Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We are going to see the celebration of the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day very soon, and the United Nations has responded to this century of concern about women by forming UN Women. This draws together a number of the special previous organisations which dealt with women’s issues. UN Women will, in particular, be established to be a new entity for gender equality and the empowerment of women.

It will draw together the four other agencies which previously covered the issues of things such as the plight of women in war, reproductive health issues and women and poverty. The main roles of UN Women are to support intergovernmental bodies in their formulation of policies, global standards and norms, to help member states to implement these standards and then to hold the UN system accountable to the commitments.

The problem is that the Pacific and Australasia are not on the board of UN Women, so some of our most needy communities with the greatest gender discrimination, poverty and difficulty in the Pacific and in Papua New Guinea—which Australia and New Zealand ably try to support—have no place on the board of UN Women. They have been ignored and neglected, and I am very concerned as to why. I do not know why the Australian government did not manage to insist that the Pacific was one of the regions on the board, along with all the rest. (Time expired)