Cathy McGowan (Indi, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This morning in this parliament we had a momentous celebration of International Women's Day: a breakfast; an inspiring speech from the Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull; a wonderfully detailed speech from the Leader of the Opposition, Bill Shorten; and Senator Janet Rice focusing on the need for international development as well as paying attention at home. As I was there with my colleagues in this House, celebrating International Women's Day—we had been talking about equality at work—my mind turned to the idea of equality in democracy. This idea was inspired by an event that took place in my holidays. Colleagues, bear with me for a short story.

I went to Papua New Guinea for my holidays—and I would also like to say the trip was self-funded. I have had a very long-term relationship with Papua New Guinea and I was up there celebrating 10 years of friendship between the organisation that I used to be president of, Australian Women in Agriculture, and Papua New Guinea Women in Agriculture. That in itself was a wonderful thing to be able to acknowledge—10 years of solid friendship. During that time, the two organisations have worked together, we have run workshops, we have done strategic planning, we have done networking, we have spent hours and hours in each other's company, we have had exchanges between Australia and PNG and we have talked about how the world could be better and how our two countries can be better. It was fantastic to be up there in Papua New Guinea.

I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge and thank the Australian high commissioner in Papua New Guinea, Bruce Davis, and his team, for their wonderful hospitality. To Bronte, Ben, Rod and everybody else in the high commission: thank you for the work that you do. I would like to acknowledge and thank the staff of the Papua New Guinea National Agricultural Research Institute—NARI—because they host the PNG Women in Agriculture Development Foundation. To Sergie Bang and your staff: thank you. To Dr Norah Omot and Barbara Tolmi, in particular: thank you very much. Maria Linibi is the President of PNG Women in Agriculture. She is an outstanding woman of great integrity who has taken this organisation from a vision to reality. She had been to Queensland and she thought, 'We could do this.' So now it is operating in PNG and going from strength to strength. Thank you to those people for their hospitality.

But the key topic we talked about when we were in PNG was the election that is going to happen a bit later this year. I had the opportunity to meet with 20 women who had just completed a leadership course being sponsored by DFAT and run by the ANU. It is looking at how women can position themselves to run in the PNG election. I wish them well—what a task! We are told that, in PNG, there is a 61 per cent turnover in politicians between elections and all of 2.7 per cent of the politicians in that parliament are women. So there are huge issues.

One of the participants in that workshop was a woman called Rufina Peters. Rufina has been in Australia, sponsored by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research and on the Australian Rural Leadership Program. She has done our leadership program and she is now running one in PNG. One of the issues facing PNG as they get underway with this election is the rolls. There are over 800 different languages in PNG. The Australian Electoral Commission is working with the PNG government to help get a roll going. But I am told an evaluation in 2013 showed that, in the 2007 election, there were half a million excess voters on those rolls. So it is a real challenge to make sure not only that women's names are there, even with no birth certificates, but that the rolls reflect the reality of the people who live in that country. There is a huge birth spurt happening in Papua New Guinea; there are children all over the place.

I want to place the idea of equality in democracy out there because yesterday I went to DFAT's innovationXchange and I got a sense of some of the really creative work that is happening there. I would like to put a question to the DFAT innovation people: what would it take to have innovation with equality in democracy and to set ourselves a 20-year plan so that in 20 years the representation in PNG, in the South Pacific and in other countries actually represent the mix of the people there. What I wanted to put on the table today is that we love PNG. We have got so much to be grateful for. But a real gift we could give to them is equality in democracy and making sure that women are well represented in that country.