by Julia Baird
By 2004, there were 60 women in federal parliament. It was no longer a novelty to see women lining the green and red benches. Older female MPs told me this next generation was quieter, more determined to play by the rules, to trade and fight in factions, to sing the party anthems. Some, like the opposition spokeswoman for immigration, Nicola Roxon, said they were treated well by the press, and were more frustrated that ‘issues that are seen to have an impact on women get sidelined in the reporting or in the political hierarchy’. Still, they closely watched the female political celebrities of the 1990s and the acne of sexism that continued to break out across the media.
So what are the lessons?
One feature many successful female politicians share is a forthright, straight-shooting approach. Janine Haines was a fine example. Her most refreshing characteristic was her candour, the fact that she was unapologetically herself. She refused to pander to critics of her image, on the grounds that a politician’s personal or physical characteristics were irrelevant. What you see is what you get, she said, ‘and that basically is what the Democrats are all about. We’re not operating a puppet show behind a thin veneer of political ideology.’3 When she sacked a press secretary three weeks after he told her to change her hairstyle, clothes and glasses, journalists applauded. ‘If he’d succeeded,’ wrote one, ‘he may have undone the very factor which sets Janine Haines apart from her rivals, Andrew Peacock and Bob Hawke . . . the fact that she is not the plastic creation of media advisers and image makers.’4 Haines said vanity and image-making was a travesty of what politics was about, and journalists approved: ‘With Janine Haines, what you see is what you get; the image is reality.’5 The polls showed the ‘natural untutored approach to politics’ was working, and Haines had plucked the Democrats out of obscurity and put them onto the front page.
Former immigration minister Amanda Vanstone, also from South Australia, is similar in some ways. Her attitude to the press was ‘ignore them’ and ‘wear them down’. Her candour was unusual. She told me, ‘People are sick of plastic politicians. Why have this veneer? Why not be yourself? It’s just a lot easier. People will respond to that a lot better in the end.’ Her caveat is that her personal life should remain private: ‘It doesn’t mean you have to open up a cupboard and say here is my mind and my heart and you can have a look at every little piece of it.’
Vanstone shrugged off the relentless comments on her weight, her loud clothing and — the press gallery favourite — the ‘exploding pineapple’ shirt:
I don’t care. They can say what they like. See basically, before I got into politics I would have worn mostly black and navy . . . And then I had a coloured shirt for some reason, I can’t remember why, and they made such a thing of it at the time, and I’ve just done it and done it and done it. And I’ve worn them out now. Surely you’ll agree — if a journalist went to an editor and said, ‘I’ve got a great story about Vanstone’s new shirt that she’s got,’ the editor would say ‘Really? Well, aren’t you a genius, we’ve been there and done that.’ I’ve just worn them out.
She also gives as good as she gets, and is admired for it. When Labor senator John Faulkner kept commenting on her weight from the other side of the chamber, she finally called him the ‘King of Comb-over’ to silence him. She’s still proud of the comment: ‘The comb-over was a ripper. That fixed him up. He used to get stuck into me all the time. The King of Comb-over used to sit there going snip snip. Just for a couple of weeks — then no more trouble . . . It was not [intended as] public humiliation for him; it was to teach him a lesson, that if you want to play like that, well, girls can play like that too.’
Few people know that Vanstone is also an amateur cartoonist, who applied to Herald cartoonist Alan Moir’s school of cartooning when she was minister for justice. At the end of 2003, she called Moir asking for his permission to reprint a drawing of Bronwyn Bishop’s head. He told me she wanted to copy it onto glass plates, glaze them, and give them to her colleagues for Christmas. Moir is an admirer of Vanstone. He describes her as ‘a good, strong, effective [politician], but she’s jolly, she’s very down-to-earth, that’s the way I depict her . . . she’s full on, she’s straight on. And she makes mistakes, but she’s not embarrassed about it. She’s a person who will apologise. She’s quite refreshing.’
Vanstone was clearly able to laugh at herself. On her website — which includes pictures of her dogs and her staff’s pets — she has written her own captions under some photographs: one talks about ‘bad hair days’; another says ‘OK OK, 19 years in the Senate has taken its toll.’ Alan Ramsey wrote Vanstone was marked not just by her durability, strong personality, refusal to suffer fools, or ability, but ‘above all, her great commonsense and her get-out-of-my-face attitude to the remorseless business of politics, a business of men run by men under men’s rules.’6
Vanstone was, for some time, the most senior female minister in the government. In 2002, she regained cabinet rank after losing it in 1997, and in 2003 she was promoted to minister for immigration and multicultural and indigenous affairs. Many journalists say they admired her blunt and aggressive approach, but disliked her politics, considering her to be a moderate who sold out in her tough attacks on welfare fraud, in cutting funds in the university sector, and maintaining government policy on keeping asylum seekers in mandatory detention. She was also regarded coolly by women’s groups, who saw her as an unenthusiastic advocate of their interests when she was minister for the status of women. She had often raised eyebrows over her apparent eagerness to attack other women, particularly fellow South Australian Senator Stott Despoja, but also women like Carmen Lawrence and Cheryl Kernot. When Stott Despoja’s profile loomed as an issue for the then Democrats leader Kernot, Vanstone famously quipped that there was only room for one blonde in the Democrats. The remark appalled Stott Despoja, who argued that Vanstone, as one of the few women in politics, should be the last to ridicule other women on the basis of their appearance. Recalls Vanstone: ‘I went back into the Senate and said to Natasha, “Look, I’ve been attacked by the appearance police for years and you know there is nothing wrong with being blonde — otherwise you wouldn’t have dyed your hair that colour.”’
Another federal Liberal MP, Jackie Kelly, had great success endearing herself to her electorate as a down-to-earth young mother. She did not want to be seen as a well-heeled Liberal, so played down her law degree and other achievements. But when she struggled to be taken seriously as a minister (which few young mothers ever have been) she tried to try to shape her image as more serious, and policy-oriented:
In my electorate they love the fact that I am approachable, warm and fuzzy, and that I am a real person, whatever that means. And I think you are complicit with the media in that. You always have a choice about whether to do a piece of media or not and it certainly suited me I think for my first two terms in parliament to have that image. Now I am on 5 per cent [margin] I am actually trying to adjust that image, which is why you go to ground a bit, then you come back and start building an intellectual base to it. You go too far with it and you start becoming an airhead and fluffy and PM’s pet, and you become this thing that’s highly electable but doesn’t have the intellectual rigour to have some clout in media policy debates . . . Now every time I go to the media I am trying to make it meaty. And it’s very hard.
Like Vanstone, Kelly believes you should never ‘whinge’ about media treatment: ‘They’re a pack of bastards [laughs]; don’t expect any favours.’
Part of the problem with this analysis, though, is that when women pointed to obstacles, or bias, they were more likely to be labelled whingers, while blokes were seen as forthright and direct. In powerful men, anger is seen as natural, almost to be expected, whereas with women, it is seen as a sign of instability, of being unhinged.
Postscript, 2021
In 2004, having read and analysed several decades worth of press reportage of women in politics, I was determined to find some easy solutions to game the system, so
women could bypass the nonsense of celebrity profiles, the distraction of reporter’s interest in their personal and domestic lives, and make their way into cabinet. This is the part that I have reflected on most since finishing the book, and rued because I now think women should just be themselves, and blow up a system that would shame or tame them.
It’s not easy, I know, so let me explain how I came to this thinking, which I then summarised in several tips. My first — which I cringe at today because while it was a reflection of the times, where women were so constantly derided and many gun-shy as a consequence, it still seems patronising — was to ‘Establish a serious profile, as someone who is policy-oriented and has the respect of your colleagues.’ Sigh. Respect should be theirs automatically. And, to explain, I wrote:
NSW Liberal Virginia Chadwick, who was considered a possible premier, and generally well liked by the press, said she was always cautious about doing any media not directly to do with her portfolio. She believes many women have suffered from the ‘Icarus principle’: when they fly too high, journalists will melt their wings. The other kind of publicity did not appeal to her personally, but was also politically a ‘dangerous way to travel’.
The former Liberal minister for family and community services Jocelyn Newman, while insisting that she was ‘mystified’ that she did not attract more attention, said she had deliberately kept a low profile: ‘Most of the senior women in politics have been raised by the media and dashed by the media . . . it’s made me very wary.’7
My second hot tip was to ‘Avoid the celebrity shots, posing in ballgowns or bikinis.’ Now I think: ‘Do what you want’. Surely we can move past the idea that women are stupid because they look nice in a dress. Of course, bikini shots probably don’t serve any politician well, because editors still love to ridicule powerful women by highlighting the fact they also have bodies — unlike men who can parade about in little costumes just as former PM Tony Abbott did often in his budgie smugglers (mostly when swimming). But the point of this section was to show that this was the lesson younger generations of women MPs had learnt: to police themselves, tone themselves down, be careful not to display any overt signs of femininity or being female. One was a future PM. I wrote:
Victorian MP Julia Gillard is frequently referred to as a ‘rising star’. She is an impressive politician — smart, analytical, and clearly a tough operator — with a distinctively gravelly voice. When she was made opposition spokeswoman for population and immigration in November 2001, her photograph was placed on the front cover of the Age. A former staffer called her and said, ‘I’m just unpacking the suitcase we’ve been keeping Cheryl’s feather boa in.’ Gillard told me, ‘It was a joke, but what he also meant — and I took it to be good advice — was watch yourself. It’s all very nice when it’s all very nice, but if you let it get out of control, it can get all very nasty too.’ She would definitely not agree to dress up for women’s magazines:
I’m a professional politician. I went into politics to be involved in implementing positive changes for this country . . . the Cheryl stuff getting dressed up I wouldn’t do. Because it’s got no connection [to my work] . . . And I think one of the great advantages we’ve got, and we have to acknowledge it time after time, is that we’re able to make those judgement calls having seen what’s happened to women who went before us. So I’m not critical of Cheryl or anybody who made different decisions because they were the first and I’ve had the ability to watch that and learn from it.
Many of today’s female politicians say they too have learnt from Kernot’s red frock experience. Jackie Kelly says while she believes ‘if you’ve got it flaunt it’, it would not be right either for her electorate or her image: ‘I would have done it I suppose when I first entered parliament and had something worth flaunting. But these days, two kids later, I just don’t think it’s me. I think I’d be caught out same as Cheryl, it’s just not you, come on. That stuff just isn’t relevant to my electorate.’ It’s hard for busy women to concentrate on their clothes, she says: ‘I’ve actually got bagged for my dress sense. I’ve had lots of barbs for being quite dowdy. It’s hard because you’ve got a lot of things on your mind . . . If I was Elle Macpherson and making a living out of it, sure, spend some time on it but . . .’8
I wonder, though, if part of the Cheryl Kernot lesson was about not just gender, but height, power and success. As time has gone on, women in the lower ranks of political life have found themselves treated more even-handedly, but the higher they climb, the more the old stereotyping emerges, and in even more acute forms. Julia Gillard is the greatest example of this.
But I will get to that. My third piece of advice was ‘Steer attention away from your personal life.’ In 2021, this seems to be is as obvious as it is patronising. My fourth was similar: ‘Avoid a personality cult.’ This was all about the fervour Natasha Stott Despoja inspired. I wrote:
Many younger MPs now talk about ‘the Natasha lesson’. Don’t do the wrong sort of publicity, or you’ll be seen as a bimbo. Federal Labor MP Tanya Plibersek, who is a couple of months younger than Stott Despoja, has consciously taken a different approach. She is cautious about discussing her private life, and has said ‘no’ to fashion shoots with women’s magazines: ‘First, because they can go disastrously off the rails. Second, it’s very hard for your colleagues to take you seriously after that. Also, if you look at the people living in your electorate, how many can you assume buy Woman’s Day in one week . . . for how many is it a vote changer? So there are very obvious costs and not very obvious benefits.’
Asked about Stott Despoja, Plibersek says:
I would not take her as a model for how to manage a media campaign strategy because I think she did too much frivolous stuff . . . What is the reason we are there? If you actually want to get legislative change through, you need to be able to convince your colleagues that the program you want implemented is well thought out and will change people’s lives, and if they are used to thinking of you as a flake they won’t take it seriously, and if the only media you get is flaky, they will write you off. So you could be a household name but unable to do anything in parliament . . . I don’t know where she should have drawn the line, but she should have said ‘no’ more often. It’s the difference between being popular and being respected.9
West Australian Liberal Julie Bishop said her approach with the press was to ‘be accessible, up-front and tell it like it is’. While she agreed to walk down a catwalk in a fashion parade in 2003 with Kim Beazley, she said it was only because it was for a charity fundraiser: ‘Would I have done it because a fashion house asked me to do it? No, because I am the member for Curtin. Hopefully I don’t portray myself as someone who gets dressed up and poses for fashion magazines. I have been elected to do a job, not get into a personality cult . . . It’s not about me, it’s about the government and the people.’ If you want to be photographed in your swimmers to make a point, that’s fine, she says, but you need to be conscious how that will be used in a different context: ‘I think there are better ways of drawing attention to good policy than posing in extreme ways.’ (Years later, as foreign minister and deputy prime minister, Bishop was photographed often in glamorous couture; behind her back, some colleagues sniped, but her public popularity was remarkable).
The fifth suggestion was: ‘Cop criticism.’ This was inspired by the string of complaints Cheryl Kernot made before and after her political exit, which may have been called-for, but were poorly timed. Still, why should women have to silently ‘cop’ a criticism that is different, more vicious and more damning than their male colleagues? Why accept the bogus and distracting stereotyping and othering? Janine Haines was right when she told the Australian Left Review, in answer to more questions about having been portrayed in a ‘kaleidoscope’ of images ranging from ‘prissy’ to ‘bimbo’, that she did not want to be pigeonholed: ‘I’m not abandoning the complexity of my personality to fit some black and white image. Complexity, that’s what life’s all about.’
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Sixth, ‘Understand that journalists are not your enemies. Nor are they your friends.’ Again, pretty obvious. But to be fair, the sense of false intimacy was long a particular pitfall of working in close proximity with the press gallery, and still stands, especially for women who want to avoid the sleaze, innuendo and compromise apparent in much of Canberra’s political culture. This is what I wrote:
Julia Gillard puts this perfectly. The job of journalists, she says, is:
. . . to develop a relationship with people that is sufficiently disarming so that they get information that they otherwise wouldn’t. Their job is one of engagement . . . trying to get to know people, disarming people a little bit, and our job is to understand that and not fall victim to it. At the end of the day it’s not that they’re nasty people or people without ethics, they are doing a job and their job is not to act as our advocates or press secretaries or ciphers . . . They rightly should be critical, probing, questioning, and I think you’ve got to be ready for that no matter how disarming the personal engagement with them might be.
Some MPs are even more cautious. Nicola Roxon did not socialise with journalists because she wanted to avoid being trivialised: ‘I am sure it would be enjoyable and I am sure I would make some better friendships and contacts, but I just think it’s also got a lot of risks that I didn’t want to take . . . I am a young woman, I am single, I want to do the x, y and z things, how am I going to get into a position where people treat me seriously . . . People do underestimate that as a young woman, [they think] you are not going to be as capable as a 65-year-old man, so you’ve got to build that, give people less reasons to underestimate you.’