Wednesday, 27 November 2024

 Nick McGOWAN (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (18:45): (1320) Earlier this year Premier Jacinta Allan visited India, and one of the key focuses of her visit, we were told, was:

… ensuring an equal future for women and girls, making sure that everyone is safe, respected and has every opportunity to pursue their dreams and contribute to society – from sport, education and the arts.

It is shame that Ms Allan did not add ‘toilets’ to that list, because she needs a serious lesson from the Indian government on why providing a safe public toilet to women is indelibly connected to their safety and dignity. In his very first address to the nation in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke frankly about how providing clean and safe toilets for women in India was a key focus for his government. He connected the safety and dignity of women to proper access to public toilets and said that it should not be difficult for the country to build toilets so that old women and young girls in rural areas do not have to wait for darkness to ease themselves. He very reasonably argued this. In the next five years his government built 110 million public toilets in India – that is 22 million toilets each year, 110 million toilets.

I want to come to Premier Allan’s record on women’s safety and public toilets. For months now, on behalf of the residents of Ringwood East, I have been campaigning for just one – not 100 million, just one public toilet to be included in the new Ringwood East train station. The Level Crossing Removal Project cost taxpayers in the order of a billion dollars and is yet to be concluded with a public toilet. As things stand, the nearest public toilet to the train station is a 190-metre walk from the station, through a car park and a lonely, dark alleyway. This is not a matter of inconvenience, it is a matter of public safety and dignity. It is also a matter of empowering women and girls, including the aged and those with ability constraints, to be able to step out and use public toilets with confidence on the public transport system.

Ms Allan likes to present the safety of women and girls as her government’s top priority. Talk is cheap. Creating the physical infrastructure that delivers a safe environment for women and girls to live in, on the other hand, requires getting off their proverbial bums and making a few hard decisions. The action I seek from the Minister for Transport Infrastructure is to ensure that there is a public toilet, accessible to all on every metropolitan train station in Victoria.