INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY

Ms BEDFORD (Florey) (15:14): Today I wanted to get an early start on the International Women's Day theme which will be celebrated this year on Friday 8 March. There will be the always well attended UNIFEM breakfast at the Adelaide Convention Centre on that Friday morning at the ungodly hour of 7am, but there is a great guest speaker, Anne Summers, so I commend that to everybody to try and get to, but I understand it has been sold out so unless you have a ticket you are going to be waiting at the door for a cancellation.

We also have South Australia's International Women's Day Committee hosting their lunch, again at the Adelaide Convention Centre; that will be on Thursday 7 March at noon. Part of their focus for the commemorations are the Gladys Elphick Awards and the Irene Krastev Awards, which recognises significant contributions of many South Australian women.

International Women's Day gives us the opportunity to reflect on women and their achievements and look at how the gender gap has faired over the past 12 months. I will start with sport and congratulate the Australian Women's XI on their recent achievements in winning the triple world crown. Our women cricketers have always held their own internationally and, while they appear to have enjoyed wider coverage this year, it is still a long way short of the coverage their male counterparts receive.

I would like to also mention a place where a lot of women's cricket is played, the South Australian Memorial Women's Playing Fields, and their annual commemoration of Bangka Day, which remembers the sacrifice of our nurses in World War II and in particular the survival of Sister Vivian Bullwinkel.

While on sport, it would be remiss of me not to mention calisthenics, one of the largest participation rate sports for South Australian women and girls. Last July, the ACF held the 24^th national competition in Darwin and we saw a great four days of fantastic items with South Australia doing a marvellous job and producing a great result. Congratulations to all the participants, coaches, support teams, clubs and parents who provide this great opportunity for our girls to travel and experience national competition.

Our calisthenics girls often go on to use their skills and talents in other areas and we saw last year the Black Diamonds Drill Dance Team reach the finals of the Australia's Got Talent TV show. Their ages range from 50 to 15; a great example of how many women continue in healthy sports lifelong, especially sports like netball and calisthenics. Whether it is aerobics or marching, which was really strong in South Australia some years ago and sees teams travel to the Edinburgh Tattoo, or adding style to the grid at the Clipsal, women in sport play an important role and I would like to quote from an October 2012 article in The Advertiser, a paper we all now know I read forensically—

Dr Close: What page was that?

Ms BEDFORD: Page 22, but I wasn't looking—that came from Geneva and it talks about women closing the gender gap in health and education. They struggled to get jobs with top salaries, according to data from a study of 135 countries. The World Economic Forum or WEF said in its annual Global Gender Gap Report that:

...gaps in senior positions, wages and leadership levels still persist. The figures were released just hours after a European Union initiative to set a 40 per cent quota for women on the boards of listed companies stalled because of a lack of support. The report, which looks at health, education and politics, and covered more than 90 per cent of the world's population, looked at how nations distribute resources and opportunities between women and men. It found Nordic countries, headed by Iceland, Finland and Norway, had done the best job of closing the gap.

When we talk of politics, much is said of affirmative action and whether it is necessary, as merit should be the only criteria in pre-selection. I think affirmative action has and did and still does play a necessary role, not because women lack ability or the merit to serve in parliament or any of the roles in parliament—

An honourable member interjecting:

Ms BEDFORD: Hang on a sec—but because merit is not always, as we know in this unfair world, rewarded. As Joan Kirner, a mentor to many of us here, has said in the past, 'When parliament is full of mediocre women then we will know we really have equality.'

I would like to also mention another article, this time on the role of women in the Defence Force, and I quote from an article in The Advertiser by Ian McPhedran, where he talked about women being:

...warned to expect a backlash as the military establishes targets to get more females into senior jobs. Delivering her report into the treatment of women in the Defence Force, Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick yesterday said the best way to change the military's sexist culture was through affirmative action.

I would like to put on record a vote of thanks to my federal colleague Stephen Smith for his outstanding leadership around women in the Defence Force, as he has been courageous in highlighting deficiencies and championing change. These sorts of reforms could well be replicated in workplaces all over Australia, and I hope we will all reflect this International Women's Day on what we can do and how we can change unacceptable practices when we see them.