The Wife Drought

by Annabel Crabb

  ‘On the other hand, you don’t get the option of slacking off or doing less than you should because “Oh, my job is so hard and what are you doing? It’s your job to stay home.” Not trying to lighten your load is a great recipe for happiness as well. I prefer it the way it is, for us.’

  ‘Of the blokes who are the partners of female MPs that I have met, some of them take the path that I did, which is to put their family obligations ahead of their professional development,’ says Stephen Burgess, Anna Burke’s husband.

  ‘But a substantial number don’t. Whereas I think that for many men who are in the Parliament, the female partners – if they have any children – do that to a much greater extent. Partly that’s social conditioning, but I also think that a lot of men derive their identity from working, not just an income.’

  The difficulty of combining motherhood with a parliamentary career is borne out by the numbers. Andrew Leigh, who is the Member for Fraser and a relentlessly curious economist, recently dug around for some statistics on his colleagues and the rate at which they reproduce.

  For his forthcoming book The Luck of Politics, Leigh researched the children of MPs and senators in the 44th Parliament using publicly available sources including Who’s Who, Wikipedia and party websites.4 Leigh’s particular focus was on child gender. He had a funny little idea (economists are like that) about a correlation between parents’ political beliefs and the gender of their children. And indeed, he found that Coalition women were more likely to have sons, while Labor men were more likely to have daughters.

  But the broader patterns he identified were pretty striking, too. Leigh worked out how many children the male and female politicians in the 44th Parliament had, on average. Male MPs and senators had 2.1 children each; a shade over the national household average of 1.9. Women parliamentarians, however, averaged only 1.2 progeny.

  Put that another way: there is a one-child penalty for women in federal politics.5

  It’s not just an Australian accident, either; similar research in 2012 by the UK’s Political Studies Association reveals a spookily matched pattern in Westminster. Male politicians there averaged 1.9 children, while women fielded 1.2 each.6

  Some female politicians, of course, don’t have children at all; that’s what keeps those averages down. And the brutal truth is that childlessness is still probably the biggest natural advantage a woman can give herself in terms of dealing with the demands of a successful career in federal politics. For some, indeed, it is the price of entry.

  In the 44th Parliament, four in every ten female representatives are childless – twice the childlessness rate found among their male colleagues.7 It’s a similar story in the UK, where 45 per cent of female MPs are childless, compared with 28 per cent of the men.8

  I’ve spelled it out as if the decision not to have children is a strategic one; or that it’s even a conscious decision, which is not always the case. Sometimes, it just doesn’t happen. Sometimes, by the time you get into politics, it’s just more or less impossible. If you come from Western Australia, it’s actually just about impossible; none of the women from WA has children who aren’t grown up, and the two Coalition women ministers who come from there – Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Michaelia Cash, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Women – are both childless.

  When the Coalition senator Bill Heffernan expressed his suspicion of childless Julia Gillard in 2007, it was because she had chosen that course.

  ‘I mean, anyone who chooses to remain deliberately barren … they’ve got no idea what life’s about,’ Senator Heffernan told the Bulletin. ‘We’ve got a few on our side as well.

  ‘One of the great understandings in a community is family and the relationship between Mum, Dad and a bucket of nappies.’9

  Is childlessness a deliberate choice? For Gillard, it was – more or less.

  ‘If I’d met a man that I was tremendously in love with, and one thing in life he wanted was to have kids, then obviously maybe I might have made a different set of decisions. I mean, who knows with the “what ifs”?’ she told Australian Story in 2006.

  ‘I suspect if I had made a different set of choices I would have been a very conservative parent. I’m kind of full of admiration for women who can mix it together, working and having kids, but I’m not sure I could’ve. There’s something in me that’s focused and single-minded and if I was ever going to do that, I’m not sure I could have done this.’10

  A woman’s peak child-bearing years extend – it is generally agreed – between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. And from what we know publicly about that particular slice of Julia Gillard’s life, it was spent like this: at twenty-two, she became the second woman to lead the Australian Union of Students. At twenty-five, she graduated from her law degree and was hired by Slater and Gordon. At twenty-nine, she was made a partner of that firm. At thirty, she started a relationship. At thirty-four, having tried at length to get preselection for various seats, she failed to get the nod for the Senate, found out her boyfriend was facing allegations of defrauding money, then broke up with him and lost her job and then worked like buggery to rescue her political career, and kind of surprisingly actually succeeded and at thirty-seven won the federal seat of Lalor, and ten years later found herself getting roused on for having no kids.

  This is the rather horrid double rabbit-punch politics can dole out to women. You give up all sorts of opportunities to get there in the first place – some women do choose to be childless, but others don’t, they just run out of time or become aware of the spectacular paucity of dating options or realise they can’t face the juggle, or suddenly remember that they live in Perth. Having come to that realisation (and let us never assume that that peculiarly private epiphany is businesslike, or swift, or without tears) they rather quickly learn that they are now to be marked down for relinquishing what they felt they could not claim.

  ‘You actually cannot win,’ is Tanya Plibersek’s conclusion. ‘So many of the criticisms of Julia Gillard were about the fact that she was unmarried and childless. But on the flip side, if she’d been exactly who she was only married, and a working mother, the criticisms about neglecting her children would have been just as strong … possibly, they would have come from the same people.’

  ‘You cannot begin to please people with your personal arrangements. You have to be content with your own personal arrangements. You and your own family have to be happy – that’s all.’

  Heffernan’s ‘deliberately barren’ remark isn’t an orphan, by the way. And it’s not even a sentiment restricted to his side of politics. Gillard’s predecessor in the Labor leadership, Mark Latham – her former great friend – wrote dismissively of her in 2009 that she could not hope to be a decent education minister owing to her personal failure to reproduce.11

  This was not, interestingly enough, a critique Latham had extended to himself in his capacity of shadow education minister between 1997 and 1998 under Kim Beazley, a role he undertook without the benefit of any children at all.

  This critique is altogether sharper, and more thrombosis-inducing, when it comes from men who themselves – like Senator Heffernan – have had the privilege of wives, meaning that the joy and fulfilment of family has come for them at something of a discount, whereas for women it is exorbitantly priced.

  Perhaps the test, for any male critic of a childless female MP, is this: ‘Ah. But would you stay at home, and change the nappies, as your wife did for you, if the roles were reversed?’ In very few cases could one imagine the answer being ‘yes’, although Latham – who clearly was changed profoundly by fatherhood and on retirement from politics became a stay-at-home dad – is an honourable exception.

  Men in politics who don’t have families get marked down too, by the way; it’s not just women. Bob Carr, who managed to be Premier of New South Wales for a decade despite not having children, not driving a car, not liking meat pies and not enjoying organised sports, was in 1992 evaluated by Liberal leader John He
wson thus: ‘You’ve got to be suspicious of a guy that doesn’t drive and doesn’t like kids and things like that.’12

  Dr Hewson, whose Ferrari informed voters in the most reverberant way imaginable of his licensed status, had three children at the time from his first marriage (he has since had two more children, one with each subsequent wife). One of his children, with his first wife Margaret, gave a television interview explaining that Dr Hewson had in any event always put politics first even before he left the family.

  Tim Fischer, the Australian diplomat and former Nationals leader and deputy prime minister, married at the age of forty-six and later told the Age that his extended period of bachelorhood had occasionally raised eyebrows.

  ‘There was a fair bit of hypocrisy around during the ’70s and ’80s in relation to marital status,’ he told the paper. ‘It seemed there was a question mark over being a party leader and being single or being a frontbencher and single. The same people [who questioned me] were married but having affairs all around Canberra.’13

  Thirteen years after Bob Carr acquired a political asterisk on account of not having any kids, his successor Morris Iemma was criticised for spending too much time with his. Iemma, who took six weeks of private leave from his job as health minister in 2003 when his wife became ill just before giving birth to twins, was subjected to a near-audible whispering campaign from colleagues on the grounds that he lacked commitment to the job.14

  When Labor senator and numbers man Mark Arbib announced his resignation from politics in March 2012, citing the grief of his young children over his regular absences, the hot rumour around Canberra was that he was secretly facing troubles with ICAC – a rumour that subsequent years have proved entirely unfounded. So unbelievable was it, in other words, that a parliamentary father might sincerely want to be with his family that substitute explanations were automatically generated by the gossip-sphere.

  The expectation of parliamentary fathers is clear: be one, by all means – you will be thought unusual otherwise – but don’t go overboard or anything. Parliamentary fathers are required to keep their families within an acceptable range; helpfully visible, but not intrusive. There is no requirement for you to talk about them.

  Mothers in politics, however, are required to talk about their children all the time. It’s not enough to have children, like the men do; if you’re a mother in politics, this status will also oblige you to have a position on all sorts of particular matters, like breastfeeding, or child care, or the photography of Bill Henson. Plus, people will constantly ask you where the children are. And every single thing you do, and the enthusiasm and grooming with which you do it, will be combed for significant indicators as to whether women can have it all. Part of this deal is that if you ever stop doing your job – hell, even if you just move to another job – it will almost certainly be construed as rock-hard evidence that combining career and family never pays.

  When Nicola Roxon resigned from politics after fifteen years in Parliament – five of them as a Cabinet minister, raising a young child with her Melbourne-based partner Michael Kerrisk – her departure was widely construed as an acknowledgement that she couldn’t ‘have it all’. Roxon herself, exasperated, wrote an article for The Monthly explaining that it was ‘rubbish’ to suggest her resignation meant anything at all for working women beyond that she had done a job, done it well in her own estimation, and now had decided to do something else.15

  When Roxon was sworn in as minister for health after the 2007 election, her daughter Rebecca was two years old. She became, at that moment, the first woman in Australian history to serve in the federal Cabinet while raising a preschool-age child.

  For a man to serve as a Cabinet minister in a demanding portfolio like Health while raising young children is perfectly unremarkable; some of Tanya Plibersek’s longest-serving predecessors, like Tony Abbott, Michael Wooldridge, and Labor’s Neal Blewett – combined successful political careers with children of primary-school age and younger. In fact, lots of men, over Australia’s 112-year recruitment history with Cabinet ministers, have served on the nation’s board of directors while blithely reproducing, and nobody ever really noticed.

  Up until the moment at which Nicola Roxon was sworn in, Australia had had ten female Cabinet ministers. Just ten. Of those, three were childless: Julie Bishop, Kaye Patterson, and Amanda Vanstone. All of the others had older children by the time they got to Cabinet; not that I’m suggesting for an instant that life would have been without complication for those women, especially in the case of Enid Lyons who had eleven children and came from Tasmania and was a widow by the time she arrived in Cabinet, which pretty much would be enough to make anyone opt for a simpler career – say, hiding in a cupboard under a damp towel.

  Roxon, as a minister, introduced a number of rules that gave her the best chance of giving her family some normalcy. She made it be known that she preferred meetings to dinners. She blocked out time between 6.30 am and 9 am for her daughter, even though staff sometimes found it frustrating. She installed a ‘one-week rule’ for submissions – they needed to be with her one week in advance of the deadline for a ministerial answer, to allow her time to absorb and process them. She worked late at night, after Rebecca was in bed. ‘Some new staff were really freaked out because I’d send an email at 11 pm and they didn’t know whether that meant that they were supposed to still be at work as well,’ she says.

  ‘I really had to tell people – I’m going to send an email when I’m working, but it doesn’t mean I think you should be working then, too.’

  Roxon was involved with what history will recall at the very least as an eventful period in government; she was deeply involved in the first Rudd Government’s headlong tilt at health reform, including the lengthy ‘Mob Cap’ tour in which she and Prime Minister Rudd pinged back and forth rather pointlessly from operating theatre to scrubs room in hospitals across the continent. As health minister, and as the grown-up daughter of a father lost far too soon to cancer, she saddled up against the tobacco companies to pioneer plain packaging.

  But the questions about how she ‘managed’ the job were always front of mind.

  ‘If you look at the good and bad things I was involved in, there is still more stuff about my work–life balance,’ she recalls. ‘Of course it’s hard, and of course you should talk about it. But every dinner function you’d go to, it’d be “How are you doing it? How old did you say your daughter was?” And so on.’

  ‘How do you manage?’ is the question, often kindly extended, to which many parliamentary mothers learn to take polite exception. The late Janine Haines, who led the Democrats for four years in the 1980s, had a ‘wife’ – her husband, Ian, who cared for the couple’s two children when she was away in Canberra. But Haines was gradually driven mad by constant questions about how she – and he – ‘managed it’. Haines’ husband was asked repeatedly whether he felt neglected or emasculated. He began to be known as ‘Mr Mum’, or ‘Denis’, in honour of Denis Thatcher.

  ‘When people say to me “How do you feel about leaving your husband and children at home while you go to work?”, I tell them that I will answer that question when it is asked of a man first,’ Janine Haines finally told the Canberra Times in 1987.16

  When asked how she ‘managed’, she replied: ‘Probably the same way men manage to be both senators and fathers … Ian is how I manage it. Every politician needs a supportive spouse … He is placid, easy-going with a very secure sense of his own worth. He runs the whole thing. I don’t even interfere when I am at home.’17

  This constant attention exacerbates the guilt that is never far from the surface among parliamentary mothers. ‘Sometimes I think I’m failing at motherhood,’ wrote Greens Senator Larissa Waters in 2013, after her four-year-old young daughter became ill during a sitting week.18 ‘Since becoming a mother and a senator my life has become infinitely more rewarding and also a hell of a lot more complicated … I feel like I’m performing a constant juggling act and with
my hand-eye coordination I’m bound to drop a ball from time to time.’

  ‘I think everyone in politics hides how hard it is,’ says Karen Andrews, who – like Waters – once had to monitor her ill daughter by text message from Question Time as she was taken to hospital by her grandmother. Andrews told me the story, then asked me not to publish it, then changed her mind. There are so many sensitivities involved; being thought an absent and thus careless mother, being thought an inattentive participant in the nation’s primary interrogative event. Anxieties run deep. ‘I don’t think it’s spoken about very openly. Women feel very uncomfortable in talking about any issues they have because we are concerned about how that will be perceived, or that people will think our priority is our family when we should be focusing on our jobs.’

  The political wife drought isn’t just about children, though, and whether or not you can have them without going mad. The usefulness of political ‘wives’ is not restricted to their ability to keep the kids quiet while the prime minister’s on the phone, or artfully distract a child who has not clapped eyes on his father for a week. In some circumstances, a political spouse can become a potent campaigner in their own right.

  But it’s the ones who work part-time, or not at all, who are more likely to be able to oblige; and that’s usually the wives, not the husbands.

  ‘I think it comes down to the not-working thing,’ says Karen Andrews. ‘Those parliamentary wives who don’t work can actually attend women’s functions, can stand in at community functions and so on. As a parliamentarian, you probably have about three-to-one in terms of functions you are invited to and functions you can attend; a wife can sometimes go along instead; they’re being there, they’re being supportive and they’re being a presence, and I think that’s great. But if you have a working partner they just can’t do that. I can’t recall my husband ever going out to represent me.’