International Day of the Girl Child

The Hon. T.A. FRANKS (15:38): I rise today to speak on the topic of the International Day of the Girl Child. This is a day that has been noted on 11 October each year since the United Nations designated this day in December 2011 in the General Assembly. The day is an opportunity to recognise girls' rights and highlight the unique challenges that girls face worldwide. This year it focused on empowering adolescent girls and ending the cycle of violence. It is a very necessary campaign that is spearheaded by the UN but supported across the globe, by NGOs, by civil society, by governments and by all those who believe in equality.

Girls face discrimination. They face challenges that mean that they are less able to access education, and they are more subject to gender discrimination and violence. I asked yesterday of the Minister for the Status of Women in this place what this state was doing to address one cause of that violence and discrimination, an issue that also stops them getting an education, which is child marriage.

Recently in this country we have seen several cases of child brides hit the media. I would say that it is a hidden issue and, yes, it is not an epidemic. It is certainly not in great numbers, but it is in numbers that count. Any single, young girl being married off is something this parliament should concern itself with. In my own personal school history I had a school friend who was married off at the age of 16 or 17. Certainly we were just at the start of year 11, and she was shipped away to be married.

As her friends, we did not know that this was illegal; we did not know that this was something we could have acted on and gone to the police about. That was some decades ago now. Had we known, and had we been aware, I think we could have changed her life, because the stories from my cohort of school friends at the time were such that we knew that our friend (her name was Suzy) was being beaten up. We knew that she would run away from her husband that she had been forced to marry. We were 16 year olds ourselves. We had no idea what we could do about it.

In this day and age we should be paying particular attention to the issues of child marriage in our society. It is happening in Australia. Those two cases that have hit the media recently, where a visa was stopped for a young girl who was being sent overseas to be a child bride, and the current case going through the Victorian courts, show that it is still happening in 2014 in Australia. The Victorian laws allow it, and they need to be changed. It has been highlighted that the Victorian laws actually enable an adult lawfully to have sex with a child as young as 12, so long as they are married to that child, a girl.

This is unacceptable, and certainly in South Australia we should be doing whatever we can to address this issue. I hope that this government will start to pay more attention and that we will have the Department of Education and Childhood Development take this issue seriously and develop on-the-ground responses to become aware and to look out for this matter and this abuse of girls' human rights. On a more positive note, I also pay tribute to Malala Yousafzai, who, as many of you are aware, is a girl child, a girl who has stood up for the human rights of other girls and who stood up against the Taliban for her right to education, and for doing so was shot in the face and almost killed.

She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize this week in honour of her fight for the right for not only herself to have an education but for all girls to have an education. She was told of this news when she was in chemistry class by her teacher and she certainly gave one of the best responses I have ever heard. I was happy to retweet her response, which was, 'Okay, I'll make a public statement once school's finished for the day', which she duly did. In that public statement she said:

I'm proud I'm the first Pakistani and the first young woman or the first young person that is getting this award. It's a great honour to me. It gives a message to people of love between Pakistan and India.

She also said she was not expecting to get the award and that it came as a great surprise when her teacher told her in that chemistry class. Malala is an inspiration; she is a true inspiration. I think that word got bandied around a little unnecessarily today. I would like to see more Malalas in this world and more girl children having the opportunities that Malala now has.