by Julia Baird
People of colour were largely excluded. In 1901, Aboriginal Australians were not even included in the constitution Australia adopted when it became a federation. It was not until 1967 that a national referendum gave citizenship and the power to vote to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
The first Indigenous member of federal parliament was Neville Bonner, who became a senator in 1971; it was 42 years before Australia had its first female Indigenous senator, decorated athlete Nova Peris, in 2013. And it was not until 2016 that Linda Burney, a proud member of the Wiradjuri nation, became the first Indigenous woman to be elected to the House of Representatives (in 2003, Burney had been the first — and only — Indigenous member of NSW parliament). This means it had taken 73 years after the first white woman entered the lower House towards the end of World War II for an Indigenous woman to follow — a stunning, shameful gap.
In her first speech Burney said she had been told when she was 13 years old that her ancestors were like stone-age men. ‘The Aboriginal part of my story is important, it is the core of who I am,’ she said. ‘But I will not be stereotyped and I will not be pigeon-holed.’
In hers, Nova Peris, a descendant of Yawuru, Kiga and Murran/Iwatja tribal nations, had urged her colleagues to become champions for the inclusion of first nations people in the Australian Constitution, adding that: ‘Aboriginal Australians are symbolic of triumph over adversity. We represent knowledge and wisdom held in land and country, because in our hearts we know that we do not own Mother Earth; the Earth owns us.’
Peris’s entry to parliament had been marked with controversy as she had been a ‘captain’s pick’ by Julia Gillard, replacing an incumbent. But Peris resigned at the end of her term, after a considerable period of horrific racial abuse, including death threats.
She told the told the audience of the ABC’s ‘Q&A’ program in 2020, that because she started to speak out about Indigenous rights she was ‘attacked by racist trolls’ almost daily. She continued:
Mail was sent, phone calls [saying], ‘Get back in your box, you black bitch.’ I had death threats. The AFP were tracking down mail that was sent to me. This is what I had to endure . . .
People fear when an Aboriginal person speaks out. When you’re an Aboriginal person in this country and speak out and start calling racism out, you get attacked, because for so long this country has had this thought process. Racism is about inferior races. White is up here. Black is down there. That’s how this country has been built. Nineteen ninety-three was when the Eddie Mabo High Court decision was made. It knocked out the notion of terra nullius. They had inherited mentally that the country belonged to ‘no man’. So it meant our lives as Aboriginal people, we were nothing.
And so when people often talk about the history of this country, the history of this country is violent. There’s been the attempted genocide. There’s been the massacres. There’s been the poisoning. There’s been the rapes. There’s been so much, and it’s horrible. The truth just gets to people and they don’t want to have a bar of it. But us as Aboriginal people, we inherit that every day. If I don’t acknowledge that then I am denying everything that makes me who I am.
The abuse was exhausting, and Peris left parliament. She said her family needed her, and she felt as if she was being asked to compromise who she was as an Aboriginal person, which is what she is ‘first and foremost’. What a disgrace, that our first female Indigenous senator, elected well more than a century after federation, who brought so much knowledge and life experience, endured such savage, nasty abuse.
The whiteness and lack of diversity in politics has long been obvious, yet remains. In 2018, fewer than twenty of the 226 federal parliamentarians had a non-English speaking background, even though 2016 Census data showed more than half of Australians had parents born overseas, or were born in other countries themselves. Almost one in four speak a non-English language at home.
A 2019 Per Capita report found that since 1988, the proportion of Australians born in other countries had shot up from 22 per cent to 33 per cent, but their representation in parliament had stagnated at 11 per cent.8 As the Sydney Morning Herald put it: ‘culturally and ethnically, Parliament is in a time warp’.9
It’s also in a time warp on gender. Former PM Malcolm Turnbull has often stated that when it comes to attitudes to women, federal politics is like corporate Australia was back in the 1970s and 1980s. Several women MPs who entered from the private sector have told me they were shocked to discover this for themselves.
As is clear in this book, no political party has been or is free of sexism. But currently, the Liberal party is steadily losing women voters — a two-decade trend — and failing to increase the number of women in its parliamentary ranks. In March 2021, I obtained a copy of a confidential internal report on why there were so few female leaders and MPs in the party, carried out for the Liberal Party Federal Executive in 2015 by the Women’s Working Group (WWG).10 This document revealed that many of the issues women preselected in the 1960s and 1970s wrestled with — and the frames and tropes identified in Media Tarts — are still current. For example, ‘a preselector bias against women of childbearing age’ (still! Still asked who will mind their children, and who will cook the meals!), and the attitude of some older party members that: ‘If you are a woman and have children you should be staying at home and looking after them.’ Some women reported being viewed as ‘tea makers’ by male LNP members. Revealingly, they found ‘some men in the party see women in an old-fashioned way where they were present to support the men and not be a force of their own’ — and that these kinds of male MPs groomed male staffers as their replacements.
There were also findings of a ‘boys’ club culture’, ‘chauvinistic behaviour from men’, and the bullying and intimidation of women. Women said they were silenced at meetings, and the report tellingly recommended they be able to speak out ‘without fear of being cut down and removed from any position they held’. Women would change the culture of the party if more of them were in there, just as happened in the Army, argued the WWG, although presciently concluding: ‘sadly, a significant number of Liberal men in Parliament are still either uncomfortable with the idea of women as political equals, or they simply ignore the whole issue’.
This report, which was finalised in December 2015, was effectively buried. It was not released publicly and was generally ignored. Just a couple of years later, Brittany Higgins was allegedly sexually assaulted by a Liberal staffer on a Liberal minister’s couch. Two years after that, she spoke out. She was quickly called a ‘lying cow’ by the minister she used to work for (who hastened to stress had not been referring to the rape allegations, but to Higgins saying she had not been supported subsequently) and a ‘silly little girl who got drunk’ by a veteran radio host. A Liberal senator was alleged to have insulted Higgins by telling another MP she had been ‘disgustingly drunk’ on the night of the attack and ‘would sleep with anybody, [and] could have slept with one of our spies and put the security of our nation at risk’.
And so the lava began to flow.
If we understand our history, we will know there is no more time for patience. And we will see the tropes a mile away, along with the pitfalls and the traps and the rubbish. We will see them coming, name them, call them out and move on. We have all the evidence we need — much of it contained within these pages.
Julia Baird
Cabbage Tree Bay
2021
Introduction to 2004 edition
tart: 1. (derogatory) a promiscuous woman. 2. a prostitute. 3. any woman. 4. (obsolete) a female sweetheart.
frame: an enclosing border or case, as for a picture . . . the body, esp. the human body, with reference to its make or build; a structure for admitting or enclosing something . . . (Snooker) a. the triangular form used to set the balls up for a game. b. the balls as so set up. c. the period of play required to pocket them; . . . (framed, framing) . . . to conceive or imagine as ideas, etc . . . to shape or to prearr
ange fraudulently or falsely as a plot, a race, etc; (colloquial) to incriminate unjustly by a plot, as a person . . . (obsolete) to direct, as one’s steps.
— The Macquarie Dictionary
Joan Kirner was a ‘fat whinger’. Cheryl Kernot a self-obsessed ‘whore’. Meg Lees was an ageing headmistress with the personality of a laxative. Natasha Stott Despoja was a vapid yuppie princess. Amanda Vanstone was the charge nurse from hell. Bronwyn Bishop was a rottweiler with lipstick. If you believed the insults flung by their detractors, aired in the press, you’d think female politicians were a pitiful bunch. How did they become such caricatures? Each of the women who blazed most brightly through the political firmament over the 1990s had been pursued with an unprecedented enthusiasm. They were courted and feted by the phalanx of reporters who hanker for a touch of colour and difference in the blokey world of politics they daily scour for stories. Then, with few exceptions, they were dumped or discredited with an intensity that surprised even the most experienced observers.
For a century after women started seriously agitating for the vote, it was often suggested women would scrub Parliament House clean once they were elected to political office. They would make it more open, honest, and accessible. Just as Christians are told to be in the world but not of the world, so it was thought that women would be in, but not of, politics. They would float above it, gazing with pity and scorn at the muck beneath. They would be promoted when they deserved it, or a man stepped aside, not because their ambition propelled them forward. They would not be pragmatic premiers, driven leaders, or vicious backbenchers who sought publicity, undermined enemies, and relished playing the game of politics. Their chastity and virtue depended on their removal from the heat of the political fray. Parliament was not their natural home; they were intruders in whom signs of difference were alarming, and signs of sameness — or political acumen — even more so. In this atmosphere, their flaws became monstrous.
The difference between what it has been suggested women should bring to politics and what they actually do has played havoc with the careers of our most successful female politicians. An assumption — often fostered by women to their own advantage — that women are cleaner, more ethical than men, and that their presence will bleach politics of grime, has been their greatest burden. Trumpeted as sincere, honest, and accessible, when they turn out to be human and flawed the pundits marvel and sneer. Women and power; water and oil. Or at least that’s what you might think if you relied only on the headlines for information.
*
The letters pages of metropolitan broadsheets are among the bestread parts of their papers. They have a loyal, witty, and committed readership. When I first began as a cadet at the Sydney Morning Herald, the letters editor, Sam North, sat several feet away from me and I could hear him chuckling all day as he waded through the rivers of correspondence from our readers, plucked out the best and placed them on his page. They were a good way to gauge the thoughts of readers, and community reactions to daily events, then. For many female politicians, the letters pages have provided a welcome contrast to the exacting judgement of political commentators. When Carmen Lawrence resigned from the ALP opposition front bench over its refugee policy, readers responded far more fervently and positively than did many commentators, who slammed her as pious and a poor team player. When Natasha Stott Despoja was compared to glamorous tennis player Anna Kournikova by political guru Alan Ramsey, readers wrote to complain, as they did when the front-page headline to a story about the distinguished psychiatrist Professor Marie Bashir becoming the first female governor of NSW was ‘Phillip, Bligh, Macquarie, Grandma’. (Yes, that really was the headline in 2001.)
But by the early 2000s, some people were also writing in to ask if it was actually worth having women in politics. Don’t they just stuff things up? Don’t they cause more problems than they solve? Were women, as one prominent commentator said to me, the political experiment that had failed? There was a cluster of failures: former Democrat leader and Labor minister Cheryl Kernot lost her seat in 2001; Natasha Stott Despoja challenged Meg Lees for the leadership of the Democrats and won, before being forced to resign less than 18 months later; and Lees resigned from the party she had previously led. Some letter writers snorted into their cornflakes as they read the newspapers — women were just as dirty as the men! They backstabbed, pursued personal ambitions and openly criticised each other. On 30 July 2002, after Meg Lees quit the Australian Democrats, these appeared on the Herald’s letters page:
First Cheryl Kernot, now Meg Lees. Not long ago the electorate was being told by the women’s lobby about the positive, transforming influence women would have on Australian political culture if only they were given the chance. Get away from the aggressive, confrontational boys’ culture, we were told.
Oh well. Back to the drawing board.
David James, Epping, July 29
I love seeing women in politics. They really are so much fun to have around. They are so tolerant and exhibit all those nice qualities of collaboration and interpersonal skills so lacking in men.
What great entertainment, and perhaps a thrilling constitutional crisis brewing . . . Hopefully we will now be spared the sanctimonious twaddle about the superiority of women over men.
Paul Murphy, Illawong, July 29
This belief — of women’s superior morality — is why parties pushed more women into marginal seats, and handed them portfolios muddied by the corruption or incompetence of the men before them, in the belief that they would have — or at least appear to have — some kind of purifying effect. It is also partly why women have failed to reach the top.
It took almost a century to see women reach their mid-2000s quota of more than a quarter of all MPs in this country. In the mid-1990s, with women finally in key leadership positions, excitement about women ‘storming the citadel’ was palpable. In February 1994, Herald journalist Mike Seccombe argued that there was an arms race going on between the major parties, where women were the missiles: Bronwyn Bishop for the Liberals, Carmen Lawrence for the ALP, Cheryl Kernot for the Democrats. It was widely believed that the feminisation of politics was about to occur. In 1990, when Carmen Lawrence became premier of Western Australia, ALP pollster Rod Cameron declared it was a watershed for Australian politics. In the same year, Joan Kirner was made premier of Victoria; Rosemary Follett had been chief minister of the ACT in 1989 (and was again from 1991 to 1995); and Kate Carnell was elected first woman leader of the ACT Liberal Party in 1993. This was, apparently, the Era of the Woman, finally coming as a counter to the Millennia of the Man.
Then, over a decade, Australia watched prominent female politicians topple like ten pins under a barrage of media criticism. One after the other, with careers destroyed, credibility damaged, prospects of leadership slim or non-existent: hyped as heroines, then cast as villains or fools, or just made invisible. Bronwyn Bishop, feted then hated. Cheryl Kernot, desired then destroyed. Natasha Stott Despoja, pinup then media tart. Carmen Lawrence, canonised then castigated (although cleared by the courts) for her role in the Penny Easton affair. Others failed through their own lack of ability or bad timing. In many cases, the women were partly to blame or complicit in their demise, yet the bias that frequently emerged in the media made their transgressions grotesque, their mistakes almost sinister — a hall of mirrors that exaggerated their flaws and made them lethal.
By 2004, the political horizon was almost devoid of charismatic, powerful female MPs who were potential leaders. There were a handful of ministers, a deputy leader of the federal ALP, Jenny Macklin, but only one female leader nationally: Clare Martin in the Northern Territory. All female cabinet ministers were in their 50s, and most were senators, meaning they are not likely to be contending the leadership of their parties. (On the opposition front bench, shadow health minister Julia Gillard was the one most widely — and correctly — regarded as having a chance of future leadership.) With the exception of talented young MPs like Tanya Plibersek (now deputy oppositi
on leader), Marise Payne (now minister for foreign affairs and women) and Nicola Roxon (who became the first female attorney general, in 2011), a generation of younger women were discouraged from going into politics because of what the country witnessed in the late 1990s: who wanted to be the alley cat on heat, the plastic piranha with balls under her skirts, or the blonde bimbo party girl? Political pundits declared parties didn’t want another emotional Cheryl, a discredited Carmen, a lightweight Natasha, a despised Bronwyn. Their grisly heads were displayed on spikes in political memory, serving as warnings to those who wish to follow them. In the noughties, women MPs were told to keep their heads down: fly too high, too close to the throbbing heart of power, and you will be shot down. And look like a fool while you fall. So what went wrong and what needs to change?
The current commentary provides few answers. A century after women first exercised the vote at federal level, and several decades after winning the right to sit as members of state parliaments, there is something tired and deflated about the debate regarding women MPs. Clichés are resorted to, tired assumptions are reproduced, and the rhetoric about their relationship to the media has been marooned between two strands of thought. The first claims there has been no bias, and the second exaggerates that bias, assuming it is unassailable and overwhelming.
Academics and activists have frequently assumed the press is a monolithic block of anti-woman propaganda, which is clearly untrue. Many argue that there has either been no change in the press since the 1970s or it has become worse, while showing little awareness of what has changed over the past three decades, and what impact women, and the women’s movement, have had. Few recognise that part of the problem for women MPs is not necessarily disdain from journalists, but excessive enthusiasm, as women such as Carmen Lawrence have found.