by Julia Baird
Once a politician, Bjelke-Petersen had an ambivalent attitude to the symbol of the scones, protesting then promoting them, and at other times defending it. There was nothing wrong with being able to cook, she said, arguing, ‘If you can make good pumpkin scones then you can be a good politician.’ She complained about the media, while in the next breath dictating her famous recipe. She said that although she had made a statement about MX missiles, she bet they would only print what her husband said, adding, ‘But they seem to love it when I talk about pumpkin scones.’22 She was indignant that ‘people have equated the fact that she can cook with innate stupidity’.23
Although she continued to insist women’s most important role was that of wife and homemaker, she told a journalist, while munching on a pumpkin scone, that she had ‘shown many people that a woman’s place is no longer only in the home’.24 She intended to bring attention to family issues, such as family allowances and support for full-time mothers. She stressed that family issues were different to women’s issues, and that women were treated fairly in Australian society — they just were not as ‘pushy’ as men.25 She argued her work in Canberra would only make her more of a woman, not less.
Flo Bjelke-Petersen drew the line, however, at comparisons to Edna Everage, the character created by cross-dressing comedian Barry Humphries and based on a parochial, garrulous housewife from suburban Victoria. The anomaly of a housewife on a stage, talking about the colour of her carpet and toilet seat covers, was at the core of the humour of Humphries’s act, as evident in the title of the 1976 show ‘Housewife/Superstar!’. The parody was based on an obsession with domestic detail, ‘seeing the whole world through the Venetian blind of the kitchen window: seeing everything in terms of household arrangement, cleanliness . . .’ Edna was someone who had ‘merely strayed from the kitchen to the stage’, Humphries said. In the mid-1970s she declared herself the ‘housewife superstar’, while she became a ‘megastar’ in the 1980s.26 In some ways Edna, who claimed to be an intimate friend of Margaret Thatcher, paralleled the entry of women into the public sphere and participation in political life. The housewives of the 1960s became the ‘housewife superstars’ of the 1970s, whose presence on the public stage was thought to be inextricably linked to their gender. Female MPs were not seen as politicians, but ‘women politicians’, whose celebrity sprang from the apparent contradiction in terms.27
Bjelke-Petersen was probably compared to Edna Everage in the Australian press more than any other female politician, including Thatcher. It was usually ridicule. Bjelke-Petersen claimed she did not see the similarity with Edna, and said, ‘I think that’s a very silly sort of comparison — I should say, “Who’s she?”’28
When Bjelke-Petersen took up her place in federal parliament, it became apparent that expectations of the Queensland housewife were so low, she was praised even when she did absolutely nothing. This can be the only explanation for the rash of compliments from journalists who watched her first week in parliament closely and concluded that, as she had made no grave errors and kept quiet, she must be able. After surviving a week in the Senate without making any gaffes, Laura Veltman declared Bjelke-Petersen could no longer ‘be regarded as a joke’ and ‘the laughing stock of Australian politics’, despite the remarks of those who said ‘she’s politically naive, generally silly, and male chauvinism’s strongest argument for keeping women in the kitchen where they belong’.29
‘She’s smart,’ Barry Everingham decided, ‘and tough as nails’ despite being an archetypal grandmother who had come to Canberra with her policies tucked away with her ‘twin sets, pearls and sensible shoes’.30 Alan Reid from the Bulletin also warned at the end of March that there was a ‘lot more to her than culinary expertise on how to produce pumpkin scones or a toothsome pavlova’.31 Still, Bjelke-Petersen’s views on policy drew only fleeting attention, although there were some references to her support for a flat rate of personal income tax, which she shared with her husband. Her policies, which mostly represented the Queensland National Party platform, included splitting the family income to reduce the level of taxation, increased welfare spending for families, cutbacks in overall government spending, more money for Queensland roads, and lower petrol prices.
While Bjelke-Petersen was acknowledged to have gained her position owing to her husband’s clout, she was clearly popular in her own right, winning a huge vote in the 1983 election (and drawing two other senators in with her). Her diary overflowed with appointments to speak across the country. Audiences loved her. She was described as politically shrewd, and ‘one of the hardest working and most popular politicians in Australia’.32
In 1981, Bjelke-Petersen persuaded her husband to accept a one-off federal grant for Queensland under new health care arrangements, despite his publicly expressed anger that it was not enough money.33 This peace-making role between the federal and Queensland governments earned her respect in the Canberra press gallery. Anne Summers wrote she had surprised her critics, who had mistaken a pumpkin-scones image for an entire persona. During a Telecom strike, people had said she would not be able to function without daily advice from her husband on the telephone, but Summers noted she had asked a number of questions during that period. She was accessible, attracting an exceptionally high volume of mail; was popular with her colleagues on both sides of the house; and regarded as sharp and intelligent. A lonely Joh had lost his wife for a good part of every week, Summers wrote, while Flo Bjelke-Petersen was ‘blossoming with her independence, working hard and having a thoroughly good time’.34
What earned Bjelke-Petersen her loudest accolades in Canberra was the stand she took on sales tax. The federal government was introducing legislation that would impose a 2.5 per cent tax on various items, including books, food and newspapers. Flo believed the proposal should have excluded basic family needs such as footwear, clothing and building materials. She crossed the floor to vote against the government. She promised to support the Democrats in the committee stages but vote with the government on the more far-reaching amendments proposed by Labor. She told the Courier-Mail, ‘The sales tax will seriously affect those in our community who are least able to afford it.’ Overnight, she had gone from being a naive housewife to ‘the champion of lower income earners’.35 Former prime minister Gough Whitlam called for ‘three cheers for Flo’ at an anti–sales tax rally. Michelle Grattan described her as a ‘smart-broker’ in Canberra–Queensland relations, arguing that while the image was homely and trite, ‘the reality is rather different.’36
Jane Cadzow declared in the Australian that Bjelke-Petersen was a ‘housewife superstar in her own right’. She was nominated for Queenslander of the Year. She campaigned for the National Party before the 1982 South Australian elections, and, even though she was not up for re-election in 1984, was the major focus of the campaign, featuring in all advertisements. After the large vote she attracted in the 1980 election, she was also used in a by-election campaign in Victoria in 1984. She was reported to be the favourite to take over the Senate leadership in 1984, although her husband did not want her to as she would be away from home too much. She told reporters she would not take the job, if offered it, because her first priority was carrying out the duties of the premier’s wife.
Frequently, signs of Bjelke-Petersen’s political acumen were contrasted with her femininity. To be a housewife was assumed to be benign, but to be political while appearing feminine was dangerous, even sinister. She was described by one Queensland MP as a ‘thug dressed as a granny’.37
Other journalists recognised Bjelke-Petersen’s brand of campaigning as clever because it appeared to be ‘good sense’ or motherly advice, while she was in fact pedalling policies. Michael Gawenda, watching as she stood talking to a greengrocer while campaigning in Melbourne, observed that:
[This] was a mind which could concentrate on watermelons and cantaloupes and the perfect bananas while all the while, on another level altogether, wait for the chance to slip in an absolutely outrageous comment whi
ch, because of the timing, and because it came from a woman who seemed so totally unselfconscious, so artless, would sound like a piece of grandmotherly common sense. This, we thought, was a politician to be reckoned with. The key to this very shrewd politician is that she doesn’t sound like a politician at all. If anything, she sounds very much like Dame Edna Everage.38
While Bjelke-Petersen’s career demonstrated women could make effective and popular politicians, she used her success and platform to espouse her belief that the home was the preferable location for women. She was fervently opposed to the sex discrimination and equal opportunity legislation of 1984 and 1986, due to her view that it undermined the family unit and diminished the role of home-makers.39 She would never have allowed her name to be put forward, she told audiences, if her children were not grown up. In fact, going to the Senate was not even her idea in the first place. Now, she travelled so much, she was rarely at home.40
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Bjelke-Petersen’s reservations about scones lasted only six months. By November 1981, she was confident she had ‘overcome her early pumpkin scone image’, and cheerfully gave out the recipe on radio and for auctions: ‘it’s done me no harm. It has helped me relate to people.’41 Bjelke-Petersen’s mantra was that the scones helped her relate to the women who made them and the men who ate them. She used her scones in a dispute Joh was having with striking coalminers in 1983, bringing a batch of freshly baked scones and promising to make her husband negotiate. The headline on the front page article was ‘pumpkin scone diplomacy’.
In June 1985 the Bulletin declared, ‘At last Lady Joh — i.e. Flo — Bjelke-Petersen has admitted what her frustrated opponents have sworn for years — that her political success is due largely to pumpkin scones.’ Fellow Queensland senator Kathy Sullivan argues: ‘When they voted for her, women used to go to voting booths and vote for themselves. She played them at their own game magnificently — the pumpkin scones thing was brilliant — and she was listened to when she spoke on other issues. But she wouldn’t have got a break if she hadn’t been the wife of the premier.’
Bjelke-Petersen baked pumpkin scones for visiting journalists for years, as well as tourists who came in busloads to meet the former premier and senator, struggling financially in their retirement. Her profile subsided in the mid-1980s, probably due to her absorption in her husband’s problems as the damning 1987 Fitzgerald royal commission uncovered widespread corruption in the Queensland police force, and Joh later faced court.42 In 2005 Joh Bjelke-Petersen died; and Flo in 2017.
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Flo Bjelke-Petersen was a smart, capable woman. When her political instincts proved to be more than a mere mirror of her husband’s, the element of surprise expressed in political commentary revealed how a focus on women’s domestic skills often masked their suitability for political life. She cleverly capitalised on this focus, however, and her popularity provided evidence of an able political tactician who was patronised and petted yet earned respect in her own right. What many other women resisted and attempted to redefine, Bjelke-Petersen embodied and glorified, manipulating media interest in politically active women’s domestic competency until it defined her completely. If she had been made a cabinet minister, it would have been a difficult tag to shake. But as a tactic for a rising political star, both her pumpkins and her populism were brilliant.
CHAPTER FOUR
Political Superwomen and MP Mums
In 2004, Treasurer Peter Costello had a message for the women of Australia: ‘You should have one for the father, one for the mother and one for the country.’ Concern about the ageing population and declining fertility rate led to a rash of policies — including a $3000 ‘baby bonus’ — trying to encourage Australians to procreate, three times. After all, Costello had three children, as did the prime minister, John Howard.
The suggestion was widely mocked. But the cultural anxiety was real. In the late 1990s, and then the noughties, the public debate about fertility and whether mothers should work had become almost hysterical in tone, remonstrative and shrill. Much of this debate centred on the fact that a growing proportion of women in their 20s and 30s were single and childless. It was usually assumed that they were ‘selfishly’ or ‘foolishly’ delaying, or refusing, to have children simply because they did not want to sacrifice their careers. The truth was a lot more complex — and certainly one of the most significant reasons for the delay is the search for the right partner. But as the finger was pointed again and again at feminism for daring to suggest women should have more choices than their mothers (inaccurately, distractingly, called ‘having it all’), many young women had become worried and fearful. A distinct lack of successful role models in many professions, and particularly in politics, feeds the belief that women still must choose either work or family.
Over these years, conservative columnists lined up to lecture young, single women, to blame feminists for encouraging women to work, and to wage an ideological battle about the impact of childcare on young children. Single female MPs continued to be grilled about whether — and when — they wished to have children, just as ‘MP mums’ were asked about how they coped. An extraordinary kerfuffle resulted from a photograph taken during the 2001 federal election campaign, when then Democrat leader Natasha Stott Despoja was photographed holding a baby, grimacing towards the camera. It was reprinted widely during the course of the campaign. Her facial contortions were interpreted as a sign that she was uncomfortable with children — calling in the tired assumptions that young professional women are opposed to families, or children, and that women can be divided neatly along ideological lines: worker or mother. In fact, as Stott Despoja later explained in a letter to the Herald: ‘It was a split-second shot that captured me in the middle of exclaiming, “She’s so tiny. I can’t believe she’s only four days old; I hope I don’t drop her.”’1 Stott Despoja fell pregnant only a couple of years later.
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Kirstie Marshall was an Olympic aerial skiing champion; a young, fit, cheerful and dedicated sportswoman. In 2002, she successfully slid from snow-slopes to back bench when she was elected to the Victorian parliament. When it was revealed, during the campaign, that she was pregnant, some observers grumbled. Bettina Arndt wrote, in a column for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, that having a baby was not a ‘charming diversion’ but ‘a potentially hazardous, extremely demanding undertaking which brings many unstuck’:
The life-changing experience of giving birth will not always slot neatly into the background of a demanding political career. International research highlighting the importance of parental care for infants brings into question the usual glib assumptions that the new political mother can easily minimise her parental involvement . . . Does this mean pregnant women should never stand for political office? Obviously not, but surely the electorate has a right to consider these issues when deciding how to vote.
Arndt went on to question the argument that having ‘more politician mothers would lead to more enlightened political decisions about issues affecting women and children’. Rather than supporting the real needs of women and children, she concluded, ‘mothers who are forced to compromise their own instincts may end up promoting policies, like more infant childcare, that justify their own hard choices.’2
After Marshall was elected, the speaker of the Victorian parliament evicted her for breastfeeding her baby in the chamber on the grounds that there was a ‘stranger’ in the house: her baby. The story landed on the front page of the Age and the Australian, and was debated vigorously on talkback radio. Most of the sympathy went to Marshall. (A notable exception was Senator Amanda Vanstone, then the minister assisting the prime minister for the status of women, who said, ‘I feel sorry for the baby being fed in a noisy and testosterone-filled televised parliamentary debate . . . Female parliamentarians can generally look after themselves and I can see no reason why they should get a better deal than anyone else.’) Shortly afterwards, the speaker of the Victorian Legislative Assembly, Judy Maddigan, sa
id she had decided to make an exception to the 146-year-old ‘strangers’ rule for babies who were being breastfed. She told reporters: ‘I have decided . . . that if it is her view that it is in the best interests of her child, she is welcome to bring it into the chamber at times when she is required to be there.’ Marshall welcomed the news, but said she did not expect to find herself in an emergency breastfeeding situation again.
This photo, showing a grimace on Natasha Stott Despoja’s face as she held her colleague Andrew Bartlett’s tiny baby, was replicated several times throughout the 2001 election campaign. Patrick Hamilton/Newspix
This incident neatly exemplified the juggling act female MPs need to perform if they have families, the insistence of some that their two roles — mother and politician — need not necessarily clash, and the fact that there will always be a vocal rump of sexism in the community. Broadcaster Ron Casey was awarded an Ernie for his comment that Marshall was ‘a second-rate politician with a first-rate publicity stunt. I mean, how else could a member of the lower house of Victorian state government get her name and boobies splashed all over the national press?’3
A century earlier, a cartoon in the Melbourne Punch featured a cartoon of a woman addressing parliament, as a bewigged speaker sat in the background nursing a child. The caption read: ‘Some foolish people imagine our ladies will neglect their family duties. Quite a mistake. 3 a.m. That dear good old creature, Mr Speaker, is kind enough to take the blessed infant while the Hon. Member addresses the house.’4 Maybe it’s not such a crazy idea.
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In many ways, the female politician is an iconic working woman, and her incremental progress provides a potent symbol of the struggle of all women to take up powerful positions in Australia. As Bronwyn Bishop indicated, at the heart of many of the attacks on the female politicians dubbed the ‘women most likely to’ has been a challenge to the right of women to occupy space in a parliament run by men. This has been in part driven by a supposed fear of what women’s entry into the workforce may do to the children they leave behind.