Brunswick Labor.net

Last Sunday saw the conclusion of the 22nd Brunswick Music Festival. There have been 22 years of a great festival which began as a festival to represent the multicultural nature of Brunswick and to produce folk music, which we now call world music. This year's festival was immensely successful. The great success was due not only to all the performers who came from all around the world but also the Sydney Road street party, at which an estimated 50 000 people participated.

This was the first year that the festival organisation was undertaken by Performing Arts Moreland, the new company entrusted with running the festival. The chair is Judy Small, who is a musician, and the director of the program was John MacAuslan, who has directed the Brunswick Music Festival for a number of years.

The festival has been very successful and this new model with a company to organise the festival will bring even greater success.

As I said, the performers came from all over the world. There was a very strong Scottish influence, which included Emily Smith, Dougie Maclean and Eddi Reader. There were also Apodimi Compania and George Xylouris from Greece; a great uilleann piper, Paddy Keenan, from Ireland; and I Viaggiatori, with Italian music performed by Kavisha Mazzella, Irine Vella, David De Santi and Mark Holder-Keeping. It is a terrific multicultural event, much loved by the people of Brunswick and Moreland.

Speech on the Equal Opportunity Bill, reforming the exemptions and exceptions to Victoria's equal opportunity legislation.

I am a bit surprised by the member for Malvern and his attacks on what he says is the ideological position of this government, which he says is equality of outcome. He says he supports measures that are against discrimination, but he does not believe in this social engineering which is equality of outcome.

It probably shows how long I have been in this house, but I remember the debates of 1995 when the then Attorney-General, Jan Wade, introduced changes to the equal opportunity legislation. She introduced special measures and the idea that equality of outcome, not just equality of opportunity, was an element of equal opportunity in this state. It was a Liberal Party reform, as was equal opportunity legislation in 1977. There has been a tradition of the Liberal Party defending equal opportunity, and members have actually been reformers.

Liberal members now come here and criticise an element that was in the 1995 legislation, an element which suggests we have to find various ways to have exceptions and exemptions to the general principle of prohibition against discrimination.

One of those is in the area of equality of outcome, the idea of targeted measures, the idea that certain exemptions ought to exist so that we can have special measures for special groups that have certain attributes -- groups that are disabled, that have been discriminated against in the past, and which seek greater purpose and position in society.