Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to support this motion to refer this matter to a committee. There have been many debates in this chamber relating to this matter and it is very disappointing to me that the government has backed away from an inquiry. The matter I would particularly like to speak on this evening is education. I think it is a terrible thing that we have got Commonwealth funding going to schools where there is an active prohibition on young people going on to further education. Exclusive Brethren young people are not allowed to attend university. Girls are not allowed to do manual arts subjects. They know that there will be an arranged marriage for them within the Exclusive Brethren community, and that is their fate whether they like it or not.

When I taught at Devonport High School back in the early 1980s, at that stage there were no Exclusive Brethren schools as such and some of the students came to Devonport High. I had a particularly bright young woman in my class, and I urged her to go on to the Don College and I talked to her about the opportunities in higher education and so on. Her parents complained to the principal of the school that I was filling her head with ideas that were contrary to their aspirations for her, that she would not to be going on to further education, that she would be married and that when she got married she would not be working again because married women in the sect are precluded from working.

So I had a situation where this young girl with her life ahead of her, with huge potential, was being shut down in terms of any aspirations other than an arranged marriage within the sect and, once the arranged marriage took place, no working life thereafter.

Debate interrupted.