Women, power and politics

In 2000, a humble backbencher by the name of Julia Gillard, in her first parliamentary term, published a chapter for an edited collection on Labor politics. It was titled: The Future is Female: Pursuing Change in the Labor Party.

Nine years later Gillard’s words have proven prophetic. She is Australia’s first female Deputy Prime Minister and last weekend Anna Bligh became the first elected female Premier.

Women make up nearly 40per cent of the Labor Party’s parliamentary ranks across state, territory and federal jurisdictions, a significant increase from just a decade earlier. The ALP has worked hard to bolster the number of women in its ranks.

The same cannot be said of the Liberals. While Labor’s total number of female MPs is about 160, only one in five Liberal MPs are female, about 50 in total.

Perhaps more significant than Bligh’s milestone last Saturday is that, for the first time in any state, most of the Labor MPs elected in Queensland are women.

Former Australian Democrats senator Natasha Stott Despoja believes this is the great success of Labor’s affirmative action quota system: its capacity to ensure women make up a critical mass of MPs in the parliament.

Former Victorian premier Joan Kirner, a long-time campaigner for gender balance in the Labor Party, agrees: “We learned very quickly that you couldn’t just change the rules, you had to change the culture as well. We had to have a critical mass of women for enough women to get adequate access to power and leadership positions.”

Labor made the tough decision to move to an affirmative action quota system in 1994. It included a requirement that state divisions preselect women into at least 35 per cent of winnable seats.

It was contentious at the time. In some sections of the party it still is. Kirner recalls: “I remember Wayne Swan telling me we would never get [affirmative action] passed in 1994 and even if we did get it passed it wouldn’t happen anyway. Some of the blokes were taking bets it wouldn’t happen.”

The Labor Party has moved to a 40 per cent quota for men and women respectively as its target for 2012. That at least ensures women won’t reverse discriminate if their power inside the Labor Party continues to grow. The remaining 20 per cent of positions will be up for grabs irrespective of sex.

Debate still rages as to whether quotas are an appropriate mechanism for preselecting women into parliament. The Liberals don’t look likely to follow Labor’s lead. I was asked to address the West Australian Liberal Party State Council early last year on what they needed to do to improve their electoral fortunes.

I floated the prospect of following Labor’s lead on affirmative action quotas, an argument canvassed in my edited collection, Liberals and Power: The Road Ahead. I was nearly run out of the room for being tokenistic.

This, of course, is the standard conservative response to quotas. Even the concept of starting small, as Labor did in 1981 by putting quotas on organisational positions in the lay party, was rejected.

The Liberal Party is losing the gender balance battle and it is hard to escape the view that it is having electoral consequences. Kirner believes it was a key difference between the parties in Queensland.

“If the Liberal Party [doesn’t] want targets they need to find another way of improving their number of women representatives,” she says. “If they don’t, they are only going to be further marginalised by the community.”

Former Labor leader Kim Beazley recalls: “When we first introduced [affirmative action] we were accused of tokenism. When you look at the Labor women now you can’t say that, but you might when you cast an eye over the Liberal Party’s ranks.”

It’s true. Apart from the lower overall number of Liberal women in parliament, Malcolm Turnbull also has fewer women than Labor does on his front bench. When the performance of his most senior female MP, Julie Bishop, is compared with that of Gillard, Liberals blush with embarrassment.

The team of senior female cabinet ministers in the Rudd Government may well be the difference between the two main parties. Gillard is one of four female cabinet ministers in Rudd’s Government, the others being Nicola Roxon, Penny Wong and Jenny Macklin. When you consider the portfolios these Labor frontbenchers hold-industrial relations, education, health, climate change, family services and Aboriginal affairs-they are likely to be at the forefront of the policy debates that will dominate the national discourse in coming years.

Politics changes quickly and politicians need to adapt to changing environments. That has always been the challenge for conservatives; history can sometimes leave them looking out of touch.

An example of how political attitudes can change in the lifetime of one politician’s career can be seen with Paul Keating. In his maiden speech to parliament he said: “The government has boasted about the increasing number of women in the workforce. Rather than something to be proud of, I feel it is something of which we should be ashamed.”

Twenty-four years later, in 1994, he became the Labor prime minister who pushed through its affirmative action policy. Kirner believes that without Keating’s backing the policy would never have been endorsed at the ALP national conference in Hobart.

For all the women Labor’s affirmative action quota system has helped get into parliament during recent years, Gillard is the prize find. Former WA premier and Keating government minister Carmen Lawrence recalls: “Julia had a lot of difficulty winning preselection initially. The [affirmative action] rule in the end got her over the final hurdle.”

Gillard failed twice at preselection, once for the House of Representatives and once for the Senate, before successfully contesting the safe Victorian seat of Lalor in 1998. When she couldn’t secure a winnable position on the Senate ticket ahead of the 1996 election, Kirner was “incandescent with anger” .

Kirner says that was the moment that galvanised women around the principles of Emily’s List, an independent organisation set up in November 1996 to mentor and financially assist women running as Labor candidates. Gillard, a lawyer by trade, was responsible for drafting the constitution.

“We set up Emily’s List and pushed for affirmative action because of the sense that we were failing both democracy and women’s interests,” Kirner says.

“Parliament is a better place when it has more women in it, as is any cabinet.”

Although the Labor Party is streets ahead of the Liberal Party in supporting women into parliament, it wasn’t always so. The first elected female MP, Edith Cowan, was from the non-Labor side of politics, as was the first federal cabinet minister, Enid Lyons. When John Howard won government in 1996, he did so with a record number of female MPs. But most of them were in marginal seats, making it hard to rise into the ministry.

In her book chapter, Gillard wrote how women historically had been “clustered in marginal seats” , and the stifling impact this could have on their careers. The ALP’s working-class roots meant it faced more natural barriers to female representation than the Liberal Party.

This may be the reason more attention has been paid to overcoming those barriers.

“We really needed [affirmative action] because our structure is very unregarding of women,” Beazley notes. He blames “really rough factional politics” and the complication that “until recently trade unions didn’t have a large female component” .

“If we continued recruiting women at the rate we were, it would have taken 200 years to reach parity,” Lawrence points out.

Whether Gillard would have made her way into parliament without affirmative action is something of an academic discussion. Now that she is there, and No.2 in the Government, admirers of her political talents come from all directions.

Senior Liberal frontbencher Tony Abbott says: “Julia Gillard is definitely a heavyweight. She is a formidable politician. She is by far Labor’s best parliamentary performer.

If you are in debate with Julia you have to be absolutely on your toes. She is almost in the Peter Costello calibre, and she doesn’t have a bad sense of humour either.”

Beazley agrees: “I don’t think there is any doubt she is the best performer in the current parliament.”

However, without naming Gillard specifically, Stott Despoja is critical of what she calls the “homogenous male model of a politician emerging among the women … sometimes copying behaviour that even many of the men have eschewed” .

This could include Gillard’s bombastic performances in question time.

Parliamentary performances are one thing, but policy prowess is what will shape Gillard’s political future. She has a poor track record as the architect of Medicare Gold under Mark Latham’s leadership and the Fair Work Bill is coming into effect during what may well prove to be inappropriate economic times.

“I wouldn’t give her an A-plus for policy like I would for her parliamentary performance,” Abbott cautions. “On policy I would only give her a B-minus.” That’s still not bad from a political adversary.

Lawrence is frank about the challenges her former parliamentary colleagues, including Gillard, face: “The [Rudd] Government spends a bit too much time focused on what’s going to happen tomorrow or in the parliamentary sphere. If Julia wants to be regarded as a leader of substance, she needs to secure substantive policy outcomes.”

For Lawrence the test will come in the policy area of education, particularly higher education.

Winning the policy debates will set Gillard up to be Australia’s first female prime minister. The question is, how soon could it happen? Abbott mischievously notes that he thinks Gillard’s time to lead will come sooner rather than later: “I expect that she will be the leader of the Labor Party by the middle of the next term of government, assuming Labor wins the election,” he says.

Beazley thinks Rudd is too young for Abbott’s prediction to come true. Lawrence agrees and, judging by the opinion polls, so does the public. But in politics things can change rather quickly.