Kilroy was keen to see a Human Rights Act passed here in Australia, not because it will end any battles at all, but because it will give people like her one more tool to use when pushing for the rights of female prisoners. She was quite prepared to wait for the right sort of law though. Apparently there is a feeling among many who want a Bill of Rights, that 'if we just pass any law we can even if it is not very good, we can amend it later'. Kilroy disagrees - if the government will not do the right thing now, why would they do it in the future?

The third speaker, Lillian Holt, a vice-chancellor's fellow at the University of Melbourne, said much that I don't agree with, and also said many things that made me think that she is very good at shocking people out of old, boring ways of thinking. She is Aboriginal, and my favourite thing that she said was that over 30 years, the 'empty rhetoric' of 'motherhood statements' about self-determination had turned into 'motherf****r' statements.

Holt went on to make the point that the rhetoric of tolerance is not about changing society, it is about getting the victims of discrimination to accept the society that has victimised them. She is also against political correctness - she wants to know if she is dealing with a racist, instead of having to guess. (And she said she may even get on well with the racist, once they get over that hurdle).

Next up was Caroline Lambert of the Women's Rights Action Network of Australia (WRANA).

She spoke about how she had lobbied the UN's human rights officials, and while she is brutally aware of the limitations of the system, still thinks that at least some work needs to be done there. For instance, the Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) (now there's a catchy name) provides the only legal basis for Australian human rights law entering the 'private' areas of the market and the home.

The CEDAW committee at the UN is looking closely and radically at women's productive and reproductive labour at the moment. Lambert's work in New York was about pushing this further, and especially encouraging the UN to not look just at the written law, but the practical, day-to-day effects of policy. To take an extreme example, a woman's right to vote is meaningless if no girls ever go to school.

A woman who works at a shelter for female victims of violence raised the same point that had been in my head - can words, laws and documents really protect people? Kilroy replied that it was just one more way to get abuse noticed, and solve a few real problems for people.

Pate said that sometimes you have to prove you have exhausted the legal solutions before moving onto direct action - and made the crucial point that people on the ground need to know that someone is fighting for them. She went on to describe the work her group is doing to teach female prisoners to be advocates for other prisoners.