Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This evening in this place I want to make a few comments about the feelings that some of us had last Thursday when we saw the newspaper report celebrating the success of Liberal women in parliament, and we shared in celebrating that success. However, there was a great deal of frustration expressed by women on this side of the chamber and at state level about the media coverage featured in the Australian that day and also later when people reported on the function. Normally we would take that as part of the media exercise and roll with the whole process. But given the kinds of comments that were made, I felt it would be useful this evening to make some general comments about the hard struggle that women have had to get elected in the first place and the expressions of excitement and celebration around that, and then talk about how we can work and share our experiences and our joy in 2006.

There is no way that there will not be extremely fierce and competitive debates on party politics because that is the job we have chosen to do. But I feel it would be appropriate to express some disappointment and frustration about the comments that were made last week. Instead of celebrating the wonderful success of Liberal women across the states and federally, and most particularly in this place, the media focused that day on the way Labor women are elected, on our motivations and on whether we are here on merit—and merit is a word I am happy to debate in any place at any time—or whether it is something to do with personal relationships.

It is important to reject that kind of debate outright. Instead of being involved most inappropriately in what would be commonly referred to as a ‘bit of a cat fight’, we should express our pride and our strength in the fact that women can work together and make a genuine difference. The real issue is not about scoring points about internal processes in individual party structures.

People, in particular young people, come to this place and sit up in the galleries to see democracy at work, to watch the processes, to look around and see the people sitting in these chairs involved in debate, and to perhaps think about whether this would be the kind of job that they would like to take on themselves in the future. The message that should go out to all young people and to people of every age is that any Australian citizen, regardless of gender or background, can expect to be able to nominate for a political position and then, through the processes of our electoral system, possibly be elected and take their place here.

That is something of which we should be proud. When I look up during debates, I see those young men and women in the gallery. I hope that when they look down here they see women, men and people from different ethnic backgrounds. Hopefully in the future we will have Indigenous people in this place because our parliamentary democracy should represent our community. It should not be separate or different; it should be representative of the community. That is what women hoped they had achieved early in the 20th century when they celebrated—not in this building but in this democracy—at federal and state levels the fact that women had succeeded in getting the vote.

There is a particularly wonderful photograph of our history from the election in the 1940s, when the first two women were elected to this place—Dorothy Tangney from Western Australia and Dame Enid Lyons from Tasmania. I hope you have seen the photograph, Mr Acting Deputy President, of these two women dressed very soberly and walking towards parliament together. They are smiling, maybe because the camera is on them, but they are walking strongly to take up the positions to which they were elected.

They came from extraordinarily different family backgrounds, they came from distinctly different political parties and they were elected to different houses. One was in the House of Representatives and one was in the Senate. But they came together into this parliament. There were great similarities in their first speeches. In fact, Dorothy Tangney—and I did not have the privilege of meeting either of those wonderful women—was very proud that she was elected to represent her state. She was here as a woman but she was elected to represent Western Australia. There was no argument between those two women as they came to take their roles in this wonderful democracy. They did not argue over which one of them was more meritorious. They did not argue over the methodology used by their parties to get them here. They were proud that they had been elected, first of all by their parties to represent them and secondly by their states to be part of the democratic process.

Those were the kinds of feelings being expressed around Australian states and federally when we were struggling to achieve the right to vote and to stand for office. There were major differences in the women’s groups that were formed in the 1890s and leading into the 1900s regarding their backgrounds, their politics and indeed their partners. In my own state of Queensland, some of the strongest feminists fighting to obtain the vote were the partners of the very people in the chamber who were determining whether or not they would receive the vote in Queensland. There were wonderful stories about what would have been going on around the dinner table while those debates were being held.

When the final vote was tallied and the right to vote was given to women in Queensland—about which I am very happy, of course—and also federally, the second expectation was that at some time in the future women would be elected to parliament. It was expected that women would be elected across all the different political movements and that they would take their places and argue on various political points to achieve success for issues which they held dear.

We should consider that history and the fact that we have been able to achieve so much—the number of women elected in the last 10 years has increased dramatically to several hundred at state and federal levels—when we see the media coverage of comments attributed to the national president of the Liberal Party. We know what can happen in media coverage. We have no idea what led to the comments that were publicised all over the media. Nonetheless, that is what the Australian public saw, instead of a celebration of the wonderful achievements of extraordinary Liberal women over the years. We know the first female parliamentary ministers that were elected by their parties were Liberal women and we share in that success. To see the headline ‘Top Lib mocks Labor’s ex-wives club’ does not reflect anything positive on anyone in this chamber, male or female.

After the Liberal dinner was held—congratulations to the people who organised that because it is a great thing to celebrate success, and you may be surprised to know I was not there, Mr Acting Deputy President—the debating point seemed to be whether affirmative action in the Labor Party was less meritorious than the processes used in the Liberal Party. It is an interesting debating point. I am happy to take it on in any way. But in terms of how we can move forward it is not the most positive impetus for future directions.

I am very happy and very proud to have been elected in the Australian Labor Party to the Australian Senate. I will strongly support other women to take on this role and encourage them to do so. But I also think that across the chamber we will be able to change and should not necessarily fall into the kind of cheap debate which does nothing to encourage people to come into this place. We have wonderful people to follow. There is an extraordinarily strong legacy from the women who have been elected at the state and federal levels. We have a wonderful opportunity to succeed in this place and to encourage further women to come here. Any debate about who was and who was not meritorious will not help us in the future and does not promote democracy in our parliaments.