Abstract
Australia’s first woman Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, was sworn into office in 2010. In 2012 she was driven to make a powerful speech on misogyny, which reverberated around the world. This research note explores the circumstances prompting the Prime Minister’s speech and argues that the arrival of a woman Prime Minister helped bring into the open the gendered nature of politics. At a more formal level, sexist commentary focused on issues such as the Prime Minister’s decision to be ‘deliberately barren’. On talkback radio and the internet, sexual vilification took on more sexualized and violent forms. Increased awareness of the hostility being expressed about women in public life led to a feminist counter-campaign in 2012 using social media.
In addition to the main argument, data is presented about the representation of women in Australian politics and the way that this has recently declined. It shows that electoral victories by parties that do not use gender electoral quotas have been largely responsible; Australia slipped from 15th to 45th place in the Inter-Parliamentary Union ranking for representation of women in national parliaments between 1999 and February 2013. The renewed attention to gender in politics is unlikely to halt this slippage in the short term.
In 2010 Australia’s first woman Governor-General swore into office Australia’s first woman Prime Minister. Women were also heads of government in two of Australia’s larger states, New South Wales and Queensland. Did this mean that the presence of women in public decision-making had finally become ‘normalized’? The fact that in 2012 the same Prime Minister felt driven to deliver in parliament a powerful speech on misogyny suggests not.
This research note seeks to describe the misrepresentation of women in politics in Australia. In particular, it will examine the kind of misogyny or sexist misrepresentation of women in public life that prompted the Prime Minister’s speech in 2012. Furthermore, it will look at the feminist mobilization that took place in response to such treatment and its effect on the way political parties approached gender issues in the run-up to the 2013 federal election campaign. It will argue that the arrival of a woman Prime Minister helped bring into the open some of the institutional and attitudinal resistance to change in, and the gendered nature of, Australian politics.
Before turning to the main argument about misrepresentation, I will describe in the next part the representation of women in Australian politics.
Representation of women in Australian parliaments
Thanks to its federal political system Australia has nine parliaments, six of them bicameral, meaning that there are 15 houses of parliament. While the representation of women varies between these 15 chambers, Australia had the longest gap of any country (41 years) between women’s right to stand for the national parliament and the first election of women. While a handful of women were elected to state parliaments before World War II, the proportion of women across Australia’s parliaments was still only 2 per cent in 1970. Even after the arrival of the ‘second wave’ of the women’s movement around 1970 the proportion of women in Australian parliaments at first rose only slowly. The pace accelerated in the 1990s when the threshold of 10 per cent was passed in Australia’s lower houses. The proportion of women in Australian parliaments (in all houses) peaked at 31 per cent in 2009. A subsequent turning of the electoral tide and a series of conservative electoral victories led to the proportion of women in Australian parliaments sliding to 28 per cent by February 2013 (see Figures 1 and 2).
Percentage of women in Australian parliaments, 2002–2013.
Number of women in Australian Parliaments, 2001–2012.
As would be expected from European evidence, there is also a higher representation of women among ‘left’ parliamentary parties than among conservative parties. 1 The Labor Party introduced quotas in 1994, which are currently expressed as a 40:40:20 rule, meaning that pre-selections must achieve an outcome whereby not less than 40 per cent of seats held by Labor will be held by women and not less than 40 per cent by men.
However, measures to increase the number of women candidates have not generally proved ‘contagious’ in Australia as they have in Europe, where the introduction of quotas by small left parties led to other parties following suit. 2 Indeed, the conservative parties in Australia still believe that electoral quotas ‘patronize’ women and are incompatible with pre-selection on merit, even though it has been suggested that practices within the Liberal Party are far from a merit-based process: women candidates (and only women candidates) are still routinely asked questions about their marital and parental status and about who will look after their children if they are elected. 3
As a result of the different political cultures within the parties and the way they address the issue of female representation, there is now a large gender gap between the parliamentary parties. For example, in February 2013 women formed 38 per cent of Labor parliamentarians around Australia but only 21 per cent of parliamentarians representing the Liberal and National parties and their variants. 4 This partisan pattern of female representation was, however, historically slow to establish itself in Australia, thanks to the strength of Irish Catholicism and factional politics within the Labor Party. 5
Female representation in the different Australian chambers also depends on the electoral system. As in other countries, 6 proportional representation (PR) electoral systems (now used in seven of Australia’s houses of parliament) have generally proved more favourable to women’s parliamentary representation than the single-member electorate systems used for the other eight houses.
Looking to female political representation in Australia with an international comparative and long-term lens, Australia’s position has clearly worsened (see Figure 3). In 1999 Australia ranked 15th in the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s league table for representation of women in the lower house of its national parliament. By February 2013 it had slipped to 45th place. Other countries have been taking more resolute steps to increase the role of women in public decision-making, by means of special measures such as legislated electoral quotas that apply to all parties. In the absence of a ‘contagion’ effect, the existence of party quotas is insufficient to prevent a decline in the parliamentary presence of women when there are victories by parties that eschew their use.
Australia’s international ranking on the representation of women in its national parliament.
Although the presence of women in parliament peaked in 2009, the presence of women in leadership positions has continued to rise, as can be seen in Tables 1 and 2.
Women heads of government, as of 20 February 2013.
Women presiding officers, as of 20 February 2013.
Furthermore, women parliamentarians have also become more diverse. The first Aboriginal women were elected to parliament in 2001 (in Western Australia and the Northern Territory) and soon reached the front bench in the Northern Territory, where Aboriginal women have served as ministers in both Labor and Country Liberal Party cabinets. In New South Wales (NSW) Linda Burney, of Wiradjuri descent, was elected to a safe Labor seat in 2003, entered cabinet in 2007 and in 2011 became Deputy Leader of the Opposition. Women from diverse ethnic backgrounds have also become increasingly visible: for example, Gladys Berejiklian, the daughter of Armenian migrants, became the Minister of Transport in the NSW government elected in 2011 and Malaysian-born Senator Penny Wong was a senior minister in the Rudd and Gillard governments at federal level. In another form of diversity Wong was the first openly lesbian cabinet minister.
Misogyny and misrepresentation of female politicians
Despite the growing presence (though recent ‘plateauing’) of female politicians, their presence still seems to be a matter of debate and controversy. For example, the defeat of the Bligh Labor government in the 2012 Queensland state election led to a fall in the number of women in the state parliament from 36 per cent to 20 per cent. When Dr Carole Ford wrote an article for the Courier-Mail, drawing attention to the halving of the number of women on the government benches, she received a vitriolic email response from a senior advisor to a Queensland Liberal National Party senator. She was told to ‘Get a life’, that ‘Blokes dominate most areas of human endeavour because Nature equipped them with something called testosterone’, that women ‘who can’t cut it’ cover their inadequacies by complaining of bias, and that ‘fewer and fewer people are listening’. 7 Nor did women’s presence in Parliament mean an end to the kind of sexist media representation that confronted earlier generations of women achieving such positions. For example, when Lara Giddings, who was single, became Tasmania’s first woman premier in 2011 The Australian ran a front-page story headed: ‘Leftist Lara Giddings Still Looking for Mr Right’. 8
The treatment of Prime Minister (PM) Julia Gillard is another obvious example. Well before she became PM, she was subjected to sexist misrepresentation, and much of this focused on her decision not to have children. When she was first in contention for the Labor Party leadership it was said by opponents within the party that as an unmarried and childless woman she would not be acceptable as leader. 9 In a television programme in 2006 she said that while she was full of admiration for women who combined children and a career she was not sure that she could have done it. 10 This was probably a realistic decision, given that Australian parliaments have hardly been welcoming for women with children. Sitting hours have rarely been family-friendly, the first parliamentary childcare centre was not opened until 2009, and there is a history of babies and small children being treated as ‘strangers in the house’. 11 Nonetheless, Gillard’s decision not to have children has been viewed as unnatural and leading to a lack of empathy with ordinary Australians. While she was Deputy Labor Leader a prominent Liberal senator suggested on more than one occasion that she was unsuitable to lead the nation because she was ‘deliberately barren’. He elaborated that to understand the community one needed to understand the relationship between ‘mum, dad and a bucket of nappies’. 12 Gillard’s marital status has also been the subject of criticism. For example, when she became Prime Minister in 2010 the conservative Sydney newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, chose to conduct an online poll on whether it mattered that a prime minister was single. It found that a ‘whopping’ 34 per cent thought the prime minister should be married. 13
But after Gillard had become Prime Minister sexist attacks on her intensified and went far beyond criticism of her childlessness and marital status. The first inkling of the nature of these attacks came in March 2011, when the Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, spoke to carbon-tax protesters in front of a banner reading ‘Juliar … Bob Brown’s bitch’. Brown was the leader of the Greens with whom Gillard had signed a formal agreement to obtain support for her minority government. In July 2011 a Facebook page was created, ‘Julia Gillard – Worst PM in Australian History’. 14 The hate speech and sexual vilification on this site included Photoshopped images of the Prime Minister naked, references to her menstruation, and extremely crude suggestions as to what she might do with the Governor-General after her swearing in. Separately the cartoonist Larry Pickering was emailing to federal parliamentarians his cartoons depicting the Prime Minister naked and wearing a dildo, cartoons that were also available on his website. The general public started to become aware of the misogyny that was going viral on the internet when the Prime Minister referred to it in a press conference on 23 August 2012 and to the cartoonist Pickering in particular.
A week later there was a huge response to a public lecture given by Dr Anne Summers, journalist and former head of the Office of the Status of Women. Summers took as her theme the way in which the ‘political persecution of Australia’s first female Prime Minister’ had infringed her rights at work. The Summers lecture was read by over 100,000 people over the next five months. 15 For many readers the lecture was a wake-up call as to the disrespect being shown for a female Prime Minister. The Victorian Women’s Trust had also been preparing a report on the negative currents affecting Australian political discourse. Three Trust donors enabled copies of this attractively produced report to be distributed free and a series of ‘Switch in Time’ events was organized where Independent MPs discussed the parallel universe inhabited by the mainstream media and the actual achievements of the Gillard government. The report covered the unrelenting labelling of the Prime Minister as a ‘liar’ for breaking a campaign commitment not to introduce a carbon tax – a level of vitriol not directed at the broken promises of preceding male Prime Ministers. 16 Similarly the Trust drew attention to a sustained media narrative concerning Gillard’s ‘treachery’ in replacing an elected Prime Minister, an action that was judged by different standards from the subsequent replacement (by other men) of an elected state Premier and an elected territory Chief Minister.
An opinion poll conducted shortly after the Summers speech found that 63 per cent of women (and 40 per cent of men) thought that female politicians were subjected to more personal criticism than male politicians. 17 Yet at least one Murdoch columnist dismissed such concern as being ‘the result of feminist brainwashing over the past 40 years’. 18 The Opposition, too, dismissed the senior women cabinet ministers defending the Prime Minister as the ‘handbag hit squad’. 19
Gender was becoming central to the construction of the Prime Minister, both by friends and enemies, in a way she had been careful to avoid in the 2010 election. At the end of August 2012 she made a commitment at the Pacific Islands Forum of $320 million to promote women’s leadership in business and politics in the region. 20 Talkback radio host Alan Jones, long associated with vitriolic attacks on the Prime Minister, for example suggesting she was a ‘lying cow’ and should be put in a chaff bag and taken out to sea, saw this as another opportunity. He was outraged by the Prime Minister’s statement that societies only reach their full potential if women are politically participating and said that, on the contrary, ‘women are destroying the joint’, naming the Lord Mayor of Sydney Clover Moore and the former Victorian Police Commissioner, Christine Nixon. 21 A highly successful feminist mobilization promptly took place on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube under the rubric ‘Destroy the Joint’. The Facebook campaign was dedicated to people ‘who are sick of the sexism dished out to women in public life in Australia, whether they be our Prime Minister or any other woman’. Its witty images of women destroying the joint ‘using only their gender’ attracted a large following. 22
When Jones said at a subsequent Liberal Party function that the Prime Minister’s recently deceased father had ‘died of shame’ because of ‘lies’ told by his daughter, Destroy the Joint swung into an online campaign to persuade companies to stop advertising on his radio programme. 23 All advertising on his programme was suspended by the radio network and Mercedes-Benz withdrew the $250,000 car they had provided him with.
More was to come. In response to a motion in parliament concerning sexist emails sent by the Speaker, the Prime Minister launched into a powerful speech directed at the Leader of the Opposition: I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man, I will not. And the government will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. Not now, not ever. The Leader of the Opposition says that people who hold sexist views and who are misogynists are not appropriate for high office. Well, I hope the Leader of the Opposition has got a piece of paper and he is writing out his resignation. Because if he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn’t need a motion in the House of Representatives, he needs a mirror.
24
Both the content and the passion with which it was delivered ensured that the blogosphere immediately recognized the significance of this speech, which was overlooked by the more traditional press gallery journalists focused on the detail of partisan politicking. The speech caused a sensation, not just in Australia but around the world. 25 The Leader of the Opposition might call on the Prime Minister to ‘stop playing the gender card’, but in just ten days the speech had been watched by more than two million viewers on YouTube.
Figure 4 The major parties rediscover gender
These large and passionate feminist mobilizations appeared to refocus the attention of the Labor Party on the need to pursue its gender advantage. In the 1980s the party had campaigned on extensive women’s policies and highlighted its women candidates. The 1993 federal campaign saw a revival of this approach when Anne Summers was appointed to the Prime Minister’s office in an effort to win back women’s votes. From then on, however, campaign managers increasingly appeared to believe that commitments to gender equality were an electoral liability, particularly among blue-collar voters. 26 In 2010 the Prime Minister had studiously avoided gender issues during the campaign, despite or because of the gender affinity effects revealed by polling. 27 The Australian Election Study showed women as 9 percentage points less likely to have voted for the Coalition than men and 8 percentage points more likely to have voted for Labor – a significant ‘modern gender gap’. 28
Wilcox, The Gender Card, Sun-Herald, 14 October 2012.
There were continuing struggles with women inside the Labor Party over whether a women’s policy would feature in federal campaigns, resulting in a number of bizarre episodes over successive elections. In 2001 the ominous-sounding ‘Kim Beazley’s Plan for Australian Women’ was released just two days before the election. In response to outrage by women within the party over this incident, a women’s policy was duly prepared for the 2004 election − but then launched well before the actual campaign, so as not to interfere with Labor’s family theme. In 2007 the party went to the polls without a women’s policy for the first time in more than 20 years. In 2010 there was a women’s policy, called ‘Equality for Women’, but it was the party’s best-kept secret. It was released the day before the election but without a launch and without being listed among the party’s policies on the Australian Labor Party website. This was reminiscent of the Liberal Party’s women’s policy in 2007, which was released without a launch onto the party’s website two days before the election. In 2010 the Liberal Party did not produce a women’s policy, although the Liberal leader did campaign on paid maternity leave.
The pattern of retreat from women’s policies was repeated at state and territory levels, with only the Greens continuing to produce comprehensive commitments. It was also reflected in struggles over the continued existence of women’s policy bodies. For example, after the 2010 federal election the Prime Minister ‘forgot’ to allocate the status of women portfolio when releasing the details of her new ministry and it had to be hastily added the next day after an outcry. Similarly the Parliamentary Labor Party’s Status of Women Committee, which had been a reliable source of support for the party’s women’s policies, was almost mainstreamed after the election. A News Ltd columnist suggested that as there was now a woman Prime Minister any government machinery to ensure assessment of the gender impact of policy was now irrelevant: ‘Such offices are past their use-by date.’ 29 It was as though the presence of a woman Prime Minister magically erased the social division of labour and ensured that policy became gender-neutral in its effects: evidence was no longer required.
In 2012, however, it was clear that party campaign managers were taking note of the significance of gender campaigning on the internet. In June and December the Prime Minister held receptions at Kirribilli House for ‘mummy bloggers’, bloggers who write for women and have an Australian audience of about 2.5 million. In February 2013 she went on to provide a video message of support for ‘One Billion Rising’ – a global campaign to end violence against women and children featuring dance and other events on St Valentine’s Day. Her International Women’s Day message was also more heartfelt than previously, discussing the ‘ripple of revulsion across the globe’ at outrages against women and addressing her audience as belonging to a ‘global sisterhood of influence’. 30 She broke a week of campaigning in Labor’s blue-collar heartland in western Sydney to deliver a eulogy in Melbourne at the funeral of Joan Child, the first Labor woman elected to the House of Representatives and the first woman Speaker. The Prime Minister particularly relished the way that when Child was first elected she had refused to be photographed baking a cake or holding a vacuum cleaner. 31
Conclusion
It has been interesting to see gender re-emerge as an overt political issue in Australia. It was very much submerged in the 2010 federal election campaign, despite the Labor Party enjoying a large advantage among women voters. The party was focused on winning back support from blue-collar workers in key marginal seats and believed this sector of the electorate would be alienated by any messages about gender equality. Accordingly the Prime Minister carefully avoided gender issues wherever they arose.
Yet the presence of women in Australian parliamentary politics was far from normalized. While women were occupying the positions of Governor-General, Prime Minister and Speaker of the House of Representatives they were also being subjected to violent and degrading sexual commentary on the internet and elsewhere.
By 2012 there was a big shift, with the PM making the sexist treatment of women in politics into an issue that resonated around the world. This was important: maintaining silence over discriminatory treatment in order not to be accused of playing a gender card can condemn others to experience the same treatment. Silence over sexism is unlikely to encourage other women to take up political careers.
Moreover, once the extent of the demeaning treatment of women in politics became known, there was a remarkable social media mobilization around the issue, meshing with the feminist mobilization occurring globally over gendered violence. It brought hope that a gender lens might be applied to Australia’s own political institutions and not just to countries receiving development assistance. Whether such hopes were justified, given the shifting political context, was another matter.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Carol Johnson, Kirsty McLaren, Linda Trimble, Janet Wilson and the Political Science editors provided valuable comments at short notice and I thank them all.