Hon Chairperson, hon Minister, hon chair of the committee, I also want to greet everyone in the House.
I just want to address a few things. It is this government, the ANC, which has given women the right to vote, the right to be in Parliament, the right to be executives and CEOs of companies. There has never been a government in this country that has elevated women to the status where we are at this point. [Applause.]
That is a positive move by this government. All of us need to accept it and promote it wherever we go. I have a clipping here which I got from an analysis in the Sunday Times newspaper which was analysing the period from 1931 to 1956. They showed a white woman who had come to Soweto. She is surrounded by black women, showing them how to clean white houses in order to become good servants.
This woman had the bravery to go to a township, where they were scared that they would be raped. But she was brave enough to go and implement an apartheid policy that oppressed other women.
So where are these women who can go out and promote the good policies of this new government that promotes women? Where are we as women? I mean women of all races. We are all raped and we are discriminated against. Where are we when we are supposed to promote good policies?
Regarding the issue of sanitary pads, to the hon EFF member, sanitary pads are being distributed to all schools. We distribute sanitary pads to every school because we know that these kids have to attend school. It is not a new thing that you are talking about.
The hon Robinson says that we must put our past behind us. I cannot do that. In psychology Pavlov says that when you feed a dog every day at half- past-nine, even on the day that you come with an empty plate, the dog salivates. So it means that when you are brought up to be racist, for example, and it is not removed from your mind, you still continue to be racist. That is why for us to remove a certain type of behaviour, it means that we must re-educate that particular person.
Most of us who are grown-ups today still preserve the old, but you have to remove the old psychology. That is why women still continue to be raped and continue to be oppressed by other women because people are socialised to oppress others.
There is a quotation I have for the House by Dr Tibane which says:
You are a product of God's engineering capacity, you are to excel because you exceeded your yesterday. Remember, it is not about exceeding others or being better than others but it is about exceeding yourself. There is nothing noble in being superior to others, but true nobility is being superior to your previous self.
So it is up to you as an oppressor to re-educate yourself. That is why you have Steve Hofmeyr who will sing Die Stem and nobody says anything about it because they see it as correct. But it is wrong when we are building a nation. People must converge, they must move from oppression to unity and those who are oppressed must unite and converge.
All of us were hurt but there has never before been a stage when people were expressing themselves through freedom of speech, their democratic right. Today people say, "We have freedom of speech", but they never spoke about our oppression. Where were they when we were being oppressed? Today, they have freedom of speech, and it is the ANC that has given them that freedom. [Applause.]
The issue of patriarchy - you can be in Black Sash but at the same time you must liberate other women. It is not about you. Liberation is not about individuals, it is about a group of people that has to move for transformation to a certain direction. So, patriarchy, I will generalise, is something that is embedded in our culture. It is in our education and in everything that we do, and we see it as being normal. We see nothing wrong about it.
One of the examples is architecture. Take this building, for instance; the architects who designed this building were masculine in their character. It was a male person who did the designs. When walking around you can slip or even break your leg because your shoes cannot stick to the tiles. It is as simple as that. If we want to liberate women and we say that women must be part and parcel of Parliament it means that we must also change our floors. We walk around here and break our heels because you can't walk on that paving.
If we say quality liberation, it means that even the people who were not included when this building was planned must be accommodated.