SPEECH TO THE INTERNATIONAL WOMEN OF COURAGE 

AWARD CEREMONY, WASHINGTON

8 MARCH 2011

In particular, thank you to Secretary Clinton, whose career as a woman in public life
has been such an emblem of inspiration and courage. 

Hillary, you’ve been an example to women all over the world.  I want to echo your
own words in 2008.

You applied them to others but I believe they apply to you.  Your bravest and most
remarkable achievement is what you have made unremarkable ... female leadership.

 You’ve made it unremarkable that women lead.

It is a great good fortune to be here today.

I say that because I do believe that women like Secretary Clinton and I are
fortunate. 

While we have worked for the positions we hold, we owe the opportunity to so many
women of courage who came before us.

From pioneer women in politics like Susan B Anthony in your country and Jessie
Street in mine right down to today. 

And not only in the century since International Women’s Day but throughout history. 

Every brave mother who ever raised a strong daughter helped us get here.

Those women worked for more than political rights and they worked for more than
the opportunity for women to hold high office. 

Those women worked to improve all aspects of all women’s lives.  And we believe
today in the same things those women believed in always: in our rights.  Our
equality.
Not just the right to vote, but the right to equal work and equal pay, the right to
proper services, the right to physical safety.

Perhaps the right of greatest ultimate importance, the right to education. 

I am passionate about education.  I believe deeply in education’s transformative

power. 

Education is the key to all our opportunities.  It is the great tool for self improvement
and social progress.

Whatever else women and girls may encounter in life, a sound foundation of
excellent, rigorous education ought to be their entitlement. 

Education is the one thing no one can ever take away from us.

And education takes courage as well.

It always takes moral courage to learn to read. 

For any teacher, any child, it is an adventure.  And reading is an adventure that
never ends. 

I saw that courage in the young women whose high school President Obama and I
visited yesterday at Wakefield, Virginia... just as I saw that courage in the little girls
whose primary school  I visited last week at home in Canberra.

But in too many parts of our world today, girls learning to read need
real physical courage as well. 

This is the great symbol of global courage: women’s fight for the right to read. 

And I want a world that is safe for the girl who reads.  A world where the girl who
reads doesn’t need physical courage and neither does her teacher. 

Wherever they are.

In an Indonesian school which provides a basic modern education in that most

populous Islamic country where support from the Australian Government is so vital.
In a school in Uruzgan province in Afghanistan, with female literacy of less than one
per cent but now with the freedom for girls to learn to read where Australia is
providing $36 million over four years through Save the Children to improve education
and health for women and children.

So today we remember the courage of women in the last hundred years who worked
for all of us to have the rights we share.

We salute the courage of women here today who have worked so hard to make the
most of the rights they have.

And we promise to be just as courageous in working for rights for all women and girls
tomorrow, here and around the world.