keep her job in the army in the 1980s if she wasn't prepared to give up all of the women that she knew and associated with in the army that were lesbians or that she'd had a relationship with. You can imagine that this was pretty devastating for a young private in the Army. Her girlfriend at the time was interviewed by the military police in Singleton. If I recall correctly, Anna was taken down to Victoria Barracks in Sydney and interrogated and had multiple—I think four—military police escorting her everywhere and asking her very deep, personal questions. It was a pretty horrific experience for her and a very intimidating one.

The reason I tell this story is not to just reflect on the very poor basis from which we started in order to build an inclusive Australian Defence Force, but to say it was so remarkable that at same exhibition—where Anna told of her terrible experiences of being in the ADF in the 1980s—there was another truly remarkable woman, Bonnie Doyle, who is a very senior officer in the Air Force now. She was there that evening representing a group called DEFGLIS. This is a network that is now provided across all of the three services for LGBTIQ people within the defence forces to get support and information and to address issues quite early as they arise. It's a body that's doing some really remarkable work. It just showed what an extraordinary journey we have been on since the 1980s, when someone like Anna van Netten was intimidated and dragged down to Victoria Barracks as a result of her sexual identity, to now having a network that is proudly working alongside LGBTIQ members of the ADF.

I would like to acknowledge the work of the Air Force chaplains in my region, who have always been nothing short of remarkable in terms of their willingness to reach out to each and every member of the ADF to embrace them. Indeed, I know our Australian chaplains have played an important role with the American defence forces, who do not have the same fortunate position of being able to reach out and service LGBTIQ members of their defence forces.

See this speech in context