Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On 21 March this year, I was pleased to be present for the installation of our new bishop, Bishop Kay Goldsworthy, to lead the Gippsland Anglicans. Bishop Kay Goldsworthy, who is the first woman consecrated as a bishop in the Anglican Church in Australia, has returned to Victoria to become the Bishop of Gippsland. Her election as Gippsland's 12th Bishop comes less than six months after the shock death of my good and dear friend Bishop John McIntyre after a short illness in June.

It is the latest 'first' for Bishop Goldsworthy, who was an Assistant Bishop of Perth, where she has worked since 1988. She was among the first women in Australia to be ordained deacon in 1986 and priest in 1992. In 2008 she became a bishop shortly before the consecration of Melbourne's Barbara Darling, who retired recently. Bishop Goldsworthy will be the first woman to lead a diocese in Victoria and only the second in Australia, after Bishop Sarah Macneil was appointed to Grafton last year.

Raised in Melbourne, Bishop Goldsworthy ran a restaurant before studying for the ministry at Trinity College, Parkville. She served in the parishes of Thomastown-Epping and Deer Park-St Albans before moving to Western Australia in 1988 as chaplain of Perth College. She was a canon of St George's Cathedral, rector of suburban Applecross, area dean of Fremantle and archdeacon of the Southern Region of Perth diocese. At the time of her appointment as bishop she was administrator and registrar of the diocese. Bishop Goldsworthy is 58 and married to Benjamin James, and the couple has twin adult sons, Tom and Ben.

There was something that I did not mention on Saturday when I was asked to address the gathering on behalf of this parliament. I did not mention her gender. The reason I did not mention her gender is because it is irrelevant. In this parliament, we have come to a place now where the bishop is a bishop who happens to be a woman, not a woman who happens to be a bishop. There was no reason whatsoever to mention her gender, and I did not. I say to every young girl with aspirations in this place today: in our future in this great nation, especially across Gippsland—from Pakenham in the west, to the border; from the great rolling hills of the southern Great Dividing Range, down to the rolling hills of South Gippsland—you will be treated as a person. I said a few other things on Saturday that are not for this place, but for the gathering that was there. Importantly, it is a great new start for Gippsland. Bishop Goldsworthy will be treasured by the community, she will be accepted and revered, and we wish her all the very best during her time in Gippsland.