Wednesday, 8 March 2023

International Women’s Day

Moira DEEMING (Western Metropolitan) (18:32): (94) My adjournment matter is also for the Minister for Women. First of all, I would like to note that on this International Women’s Day it is my honour to be a part of the first ever Legislative Council to have a majority of female MPs. In many ways we women of the upper house are treading a path opened up for us by Dame Enid Lyons, who was the first woman elected to the House of Representatives and who was also a proud member of the Liberal Party.

However, I must also note with sadness the scandalous fact that women’s rights have actually gone backwards in this state. Many of the hard-won rights that women have fought for so that we could fully and equally participate in public life over the course of the last 100 years are lost. We no longer have the right to female-only public toilets, change rooms and refuges, and all those so-called affirmative action measures like gender quotas, scholarships and grants that were supposed to be just for women are lost now too. Female-only sports leagues, which gave so many young women, me included, access to fair and fun sporting competition are now also lost. Females have lost the right – the basic right – to associate exclusively with each other. We are not allowed to have female-only gyms, and even lesbians are not allowed to have female-only dating apps. Violent male sexual offenders are housed with vulnerable female prisoners. In fact there is a vulnerable group of women in my area, in the Dame Phyllis Frost correctional centre, who have reached out to me, to the government and to the media, crying out for help because they are scared and they are vulnerable and they look around the world and they see what has happened to other women in prisons where violent male rapists have been housed.

Why has this situation happened? It is because the government cannot seem to crack the code of what the word ‘woman’ actually means. Thankfully, I have the formula: ‘woman’ is a noun and it refers to an adult human female. We are also losing the right to even speak up and disagree about this. We are labelled vile. We are labelled bigots. But it is not hateful to ask for sex-based rights. They are, after all, originally a category of human rights. Will the Minister for Women Natalie Hutchins let women speak to her and join us on the steps of Parliament on 18 March for the listening post and actually hear what women have to say on this issue?