Ms O'BYRNE (7:50 PM) —I rise today to speak on this first International Women's Day for the new century. As a relatively young woman in parliament, I feel honoured to be in a position to speak on a day such as this. But I must confess I also feel somewhat sad. I feel sad because one could imagine that early last century women fighting for the most basic of rights for their sisters around Australia and around the world would have presumed that by the new century, by the year 2000, the fight would be long over. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Some two centuries ago, philosopher Thomas Paine wrote that, whatever the merits of the case for equal rights might be, even with changes in attitudes and laws, deeply ingrained and oppressing social prejudices remain which confront women minute by minute, day by day. Seventeen years later, Mary Wollstonecraft's vindication of the rights of women argued:

Unfortunately, these words could have been written today and they would be just as relevant as they were so many years ago.

In April 1895, the word `feminism' appeared for the first time in the weekly journal Athenaeum. It was used to describe a woman who `has in her the capacity of fighting her way back to independence'. Women have fought hard and achieved great things over the years. Independence for many women today is a reality that was not experienced by their mothers and grandmothers before them. Women have certainly earned the right to celebrate the advances that have been made on this International Women's Day. But have the attitudes of the establishment really changed that much from Thomas Paine's writings of 200 years ago? With declining funding and legislative changes implemented by this government, we are seeing a slow erosion of rights women have fought hard to attain.

The Affirmative Action Agency is a classic example of the erosion by this government of services set up as a monitoring tool to assist women in their quest for equality. When the agency was established in 1986, it was the first attempt by a government to encourage and monitor the progress made by larger private firms in promoting equality of opportunity in the workplace. The agency's success has been well documented. Why then would this government cut its funding by $900,000?

The Office of the Status of Women suffered a budget cut of 40 per cent in 1996. As a result of this cut, OSW was unable to provide its share of funding for the Women's Statistic Unit in the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which closed in June 1997. Consequently the Women's Year Books produced by this unit are no longer available. These were an important tool to monitor gender outcomes. At the same time, another form of gender audit, the federal women's budget process, was also abolished. The Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs also suffered, with the loss of all its women's policy structures, including the Women's Bureau, which had been in place since 1963.

Another loss was the Office of Indigenous Women in ATSIC. The Work and Family Unit, which was set up to oversee the working women's centres which provide support to women workers under the decentralised wage bargaining system, are no longer grant funded. This has resulted in them not providing the policy input, as expected, to the coalition government.

Despite the improvements of the past two decades, women are still a distinct minority in the upper levels of most organisations and are virtually non-existent at the top. Whilst Australian society and the corporate world remains patriarchal, the opportunities for facilitating the change remains low. But this is where I feel inspired because women have an inner strength that enables them to thrive in the face of adversity. It is this inner strength that saw the birth of the women's movement in the first place. It is this inner strength that enabled women to achieve the right to vote, to demand equal pay and to strive to achieve such things as regulated child care, parental leave, professional standing and trade qualifications. On International Women's Day, women should be celebrating their strength to stand up against a government that tries to take back the hard-won gains of women in this country. I quote from Tasmania's newly appointed Anti-Dis-crimination Commissioner, Jocelynne Scutt:

This inner strength demonstrated by women for so many decades is for me my motivation, my inspiration and my reason to celebrate on International Women's Day 2000.