Statutes Amendment (Child Marriage) Bill

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 10 March 2016.)

Ms CHAPMAN (Bragg—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (11:26): I rise to support the member for Adelaide's bill, which is essentially to enable a court to make orders to protect a child on reasonable grounds if it suspects that a child or children are to be removed from the state to be coerced into a child marriage. Essentially, this would prevent a party or parties from taking the child from the state, the child's passport could be held and, where appropriate, the examination or interview of the child could take place.

The Children's Protection Act in South Australia currently already makes provision in a similar way to protect young women against being removed from the jurisdiction, particularly Australia, if they were to undertake genital mutilation, which not only offend the conscience, I am sure, of all Australians, but would also break the federal law. We are very keen to ensure that we protect young women from being taken away and sold as brides.

It is not news to the people in this parliament that we have a situation where young women are traded, sold, exploited and—usually in sale arrangements or matchmaking arrangements—sent off at a young age to marry older men. It is a commercial arrangement sometimes. It can be a family arrangement, but it offends every sense of what we feel is important when we have child protection laws to protect our children.

Nothing more offensive could have been seen in the recent media when we watched with sheer distress those who have been adversely affected or, sadly, killed at the Brussels event in the last few days where we see a situation of the city of Brussels in Belgium under siege and its people being slaughtered.

I was particularly concerned to see, notwithstanding all of the protections that we have under Australian law, that a young woman had been taken to Syria with her five children and married to a party who is being sought for terrorist activity. Now we have this painful situation of the plea of the grandmother of the children, an Australian citizen, who has gone over, probably putting her own life at risk and, contrary to all advice, gone into a war-torn country to try to rescue those children and the equally difficult dilemma for the federal government to consider in due course, if they are located and if they are alive, whether they are able to come back to Australia, to return to the country of which they are citizens.

This is the sort of situation that occurs when we allow young people, particularly young women, to be exploited and married into a situation where they leave the country and are kept out of the country in, clearly, an imbalance of the power relationship between husband and wife. It is absolute tragedy for those children to be caught up in that dilemma. The member for Adelaide has been particularly active and, I think, leading the charge in making sure that we protect our young girls, in particular, from that exploitation. I commend the bill to the house.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. T.R. Kenyon.