Senator STOTT DESPOJA (1:09 PM) —As a South Australian similarly concerned about the issue of the Murray-Darling river system, I acknowledge that the public meeting Senator Wong mentioned took place, thank the Australian Conservation Foundation for organising it and commend our candidate for the Senate, John McLaren, who represented the Australian Democrats at that public meeting.

Today in the Senate I would like to speak firstly about the issue of abortion and abortion services in Australia. On this coming Sunday night, 8 August, ABC Television will show a UK documentary on abortion called `My Foetus'. It will be part of the Compass program. I want to make it clear that I have no qualms at all about our national broadcaster showing programs of any sort without fear or favour. I am not asking in any way for the program to be censored, as I trust the ABC's charter to air programs without any form of interference. However, I am looking for some reassurance that this documentary will not give misleading impressions about abortion in this country. I am not talking about the UK, but about Australia.

Some of the notions that could be received as a consequence of this program—and I acknowledge I am basing my comments on news reports to date—could be misleading ones such as second- and third-trimester abortions being fairly common or easy to access in Australia. To, hopefully, try to avoid this misrepresentation or misperception, I wrote to the ABC last month, urging them to publicise each state's and each territory's precise laws and practices surrounding abortion before they aired the documentary. I was concerned that many viewers may not realise how the Australian laws differed from the United Kingdom's laws, and I encouraged the ABC to make these details known in the interests of an informed, educated and balanced debate. For the record, in this country it is not actually that easy to find out details about each state's and each territory's laws and practices regarding abortion, particularly because those laws and practices can be quite different from each other. I am pleased to say that I did receive a response from the ABC to my letter. I note that the ABC have claimed that they will appropriately deal with this `in Geraldine Doogue's introduction to the program'. Mr Acting Deputy President, I seek leave to table the response that was provided to me by the ABC. I have drawn it to the attention of other honourable senators and parties.

Leave granted.

Senator STOTT DESPOJA —I thank the Senate. I thank the ABC for responding and partially agreeing to my request or at least partially doing what I was asking them to do. However, the letter does concede that these laws and practices will not be spelt out in detail on Sunday night. How they vary among the states and territories, for example, will not be made clear, so I am still concerned that viewers of the documentary may come away with a dangerous misunderstanding of abortion laws and practices in this country.

Recent comments by some government members have not helped the situation. In Monday's Australian newspaper, the Minister for Health and Ageing, Tony Abbott, was quoted as saying that `a political constituency may even be starting to emerge to ban abortions after 20 weeks'. The minister's comments give the impression that abortions after 20 weeks may be common or even easy to access. That is not the case in this country. In fact, for the record, 95 per cent of abortions performed in this country take place during the first trimester of the pregnancy. This is partly because the accessibility of termination services is significantly reduced after that first trimester. Only Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory have specific, explicit legal gestational age limitations in relation to terminations. However, in practice in all states and the Australian Capital Territory, terminations at up to 14 weeks gestation are generally available in a few specialist private day surgeries in the capital cities and services at between 14 and 20 weeks gestation are available on a more limited basis, if at all. In the Northern Territory, the law allows for termination services to be performed during the first trimester on the basis of maternal health and/or serious foetal disability. At between 14 and 23 weeks gestation the availability of termination services is limited further. In practice, however, availability is even more limited for all termination services in the Northern Territory as an obstetrician and gynaecologist must perform the service, two doctors' signatures are required and services are available only in hospitals.

Regardless of the number of weeks at which a pregnancy is terminated within the legal limit, women should not be demonised, attacked or vilified for exercising what is their reproductive right. I suspect that the government should be providing more objective, impartial pregnancy counselling services—or at least support for those services. It was recently brought to my attention that Pregnancy Counselling Australia, which is listed on the emergency page and the community help page of the White Pages, is a pro-life organisation—despite its White Pages listing which innocuously states that it provides `pregnancy termination alternatives & post termination counselling'.

Clearly, this listing is misleading. The provisions of the Trade Practices Act in relation to `conduct that is liable to mislead the public as to the nature, the characteristics, the suitability for their purpose or the quantity of any services' is unlikely to apply to Pregnancy Counselling Australia as an organisation that offers free counselling services. However, it could well apply to the company that produces the White Pages, Sensis Pty Ltd, as Sensis publishes and distributes the White Pages with a view to encouraging the use of telephone services to the end of making a profit for it and its parent company, Telstra.

I urge Sensis to remove Pregnancy Counselling Australia from its emergency page and engage in corrective advertising to advise the public of the true nature of this service. Unfortunately, Pregnancy Counselling Australia is not the only organisation that provides biased advice in this regard. I understand there is only one dedicated pro-choice counselling service in Australia—Children by Choice, in Queensland—compared to many pro-life counselling services. I do not deny the right of these services to exist, but misleading representations and advertising are not appropriate. For that reason, I call on Sensis today to rectify this misleading advertisement in their White Pages, including the emergency page.

I believe in a woman's right to choose and I abhor recent comments by some legislators that attempt to interfere in women's reproductive rights. In the last couple of months alone, the government has put forward proposals to again make the morning after pill available only by prescription and has drafted legislation—which I acknowledge is now on hold—to allow parents to access medical files of their teenage children.

In 2003, during the debate on the Prohibition of Human Cloning Bill, the government introduced regulations to ban the export of embryos—and I can see good reason as to why. When these regulations were first tabled, they were so wide ranging that they actually prevented Australian women from taking their own embryos overseas for IVF treatment. Pregnant women or women who had an embryo that they were taking overseas for IVF were actually criminals under that legislation. It meant that pregnant women could not travel overseas without possibly being guilty of a criminal offence. So no overseas trips for me—although the thought of someone trying to police that particular regulation is interesting. I acknowledge that this regulation was withdrawn after I threatened, on behalf of the Democrats, to disallow it, but it is a prime example of shabby law-making in this country which fails to take into account the impact of certain laws and regulations on women in particular.

The replacement regulations are equally questionable. Now, if a woman needs to travel overseas with her own embryos for the purposes of IVF treatment, she requires ministerial permission. Just imagine sitting down with the minister and having a chat about that: `Can I take my own embryos overseas for the purposes of IVF treatment?'—ministerial discretion; extraordinary interference in terms of the rights of women, reproductive rights in particular.

However, this not the only area of women's policy in which I think this government is performing dismally. Mr Acting Deputy President Cherry, as you would know and as I hope many other honourable colleagues would be aware, last Sunday represented the 20th anniversary of the Sex Discrimination Act, yet women's progress in Australia since 1984 has been shamefully slow. Yes, there has been steady but slow progress. But women continue to face the threat of violence, discrimination, cultural stereotypes and even decisions about how they balance their work and family life—many decisions on issues that men are not confronted with, or not to the same extent.

There are now 49.1 per cent of Australian companies with no female executive managers, compared to 52.6 per cent in 2002—so not a big increase—and women hold only 3.2 per cent of the top executive positions in Australia. Women who are in senior management positions, despite being equally or possibly more qualified than their male counterparts, are paid 90 per cent of what their male counterparts are paid. Across the board, women now earn two-thirds of men's total earnings, and on average they work fewer years in paid employment than men. Consequently, the average superannuation payout for a woman in 2020 will be $100,000, compared to $200,000 for a man. This means that women retiring in 2020 effectively will have the same amount of superannuation accumulated as men did 20 years earlier. Recently we have had celebratory headlines in the newspapers commending this government on the fact that it has a record number of women in executive power, a record number of women in the cabinet—three. That is dismal for the 21st century.

A recent work and family survey found that most respondents would prefer an obligation for employers to provide flexible family working hours to help them better manage their balance between work and family—26.7 per cent of respondents—or the right to time off work for family emergencies—24.8 per cent of respondents—to other options such as an increase in the government's family payments and more government help for child care. We in this place have discussed the suite of reforms that are required for a better work and family balance—child care, conversion of part-time hours, conversion of overtime into jobs, paid maternity leave. All of these things should be on the agenda for the next election. I fear, however, that they will not be. I fear partially that the paid maternity leave debate is on hold again, thanks to Australian working women being fobbed off by a token maternity payment provided by this government—and, unfortunately, endorsed by the Australian Labor Party—when they should have been developing a comprehensive, sophisticated model in relation to paid maternity leave.

On this 20th anniversary of the Sex Discrimination Act—and there has been progress, but we as women in this country have a long way to go, particularly in relation to access to power in our most powerful institutions, such as media, church, the corporate and business world and indeed parliament, let alone leadership positions and executive power—I call on this government to provide an audit of the position of women in Australian society, an audit against the Sex Discrimination Act in terms of not only how that act has supported, progressed and advanced us but also how much we have got left to go. When this government came to power it was not anxious to provide the same levels of research and analysis that were previously supplied, not only under previous governments but even with the government's dismal attempt to provide a women's portfolio budget statement. We have seen a lack of precise, detailed, objective, independent information in relation to where women stand in society. I call on this government to finally audit the position of women in Australia. Be devils: set some benchmarks, set some targets and do not just talk about women's positions of power, women in management or business and addressing the incredible gender wage gap, which has expanded 35 per cent in the past eight years since this government came to power. Why not do something about it? I call on the government to do that and look forward—

Senator Ian Macdonald —A quota.

Senator STOTT DESPOJA —Sorry?

Senator Ian Macdonald —Like a quota for a number of women in the parliament?

Senator STOTT DESPOJA —We should not need a quota. But anything that will advance women's representation at this stage I am prepared to support. But let us start with a realistic assessment of where we are at.