by Julia Baird
Journalists highlighted Haines’s rapid-fire delivery and frank approach to interviews, and often represented her feminist views as the emotional, savage and shocking outbursts of a political firebrand.41 This may be why photographs of her with her mouth open, looking intense and angry, were used so often with articles. Her attacks on sexism in the parliament and the press were considered good copy, but were used as examples of someone who was unguarded and liable to offend. For example, when she was annoyed by reporting that focused on her looks, the ‘32-year-old mother of two’ told a reporter: ‘People say how nice it is to have a young, and other adjectives, woman in the Senate, and say that I’ll be a decoration to the place and so on . . . But they wouldn’t dream of going up to one of the nice-looking younger male senators or members of the House and saying the same thing. They’d get a punch in the nose.’42 These comments were often referred to over the following decade, not as an incisive observation about sexism in politics, but as an example of an alleged tendency of Haines to upset people.43
Haines attempted to broaden the definition of women’s issues from what particularly affected women — families, childcare, reproductive rights, discrimination and violence — to what women were interested in, thereby covering the entire political spectrum. She argued for specific legislation to protect or elevate women’s interests, and insisted women were interested in all legislation, as Ryan did, over the years she was in parliament.44 But these two positions were often seen as contradictory: the affairs of women were assumed to be outside, or tangential to, ‘real’ politics. Comments like ‘Although she has strict feminist ideas, she has the widespread respect of the party’ were typical.45
By 1986, the Democrats had a fully developed policy on women; however, Haines quickly became frustrated that the press ‘only quote us when we speak on rape, abortion, pornography’.46 Like Ryan, her desire to move away from being seen as solely interested in ‘women’s issues’ was heralded as a mark of maturity. But the competency she displayed in other areas was still recognised by the press. By 1984, the compromises she had extracted over Medicare and her work in the Senate committee that investigated the conduct of Justice Lionel Murphy had earned her the reputation of a shrewd parliamentary watchdog. By the end of 1984, she was tipped to be the leader who would follow Democrat founder Don Chipp. The headlines read: ‘Fiery senator not afraid to tilt at windmills’ and ‘Janine Haines: now taken seriously’.
In 1985, Haines was elected deputy leader of the Democrats, becoming the first woman to hold a leadership position in a federal parliamentary party. The leadership contest was well-reported: internal brawls in the party were good copy, and the tales of disgruntled men who disliked Haines were aired regularly. Even before she went on to be elected leader, one of the Senate candidates resigned due to concerns over an increasingly ‘strong feminist element’ in the Democrats.47 Commentators speculated on what impact her ‘outbursts’ on sexism or views on women’s issues would have on her chances, as well as the way she looked. Many journalists clearly believed that engaging in ‘women’s issues’ was not a good recommendation for leading a parliamentary party, but, at the same time, recognised her gender could be an advantage in leading a young and progressive political party. One wrote that Haines had shouldered all of the political ‘women’s areas’, like community service and welfare, ‘yet, ironically, being a woman is not going to hurt her chances of being elected as leader, and could even help them.’48
Haines won easily, to the surprise of many commentators, who had underestimated her appeal. A poll at the beginning of September 1986 showed support for the Democrats had shot up from 5.4 per cent in 1984 to a substantial 11 per cent.49
As leader, Haines continued to critique sexism in parliament, and she worked hard to link women’s issues to broader economic debates. Unlike Ryan, Haines’s views on women became part of her package, not her defining characteristic, partly because as leader of a party her views were sought on a wide range of subjects. But she was increasingly conscious of the liability of being represented as an ‘archfeminist’, a tag which she argued was applied to any outspoken woman. She told the Age:
I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. If I raise questions of pornography, child abuse, incest, domestic violence, they say I’m obsessed with sex. If I raise equality of opportunity, difficulties women face, they say I’m a man-hating feminist. If I’m flippant about myself it’s lack of confidence; if I’m flippant about them, I’m a sarcastic bitch. If I make strong statements I’m aggressive; if not, I’m weak. If I’m angry, I’m emotional.50
Haines brought women into the public arena in a very real way. She spoke about rape, postnatal depression, how politicians were often ‘up themselves’, and were ‘troglodytes’ engaged in ‘stag fighting’. While she, like many other women, equivocated about the word feminist, she did not waver from her belief that women’s issues formed a central plank in the Democrats platform. She supported Ryan during the passage of the sex discrimination legislation. She was scathing about the way women were treated by the media, arguing in 1981:
If [women politicians] make statements of state or national importance but on topics outside the realm of so-called ‘women’s issues’, we are ignored; if we make a passing reference to a topic such as rape, sexism or pornography, we are labelled hysterical, reactionary, fun spoiling wowsers — or just plain whimsical . . . I and a lot of other women are becoming fed up with the treatment we receive at the hands of the media. We are constantly being trivialised, patronised, decried and stereotyped. We are depicted as mothers, grandmothers, wives and daughters. We are described in terms of size, age, and hair-colouring. Our comments are edited into idiocy. We are considered mindless twits with nothing of value to offer the community outside the kitchen and the bedroom.51
Haines’s popularity defied the pundits who thought a woman with feminist views and no business experience would struggle to keep the Democrats afloat after Chipp left. When the Democrats won seven Senate seats in the 1987 election, she was called ‘Australia’s most powerful woman’.52 Her ability to attract publicity on a wide range of topics was regarded with awe by the major parties. Dozens of journalists described her as the most popular politician in the country. The Bulletin named her one of Australia’s top ten politicians in April 1989. Sydney Morning Herald columnist Alan Ramsey said Haines was ‘developing a public profile as somebody who means business’.53
Then, in 1990, at the peak of her success, Haines decided to run for a seat in the House of Representatives because she wanted to improve the Democrats’ profile. She believed it was impossible to attract media interest on a day-to-day basis while in the Senate. Her popularity provided the impetus, as well as her ability to handle the media, and the future of the party was seen as hinging on her success.54 For months, the polls predicted she would win. In the long series of articles that followed her announcement, journalists began to treat the Democrats more seriously, and once it became apparent the Democrats could begin to exercise considerable political clout, articles critically examining their platform began to appear.55
It should be remembered that Haines’s popularity coincided with a distinct change, over the decade she was in power, in the way female candidates were viewed. By 1990, women began to be seen as a more honest, credible alternative to male politicians.56 Some reporters, and especially paternalistic editorial writers, had been promoting this view since the 1960s. Haines capitalised on this, and added to it with her straight-shooting exposés of how parliamentary business was conducted to suit the interests of an elite group of middle-aged men. Haines, like many who followed her, was canonised as ‘Saint Janine’.57 Polls showed she was seen as honest and trustworthy.58 Her rival for the seat of Kingston, sitting Labor member Gordon Bilney, clearly resented the perceived advantage her gender gave her. He told Peter Smark: ‘It’s more than just an attempt to sell her as a saint. She’s being sold as someone not just sanctified but attended by a band of angels . . . I just
say she’s a cold, calculating polly.’59
Haines lost her bid for the seat of Kingston. She came third, capturing 26 per cent of the vote, behind 38.4 per cent for Bilney and 32 per cent for the Liberal candidate, Judy Fuller.60 Nationally, however, the Democrats peaked in popularity, with 12.6 per cent of the Senate vote. Her mistake was to think she could win a seat in the lower house given our system of preferential voting, but her personal vote was remarkable.
*
In the 1970s and early 1980s, the Australian press took a great interest in female politicians who were feminists. The problem was, the women who sought to be heard on matters to do with women were rarely given the chance to speak about anything else. By the middle of the 1980s, feminist views were increasingly recognised as just one facet of a political personality, and were no longer considered sufficiently novel to lead articles with. In the 1990s, Natasha Stott Despoja not only did not shy from the word feminism, but claimed it was a personal religion. Others insisted women were now embedded in the political process and should not be considered separately. Many journalists just lost interest. In 1994, Doug Aiton of the Sunday Age wrote a feature piece about Cheryl Kernot: her strengths, her background and her views. He wrote: ‘“I was going to ask you,” I said, “your thoughts on feminism. But I’ve decided I can’t be bothered.” She nodded, “We should have gone past that by now.”’
We hadn’t, though.
CHAPTER SIX
The Cover Girls: ‘Forget policy, I’ve got great legs!’
You can control a story by the way you look or get a story up by the way you frame it. You can manipulate it by superficial things such as appearance.
— Former MP Wendy Machin, 1997
I think it would be a lot easier for me if I was ugly, because what you’ve got to do if you’re a blonde, you’ve always got to prove yourself, you’ve always got to prove that you’re not stupid and that is a very big problem.
— Ros Kelly, 1997
For many female politicians, entering federal parliament was an experience akin to walking into a male-only university residential college, pub or building site: catcalls all around. The absence of women in the blokey world of politics meant that many fairly normal looking women, walking in to take their places alongside men, have been leered at and lusted after as though they were 18-year-old barmaids. NSW National Wendy Machin was called the ‘spunkette MP’, South Australian MP Barbara Wiese a ‘page three girl’, and, later, Cheryl Kernot was dubbed ‘Ballot Box Barbie’ and Natasha Stott Despoja a ‘blonde enchantress’. When Pauline Hanson stepped off a plane during the 1998 election campaign, with the wind blowing her skirt up around her knees, the front-page headline on the Daily Telegraph cried, ‘Forget policy: I’ve got great legs!’ Which pretty much sums it up — even if the next day a reader, R. McCormick from Bridgewater in South Australia, wrote in to challenge the point: ‘Pauline Hanson has not got great legs. They are skinny and shapeless. The super high heels she wears would make any woman’s legs look better.’
Women MPs have consistently complained of a gratuitous and discomfiting focus on their appearance. In the 1990s, some were even accused of exploiting it, and mocked for trying to play the ‘beauty card’. In 1990, for example, Ros Kelly, then a federal Labor minister, agreed to pose draped in a red sheet for an exhibition about the sensual side of powerful women. Photographer Heide Smith’s aim was to skewer the assumption ‘that if a woman is beautiful she must be dumb and if she’s brainy she can’t be good-looking or sexual’. After the exhibition, called Because Beauty Is Timeless, opened at the Canberra Press Club in July, journalists discovered Kelly, then minister for the arts, sports, environment, tourism and territories, had asked Smith to take out a particular photograph of her with a swathe of red material draped across her head. The headline in the Daily Mirror read: ‘BANNED: Hawke Minister bars this photo’. It was accompanied by a cropped photograph of the portrait, which made it look as though Kelly was naked. Canberra Times reporter Marion Frith, while arguing the press had over-reacted, wrote that ‘Mrs Kelly looks, well . . . she looks sensual, sexual even, a look until now unassociated with figures of such political status.’1 The Sydney Morning Herald joked, ‘Popular wisdom in Canberra has it that the high profile Minister for the Arts, Sports, Environment, Tourism and Territories, Mrs Ros Kelly, will do anything to get her picture in the papers. For a while yesterday, it looked like the joke had been proved true by pictures of Mrs Kelly clad only in a bed sheet.’2
Sex, power, a bare-shouldered cabinet minister draped in red: the story was irresistible. When Cheryl Kernot posed in a deep red bordello dress for the Australian Women’s Weekly in 1998, with a now famous feather boa, it was frequently claimed that her action, and the ensuing hullabaloo, was unprecedented. This is incorrect. Partly due to the timing of the shoot, the reaction to her frock-up was more prolonged, fervent and damaging than the others. But several women had posed in similar, if perhaps less flamboyant, attire for newspapers and magazines. Former Democrat leader Janine Haines agreed to be photographed fully made-up for the Australian in 1989, in a sequined evening dress, and, unusually, without her glasses. The headline read: ‘the real Janine Haines’.3 In 1993, Ros Kelly dressed in a long, one-shouldered evening gown, split to mid-thigh for Woman’s Day shortly after the prime minister’s wife, Annita Keating, had modelled clothes for Vogue. The female reporter wrote Kelly, ‘in her favourite little black dress, blonde hair glamorously coiffured and handsome features highlighted to great advantage . . . faced up to the camera like a cover girl’. Readers were told it had taken a ‘great deal of persuasion’, before Kelly agreed, due to her belief that ‘it takes a very confident woman in politics to be seen as a woman’. The headline cried, ‘Yes Minister!’ The reporter exclaimed she ‘proves without doubt that you can be a pollie and a super-attractive woman too!’4 Just what we were all worried about.
All of these ‘glamour shot’ articles claimed to be peeling back the political layers to the ‘real woman’ underneath, even though the images were highly stylised. There were no corresponding images of male colleagues draped in doonas or tight-fitting pants, with headlines revealing this was the ‘real’ or ‘true’ man. It was the professional garb of working women that was seen as artifice, not the make-up and borrowed dresses.
*
In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a handful of young women dubbed MPs with ‘model looks’ by the press, including NSW National Party MP Wendy Machin (27, ‘blonde, slim and single’), Liberal senator Kathy Sullivan (33, ‘blonde, slim and recently divorced’), South Australian Labor politician Barbara Wiese (30, ‘brunette, slim and single’), and federal Labor MP Ros Kelly (32, ‘blonde and married’). Each endured a series of debates in the press about whether they were ‘just a pretty face’. The stereotype of most women the press dubbed ‘blonde bombshells’ was eventually used against them by political opponents who accused them of being vain and shallow. The flipside of this, of course, was that there were many women considered not to be model girls, and therefore less worthy of media attention. Women judged to be frumpy or — the worst of sins — ‘housewifely’ were frequently the subject of articles where experts commented on how they could be ‘made over’ in order to win votes or party support.
Kathy Sullivan: ‘the Kissable Senator’
Queensland political science graduate Kathy Sullivan (then known by her birth name, Kathy Martin) was elected to federal parliament in 1974, when there was almost a complete dearth of women politicians in Canberra. A total of five new federal female MPs were elected, which the media hyped as a landslide. ‘Every television station, every current affairs program just zeroed in on me — fabulous publicity for a politician,’ Sullivan later told ABC radio. Within a short period of time, she became known as the ‘Kissable Senator’ — a tag that originated from a comment she made to a journalist that ‘everyone kisses me. They don’t want to shake hands — they all want to kiss.’5 On her first day in parliament, a Daily Telegraph head
line declared: ‘One girl among the new boys: Kissing Senator arrives’. Digby McLean from the Canberra News said he had found out why everybody had wanted to kiss her: ‘Senator Martin has a charming personality, and a warm smile she always manages at the right psychological moment,’ he wrote. ‘Her soft, husky voice is one of the sexiest I have heard.’6
Sullivan said she deliberately attempted to project an image of ‘somebody who is businesslike, but still female’. She stopped smoking cigars in public, stopped wearing her favourite knee-high boots and quickly complied with instructions to grow her hair to a ‘neat, businesslike sort of style’.7
After Sullivan was elected, stories about her first husband, who was convicted of murder after their marriage broke up, soon appeared, with headlines proclaiming: ‘New Glamour Senator Was Wed to a Killer’. When she married again, at age 33, in ‘floral chiffon’ on 20 December 1975, her wedding was reported in the Australian (‘Senator marries’), the Courier-Mail (‘Senator Kathy becomes Mrs Gray’), and the Canberra Times (‘Big week for the Senator’).8 Martin’s separation from her second husband two years later, in seemingly acrimonious circumstances, was also widely reported.9 Her third marriage, to Robert Sullivan, in December 1983 received little attention. ‘It never was my intention to announce it to the press,’ she told the Courier-Mail. ‘I’m fairly sensitive to intrusions into my private life.’ However, she agreed to speak to the Courier-Mail on their one-year anniversary in an article containing a progress report on the relationship and the couple’s search for a five-bedroom home on the Gold Coast.
While Sullivan complained to journalists that the interest in her personal life was prompted by an interest in the way she looked, her discomfort provided hooks for another round of stories, which verged from mocking to sympathetic. Journalists, while recording her frustration, simultaneously implied she was a loose cannon.10 For example, Queensland journalist Hugh Lunn, from the Australian, wrote a story after Sullivan had accused the press of a sexist bias in the coverage of her personal life ‘simply because I am a woman and blonde’.11 Although the Australian ran a supportive editorial about how difficult it was for politicians to maintain their marriages, Lunn later referred to her ‘funny lady’ comments as evidence that she was a wild card, had ‘stormy relations with the media’ and was a potential liability for the government.12