Unfettered and Alive

by Anne Summers

  I had travelled the country explaining the proposed affirmative action laws to as many audiences as possible, including addressing a packed business luncheon at one of Perth’s fanciest hotels. The Premier, Brian Burke, chaired the event and I was seated next to him at the top table. I had not met him before and he certainly made no effort to be either welcoming or charming. He was on a diet and while the rest of us hopped into our chicken, he downed several cups of tea. Maybe that was why he was so grumpy. As I got up to speak, he said in a loud aside to me: ‘You better not fucking embarrass me.’ I would have liked nothing more, but I knew it was more important to sell the policy to business, and try to get a win for women’s employment. You will keep, you bastard, I muttered to myself in a promise that I was never able to keep. I shed no tears, however, when during the 1990s he was twice imprisoned on dishonesty charges and was stripped of his Companion of the Order of Australia, the highest honour our country can bestow on a citizen.

  For the most part, the years I spent at OSW were good optimistic times, when progress was palpable and, I was confident, we were really within reach of true equality. Not that we used that term: our talk was of ‘improving the status of women’. But we seemed to be getting there. I used to point out in my many speeches that women’s pay, while still not at parity, was now at 86 per cent of men’s earnings. Just eleven years earlier, in 1970, it had been 65.2 per cent, I’d say, quoting figures from the OECD.3 The upward trajectory was there—what could possibly stop it? We will soon have equal pay, I would say with utter confidence, just as Gough Whitlam had intended when, in one of the very first acts of his government in 1972, he had authorised intervention in an equal pay case and, reversing the previous government’s opposition, had firmly asserted that his government wanted equal pay to be the law of the land. I would not have believed it possible that 30 years later what we now call the gender pay gap would actually have slipped backwards, and in 2016 be at 77 per cent of male earnings.4 In 1986, I was enthusiastic as I watched women being appointed to jobs they had never previously held, and saw once insuperable barriers break. Just in the time that I was at OSW Dame Roma Mitchell became the first woman chancellor at the University of Adelaide; Helen Williams the first woman to head a federal government department when she was appointed Secretary of the Department of Education, another Susan Ryan appointment; Joan Child, a Victorian Labor MP, became the first woman speaker of the House of Representatives; and Janine Haines became first woman to lead a political party when she was elected leader of the Australian Democrats in 1986. Mary Gaudron became the first woman appointed to the High Court. And these were just the very high-profile appointments to public office; elsewhere women were stepping up, making history and carving new trails of opportunities for others to follow. I felt a sense of achievement and of progress that I did not for one moment think would not be permanent.

  The government, apart from a couple of notable exceptions, was firmly onside. Bob Hawke was fully supportive. I was often asked how a man who had had such a reputation as a womaniser before he entered Parliament could possibly understand or empathise with women’s issues. I am not in a position to speculate about any contradiction between his past and how he conducted himself in government. All I can say is that in office, he was exemplary. He supported every major proposal we put to him, he was willing to speak on women’s issues when it was deemed appropriate and he broke all precedent by moving the second reading of the Affirmative Action legislation when it finally came into Parliament in 1986. Usually Prime Ministers do not introduce legislation.5 Hawke also liked to point out that he had actually read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and that this book had introduced him to the feminist principles that he was now willing to have inform much of his government.

  Australia now had strong sex discrimination legislation and soon the affirmative action law would require employers to report annually on the numbers of women they employed. This would be a major step in knowing and understanding women’s employment patterns. It was less than twenty years since 1966 and the abolition of the ‘marriage bar’, that required women to resign from the public service, from banks, teaching and a host of other jobs when they married. It was astonishing to realise how recently Australia—and most other Western countries—had employed such blatant discrimination against the majority of women. It would take more than a generation for the economy to make up for this, for women to begin to file into responsible jobs and begin the slow work of advancing up the ladders of opportunity so they might be well-placed, and suitably qualified, to take on senior jobs and leadership roles. Even now, there was still hostility to married women—which was actually mostly code for ‘mothers’—being in employment. I could scarcely get my head around this resistance. It was irrational. Married women themselves wanted to work; increasingly, they were sufficiently educated that it would be derelict for a society not to employ them. (Indeed, since 1987, women have constituted a majority of university graduates in Australia.) But the opposition was there and it was loud. The argument now being put forward was that married women were taking jobs from young people (read: young men). It was rubbish, of course, since older women and young people were in different job markets, but it had superficial appeal to those who still firmly believed, in the middle 1980s, that a woman’s place was in the home.

  So it was not all smooth sailing. There were also, of course, legitimate disagreements about policy issues and about tactics. The women’s movement was seldom united and not everything the Office, or I, did met with unqualified approval. No matter how hard I worked, or how genuinely I tried to reach out, I often met unfriendliness. A meeting in Sydney with a group of what were then called ‘Multicultural’ women became fiercely argumentative about whether I, as an ‘Anglo’, could understand their issues. I pointed out that I was there, listening, trying to do just that. And there were outright attacks. I attended a show by comedian Sue Ingleton at Canberra Theatre only to hear her say: ‘And Anne Summers, she’s so far up Bob Hawke’s arse …’ I forget the rest of the sentence. Other attacks were raw and ugly.

  One morning I found flung across the windscreen of my car a life-size plastic sex doll. It was deflated, its arms and legs flattened, but the head had been carefully placed so that it faced my steering wheel. I had never seen one of these dolls before and was surprised at how repellent a piece of pink plastic could be. I especially recoiled at the head, with its black painted-on hair, its grotesque makeup and the red-rimmed mouth whose fixed round opening was so patently designed to take a penis. And here it was, on my car. I felt nervous, even a little frightened. Not because this tawdry piece of plastic could hurt me but because whoever put it there could. It was a reminder that there were people—possibly a lot of people—in Canberra and beyond who did not like the way women’s policy was getting political priority. And, it was chilling to have to confront that some of them actually hated women. Maybe it wasn’t meant for me, friends tried to reassure me. Maybe it was left on your car by accident. Maybe. But if it was intended for me, it was a clear act of hostility.

  I had had many surprises when I made the leap from the Canberra Press Gallery to the federal bureaucracy, and by far the biggest was to discover the extent and vehemence of the opposition to any expansion of childcare services. This came not just from sections of the public service, but from within Hawke’s own cabinet. I had naively assumed that all ministers would support government policy, so I was quite stunned by the vociferous resistance, particularly from Senator Peter Walsh. Labor Party policy on childcare in the 1980s, Walsh wrote in his Confessions of a Failed Finance Minister, had been determined by ‘a self-serving, symbiotic coalition of feminist “networkers” on-market sector service providers and early childhood “educators” ’.6 He and I were locked in battle over childcare funding and being the Finance Minister, he was probably going to win. It was also awkward that Walsh lived in the same apartment building as me. Our front doors were adjacent. He’d banged on mine more than once, usua
lly after midnight, because he could not find his keys, but usually we passed each other on the stairs with the barest of courtesies.

  I became convinced that this was not a financial fight. It was an ideological battle about the place of women in our society and women’s right to economic self-reliance. It became obvious that, if we were to make any headway, we needed a circuit-breaker. It came in late 1984, when the Prime Minister called a surprise election. I had been in the job less than a year, but I figured that when faced with bureaucratic obduracy and political hostility, the best—often the only—way to break through was to have the Prime Minister take control of the matter. I knew that what I had in mind was risky, because public servants were supposed to observe proper procedures when dealing with the Prime Minister’s office. They were certainly not supposed to use back channels to try to achieve policy outcomes they had failed to win through the ‘normal’ political process. But what if the ‘normal’ channels were hell-bent on blocking the very things I had been appointed to deliver? I was in no doubt that circumventing those bureaucrats and cabinet members who were blocking childcare was the right thing to do. But I knew there would probably be consequences.

  I could work on this only with a few trusted and courageous people. Both Michael Roche and Mary Ann O’Loughlin were willing to take it on and, together, they had the necessary economic and policy skills. We spent long hours deciding what to propose, but in the end Michael urged simplicity.

  ‘Let’s just try to double the number of places,’ he said.

  He wrote up the policy, and together with the figures to back it up, I presented it on two sheets of plain paper to Bob Hogg, one of Hawke’s political advisers, who I met early one morning at the motel where he stayed when he was in Canberra.

  When Hawke delivered his election campaign launch speech, his largest single budgetary commitment was the promise of 20,000 new childcare places. Today, when more than a million Australian children use various forms of childcare7, that does not sound like much, but in 1983 there were just 46,000 government-subsidised childcare places in the entire country. It was a complicated formula, but the new policy was designed to rapidly expand the base number so that future increases in government subsidies would result in an exponential increase in the number of places. We had projected an expansion to 110,000 places by December 1988. The firm commitment from the Prime Minister in his campaign speech meant that once he won the election against Andrew Peacock—which he did, albeit with a somewhat-reduced majority—there would be a mandate to vastly expand childcare services. ‘This was a great victory for OSW,’ wrote Marian Sawer, who has chronicled the women’s advisory functions over several governments, ‘and in particular Anne Summers’.8

  It was indeed a tremendous coup for us, and even more so for the women across Australia for whom access to childcare would open up increased opportunities for education and employment, but we had won this victory through unorthodox means and the question was: were we going to get away with it? And of course, we didn’t. Just five months after the election, the government delivered a minibudget that cut $30 million from what was expected to be total expenditure on childcare of $143 million 1985/86.9 There was massive community protest against this; Marian Sawer reported that the Prime Minister was receiving 600 letters a week.10 The cut was reduced to $10 million, but in order to keep increasing places with reduced funds, the government cut back on quality. The Childcare Act was amended to repeal the nexus between subsidies and the requirement that childcare workers had stipulated training. The overall result was an increase in the fees parents had to pay and fewer trained workers employed in centres. Our victory came at a high cost but we did achieve a very significant increase in places and spending. Even today, more than 30 years later, there is still a distinct unwillingness on the part of politicians of all parties to address childcare. Although spending on services has risen to a massive $7 billion a year, the policy is irrational and chaotic, and fails to meet what I have always thought should be its primary focus of freeing up women to be able to study or work.

  I celebrated my 40th birthday on 12 March 1985 by attending a diplomatic meeting in the morning then flying to Melbourne to attend a NWCC dinner. When I checked into the Southern Cross Hotel just after lunch, I found my room was full of helium-filled balloons, silver, green and purple in colour, a wonderfully frivolous gesture from the staff at OSW. It made me feel a little bit better about being by myself, and working, on this milestone. I could not take them with me, of course, so the next morning I opened the window and let them drift out over the city skyline. I thought of them as representing our feminist dreams, able to soar to our full potential with no force able to stop us.

  I had a more formal celebration at the weekend. My parents drove over from Adelaide to attend the party at my apartment in Kingston. It was a relatively low-key evening, with mostly colleagues from my new world. All my rowdy friends in Sydney I would see some other time. My father was mightily impressed that the Prime Minister and his wife were at his daughter’s birthday party, although he who insisted on the best of everything, especially when it came to apparel, thought that Dr Scholls sandals was hardly appropriate prime ministerial footwear for a birthday party. Susan Ryan presented me with a Malvern Star Ladies bike. Pink, of course. It was just the thing for a femocrat to be seen riding around the lake in Canberra on Sunday mornings.

  My parents stayed on for a few days, which I was not happy about as the visit was extraordinarily stressful. My father was drinking heavily again, and they were fighting. My mother told me she had considered driving the car into a tree on the way over. She had not found it in herself to do that but, she said, they were going to separate. She could not keep living with him the way he was. I was aghast. She’d put up with it for all these years. Why leave now? I was astonished at how upset I was—and at how I was instinctively taking his side. I was the one who was supposed to encourage women to leave distressing relationships. Why didn’t I see it that way when it was my own mother? The tension between my parents descended like a cloud on the apartment although my father was subdued most of the time, withdrawn into whatever morbid guilty place where he locked his spirit away. I did not want to have to deal with it—or them. That night I slipped and fell on the stairs and sprained my ankle. I could hardly walk so I retreated to the couch. I became the child again, dependent, forcing my mother into the once familiar domestic role of having to care for me. That way, I could avoid having to deal with the horrible mess that was my parents’ lives. I was being a coward and I knew it but I did not know what else to do.

  The next morning my mother and I were confronted with the calamity of my father drunk and covered in blood. He had been consigned to the small downstairs bedroom while my mother had taken the spare room upstairs next to my bedroom, and he had evidently spent the night working his way through my liquor cabinet. He was in a terrible state, incoherent and raving, and the walls of his room were splattered with blood. It looked like a murder scene. I was paralysed with horror. My mother looked at me as if to say, See what I have had to deal with? I immediately rang the O’Neills. Great friends that they were, they drove over immediately. Gary brought a couple of boxes and took it upon himself to remove all the alcohol from the apartment, while Mez got on the phone and started ringing rehab places. No one would take him. All we could do, we were advised, was to take him to the emergency department of one of the hospitals. Mez took charge. She cleaned my father up. His wound was not as serious as the amount of blood suggested, but he must have had one hell of a hangover. He was clearly very sick. I could not drive because of my ankle, so Mez took us in my car to Woden Valley Hospital where, we were told, we would just have to wait.

  We were there for several hours and it seemed unlikely that a doctor would see him. They clearly took the view it was not their job to deal with drunks. My mother had withdrawn into herself. I found myself starting to feel sympathy for her, but I did not know what on earth we were going to do with my father
. It was then that Mez said to him,

  ‘Austin, come with me, we need to have a talk.’

  She took him to the end of the corridor, sat him down on one of those cheap plastic hospital chairs, and began an earnest conversation. I could see that he was listening to her. After some time, the two of them rejoined my mother and me, and Mez told us we were all going home. When we got back to Kingston, Mez cleaned up the little room where my father had disgraced himself and put him to bed, and then she left.