It is with a feeling of great honour and some continuing sadness that I stand here this evening to present the 1996 Robert Nestdale Oration. I am honoured to have been invited to present such an important address in the life of this Division and pleased that at least my friends in the Young Liberal Movement continue to be interested in the views of a "dinosaur of the Jurassic period".
However, I can never forget that the establishment of the Oration was to mark the passing of a great liberal, an inspiring leader of the Young Liberal Movement and to me, a very special friend. I was Federal President of the Young Liberal Movement at the time of Robert's death and I will always recall the support, guidance and friendship he gave to me — three rare enough commodities in politics, let alone all at once.
I was in the villages of far northern Thailand on the day Robert died — a place where his work with UNICEF may well have taken him. It was impossible for me to return for his Memorial Service but it was by all accounts a great send off. An indication of the high regard in which he was held were the messages received and the tributes made at the Service — from the Secretary General of the Commonwealth Emeka Anyaoku, the NSW Attorney General Hon John Dowd, the Hon Gough Whitlam AM QC and a previous Nestdale Oration speaker, the Hon Philip Ruddock MP. High praise indeed for one who did not hold elected office, whose passing was not marked by a state service and whose most recent career had been spent in the service of children through the United Nations body UNICEF.
I know that with long standing traditions of tribute to long gone liberals it is occasionally bewildering trying to understand where they fit in the process. Robert's curriculum vitae as a State and Federal President of the Movement, a member of Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists and his work with UNICEF would give you all that but I will describe Robert using the words of Chris Puplick from the Senate Hansard on the day of Robert's death. Robert "believed in liberal causes, liberal principles and liberal values. He made manifest efforts in defence of those principles at times when they were unpopular, when standing up for them was difficult and when a commitment to them was not easy." I know many elected politicians whose commitment to liberalism will never be recalled with such respect and emotion.
This fourth Nestdale speech is made possible by the NSW Division of the Young Liberal Movement and by John Brogden, the Movement President who established the Oration. The NSW Division holds a unique position in the history of the Young Liberal Movement and in fact in Australian politics. It has been derided by those who do not share a view of the importance of strong social policy, even suffered its own variation of vilification but in my view the Movement's position as a commentator, a political activist and a conscience for this division and across Australia should never be belittled or squandered. It will be a sad day for liberalism if the NSW Division of the Young Liberal Movement ceases to be its champion.
I stand here as one in a position of enormous privilege, as one who has received every opportunity in life. Part of that is because I am a product of Australia's halcyon 60s (yes, 60s) and 70s. I am also a product of a fairly traditional family background — these days my mother is a farmer and a talented craftsperson. But she has been a full time carer for a dementia sufferer and before that had her hands full with at least one of her two children being a precocious and demanding child who was a feminist at age one.
My father died 2 years ago — leaving me without the most brilliant, the strongest and "most important man in my life". He had grown up in the Southern Highlands in rural poverty, through the Depression. He was in no particular order a World War II veteran, a Chartered Accountant who despaired of my mathematical ineptitude, a romantic, a Francophile, a farmer and a modern day Dr Doolittle who talked to the animals.
He gave me everything — and he made it all possible himself — secondary and tertiary education of the highest standard, a lifestyle that it is easy to take for granted but which many Australians never have a chance to know and finally an appetite for language, people and places that can never be satiated. When I reached university I realised for the first time that there were things in career and study it was expected a young woman should not or would not do — because she was a woman. Even with my very traditional conservative upbringing and my Methodist education, this had never occurred to me before. My father for example, had never questioned my capacity to do anything.
My judgement maybe, but not my capacity. Overcoming the initial shock I dismissed such attitudes from academia and the legal profession and as you might note, did as I wished anyway.
But back to privilege — as an Australian woman in my early 30s, in the mid 1990s, I and my peers enjoy enormous privilege. The great intellectual battlefront we face is the war between feminists Helen Garner and her respondents such as Virginia Trioli. The confusion engendered by the debate over the nature of modern feminism is perhaps not for discussion here tonight but it is an important issue that interested members of the Young Liberal Movement should consider at some stage.
Privilege also gives us access to education, to employment and to health care and we take our positions at the forefront of the community ready to face the world. Do we regard these "givens" as rights ? I think so. I also think that it produces a dangerous and limiting complacency that does not cause us to raise our eyes and look beyond our horizon at the condition of our peers the world over.
After decades in the West of fighting for rights and responsibilities, of arguing the feminist cause, of trying to level playing fields and break through glass ceilings, millions and millions of women the world over continue to suffer deprivation, intimid ation and discrimination on such a massive scale that it is almost impossible to seriously appreciate.
The Nuremburg trials held post World War II condemned rape as a crime against humanity. In 1996, the United Nations records that violence against women, particularly rape, continues to be one of the most powerful weapons of oppression used in theatres of war.
UNICEF's State of the World's Children Report of 1996 presents a devastating record of the use of systematic rape as a weapon in ethnic cleansing. A European Community fact finding team reports that since April 1992, the commencement of fighting in Bosnia, more than 20,000 Muslim girls and women have been raped in Bosnia. In Bosnia, Herzegovina and Croatia the Report says teenage girls have been a particular target. Teenagers left pregnant by this experience have been forced to bear the child.
The picture of Rwanda presented by the Report is also profoundly disturbing. The Report notes that in some raids virtually every adolescent girl who survived a militia attack was then raped. Of those who became pregnant, many were ostracised by their families and communities. The result? Some abandoned their children; others committed suicide.
These are not the random, senseless acts of violence against women that we hear of in our community on an almost daily basis. Of themselves, those attacks are a profound violation of humanity sufficient to draw reactions of horror from most people.
This is different — this is a systematic, organised, ongoing abuse that defies description and destroys a community at its very core; in many ways more completely than the destruction wrought by the guns and bombs of war.
As UNICEF notes,
"Rape's damage can be devastating because of the strong communal reaction to the violation and pain stamped on entire families. The harm inflicted in such cases on a woman by a rapist is an attack on her family and culture, as in many societies women are viewed as repositories of a community's cultural and spiritual values."
In 1989 on the same visit to Thailand to which I referred before, I visited a refugee camp at Arunyaprathet on the Thai-Cambodian border. We walked through the camp with members of Medecins Sans Frontieres and saw children playing in the dust, and other children watching them — those watching had suffered shocking injuries from mines and razor wire and were trying to recover in dire surroundings. We saw hundreds and hundreds of women doing the work of the camp and the family — and were suddenly struck by the fact that there were no adult men around, only the very old and the very young.
In this environment, where all the men go off to war, women and girls lose their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons and are exceptionally vulnerable to the attacks I described earlier.
The UNICEF Report notes that in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Myanmar and Somalia families seeking refuge "frequently cite rape or the fear of rape as a key factor in their decision to seek refuge."
It is not only acts of outrage in war that threaten the personal safety and freedom of women across the world. In Kabul, even as we sit here, girls and women are finding their lives turned upside down by the rule of the Taliban. The latest reports from the UN indicate that local UN female staff are prohibited from reporting to work in their offices. There has been a dramatic increase in the risk to women and children in the city from mine injuries and the UN urgently needs to resume mine awareness training. The Save the Children (US) organisation reports a dramatic increase in the number of young children being killed by mines — at this time of year the children of Kabul are searching for firewood, an "extremely dangerous activity in this mine infested city."
In terms of their general freedom, women find themselves in a new and frightening land in their Afghanistan, now under the control of the Taliban.
They have been prohibited from taking up any public job except begrudgingly in medicine and in heavily Taliban-controlled parts of the country, girls have been barred from attending school. A woman may not speak to a man in a public place or when outside their homes show any hair or skin.
The ban on women working strikes a special irony when you consider that after years of armed conflict in the country there are now 28 000 widows in Kabul alone, with no means of looking after their families. Widespread destitution is destroying the lives and the spirits of tens of thousands of Afghan women and their families.
Australian journalist Kim Willsher recently reported on the position of women in Afghanistan directly from Kabul. She was attacked in the street for not covering her face completely: but because she was recognised as a western woman she was not given a lashing with a baton or piece of electrical flex, or shoved in the face with a rifle butt.
Even their recreation activities have been attacked — a woman may not watch television, listen to music or play chess. All forbidden as un-Islamic.
Professionally the Taliban control is bringing women to their knees. The most serious impact is on the health system. Female doctors and nurses have only recently been allowed to resume their duties but they must be fully covered when performing them. Kim Willsher describes the burqua, the complete cover which envelopes the woman from head to toe leaving a thick woven grid through which to see, as "an obvious and odious symbol of women's slavery."
Willsher quotes the words of a female surgeon in an Afghan hospital — "It is not accepted for women in other Islamic countries to be treated this way, so why here ? Now we cannot even speak to the male doctors let alone get a second opinion on a patient, even when we are fully covered. Even during operations they say the patient has to be covered with a burqua, but this is impossible. They say it is Sharia law, but what kind of law reduces women to this?"
I agree completely with the words of the journalist when she says that although Westerners in Kabul refer to the situation as the women's problem it is a far greater issue than that — "It is a question of basic human rights." Elsewhere in the world, in 1996 in a western democracy there are indigenous women who live in sparsely populated areas of their country where the rate of sexually transmitted disease is such that for the population aged between 14 and 25, approximately 75-80% have had at least one if not more than one STD. This is described as probably the highest rate in a discrete population in the world. And this is Australia.
The consequence of this situation is a net decline in the fertility rate of Aboriginal women and as the population declines, a very serious impact on the future of their community in terms of their involvement with and attachment to their land.
For these same women, 30% of them give birth to their first child before the age of 20, compared to 6% in the non indigenous population. Of their children, the infant mortality rate is 24 per 1000 births compared to one third of that (eight) in the non indigenous population.
Their life expectancy is about 60-65 years, compared to 81 years in the non indigenous population.
Yet indigenous Australians have recently been attacked in a speech about, amongst other things, "the privileges Aboriginals enjoy over other Australians", given by an elected member of parliament who enjoys privileges beyond the ken of many Australians. The privileges to which she sweepingly refers in her first speech must be the ones I articulated a moment ago — infertility, shortened life expectancy and tragically high infant mortality rates. Perhaps it depends on your perspective?
And so I return to the question of what a life of opportunity, strong family support and overall a country which lives in peace gives to its young women, in fact to all of its people? It gives you the rights, freedoms and responsibilities to live your life as you wish, no matter what your choices, as long as you do not trample upon the rights, freedoms and responsibilities of others.
And if you do find yourself in a position of strength, it is worth raising your eyes beyond that horizon and looking closely at the other shore. For some, there will be a chance to make a contribution: to take away some of the deprivation, to write and speak of the tragedies so that the suffering does not go on unnoticed and in silence. Few though, will ever be able to contribute as much as Robert Nestdale and that contribution to the well being of the world's children through UNICEF is really his timeless memorial.
I have some cynical views about people and about politicians — developed not through spending too long in the sun, but maybe too long in politics. My great fear is that people in general prefer to take the easy way out; to assume the line of least resistance and not bother to fight back when faced with the bile and hate and vitriol of bigotry and discrimination in all their forms.
The leading nineteenth century American suffragette Susan B. Anthony said "Cautious careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation or social standards never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest are willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathies with despised ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences."
Finally, my cynicism about politicians is tempered by the fact that I know and admire a number of great integrity and conviction. For them politics is about people. They will give their all to the people they represent, all the while deriving strength from their philosophy.
Patrick White was one of this country's greatest writers — I thought that in Year 12, in 3 Unit English when I was the crazy who actually chose "Tree of Man" as a work for the year. I never discussed poetry with Robert Nestdale but notwithstanding the gender specifics of this work, I think he would have appreciated this stanza from White's 1970 poem "Nine Thoughts from Sydney":
"Where is the politician who will flower like the leptospermum citrata,
Who will sound like the surf out of the Antarctic,
Who has in his hands the knots of coolibah,
And in his soul the tears of migrants landing from Piraeus?"
Show me that politician and I will show you a great liberal.