(Transcript from World News Australia Radio)
Australia has quietly been marking the 70th anniversary of the election of its first female federal MPs.
Much has changed since that momentous event.
But as Santilla Chingaipe reports, equal gender representation in Australia's parliaments is still far from reality.
Soon after federation in 1901, Australia became one of the first countries in the world to give women the right to vote - and the first to allow them to stand for election.
It would take decades before the first women were elected to the federal parliament.
In the 1943 election, one woman was elected to the House of Representatives, and one to the Senate.
Dame Enid Lyons, then well-known as the widow of former Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, won a Tasmanian House of Representatives seat for the United Australia Party, which later became the Liberal Party.
During her maiden speech, she began by acknowledging the enormity of the occasion.
"Mr Speaker, It would be strange indeed were I not tonight deeply conscious of the fact, if not a little awed by the knowledge, that my shoulders rests a great weight of responsibility; because this is the first occasion upon which a woman has addressed this house. For that reason it is an occasion which, for every woman in the Commonwealth, marks in some degree a turning point in history."
Dorothy Tangney became the first woman Senator as a Labor Party representative of Western Australia.
During her inaugural speech, Senator Tangney was also conscious of being a pioneer but wanted to stress that she wasn't only going to represent women.
"I also realise my great honour in being the first woman to be elected to the Senate. But it is not as a woman that I have been elected to this chamber. It is as a citizen of the Commonwealth; and I take my place here with the full privileges and rights of all honourable senators, and, what is still more important, with the full responsibilities which such a high office entails. I trust that I shall carry out my duties in this chamber with every regard for the dignity and honour of the Senate, and also of the party to which I have the honour to belong."
Emily's List is an organisation that works to support women wanting to become Labor Party politicians.
It claims credit for helping to get more than 150 women into the federal, state and territory parliaments since 1996.
Tanja Kovac is the group's national convener.
Ms Kovac says Dorothy Tangney, and other female politicians that have since followed, suffer from the perception that the only matters that would be interested in relate to women.
She says that is perhaps why Senator Tangney wanted to make that distinction in her maiden speech.
"Firstly that suggests that women's issues are some how divisible from what is just generally important in the community and I think that that's a wrong assessment of the way we look at things that matter to women and so she was probably addressing some of those concerns and I think she was talking about a time when the transformation of having women in parliament also coincided with the growth of the welfare state and there is no mistake why that happened. Women had been doing all of unpaid charitable labour of hospitals and schools and facilities to care for returning servicemen. They had been doing this unpaid for some time."
Dorothy Tangney remained in the Senate for 25 years.
Enid Lyons remained a federal politician for eight years - making history again in the Menzies government in 1949, when she became Australia's first female Cabinet member.
The Inter-Parliamentary Union is a group that represents the world's parliaments.
Its historical data shows that after improving markedly since the days of Dorothy Tangney and Enid Lyons, Australia has gone backwards in the past decade in terms of female representation in its parliaments.
Karen Andrews is the Liberal National Party member for the federal seat of McPherson in Queensland.
She admits there is still a long way to go to achieve equal female representation.
"We're still not at the point where there are sufficient numbers of women to properly represent the gender balance within the community and I very strongly believe that a Parliament should be representative of the people, so there needs to be a greater representation of women both at federal and state parliament."
When Tony Abbott announced his new cabinet, it included only one woman - Foreign Minister Julie Bishop.
Acting Labor leader Chris Bowen was quick to criticise it.
"The cabinet of Afghanistan now has more women in it than the cabinet of Australia. This is a sad day for the senior representation of women in Australian politics."
Melanie Fernandez is the chair of the Women's Electoral Lobby.
She dismisses Tony Abbott's argument that his cabinet ministers were appointed on merit.
"That's pretty offensive to say that there aren't enough women out there to actually fill a reasonable quota of leadership positions in cabinet positions in this government. We're really under represented in federal parliament as it is. There's less than 30 percent of members are women but to then also ensure that there is such little representation in the leadership positions in the cabinet is really problematic progressing gender equity and the issues that are important to women."
Tanja Kovac from Emily's List, agrees.
"Merit is a funny argument: it's only ever talked about by the Coalition or conservative commentators within the context of appointments that encourage people who would other but wise be disengaged or disenfranchised from accessing power. It is not talked about when power uses unmeritorious ways in which to grant more power. What about nepotism? What about purchasing, using your wealth and investments to be able to basically purchase a seat in parliament because you've got the greatest amount of wealth? Not because you're the most talented. What about inheriting a seat because your father had it, your father's father had it?"
In the new parliament, only about 20 per cent of Coalition MPs will be females.
Karen Andrews believes the under-representation is simply a result of women being reluctant to enter politics.
"Because of issues between work and family and the extraoridinary amount of time that politicians spend away from their families. For women it is often a more acute issue, because they are still considered both by themselves and also by our society to be the primary carers for children and so most of the caring for their families falls to women and I think that many women are reluctant to spend significant time away from their families."
Mehreen Faruqi is a Greens MP in the New South Wales parliament.
She's a strong supporter of her party's affirmative action policies for females.
"I can give you the example of the grassroots pre-selection process we had just earlier this year through which I got this role of the Greens MP in the Upper House. One of our Upper House MPs, who is a woman, was resigning and so the party decided that only women would stand to fill that position and so I think other political parties have to think about those sorts of processes to make sure that we do have equal representation. After all, society in Australia is made up of half men and half women so those genders need to be representative in parliament as well."
The Australian Labor Party has a mandatory quota for women to be pre-selected for 40 per cent of winnable seats and this will be roughly the proportion of female Labor MPs in the new federal parliament.
The Liberal Party has had quotas for some internal party positions since the 1940s, but none for parliamentary representation.
Tanja Kovac from Emily's List says the Coalition parties should follow Labor's example.
"There is currently a whole lot of debate among Liberal women why the leading role that the Liberal Party and the Coalition parties played in advancing women's causes has dipped away in the last 30 to 40 years and there's some soul searching and probably some reform to be done on the other side of the house about why they are failing women."
The Pakistan-born Greens MP Mehreen Fahruqi says she wasn't going to allow her gender to get in the way of becoming a politician, and she urges other women to think the same.
"I am an engineer. I'm a civil engineer, so that's a very male-dominated profession and I actually particularly chose to do that and especially in Pakistan which is a very patriachal society to kind of make a point, to try and break the glass ceiling a little bit and maybe provide the opportunity for other women to do that as well."
Lisa Singh is a Labor Senator for Tasmania who describes herself as being Asian Australian.
She argues that while women are needed generally in Australian parliaments, women from non-English speaking backgrounds are particularly under-represented.
"I think we've still got a long way to come there. There are still some people of European origin, very few of Asian origin. I think myself and Penny Wong would probably be the mere two there. And yet we know we are living in the Asian century. We have large Asian diasporas settling here in our country. We are a country that is based on fantastic cultural diversity of different nationalities, ethnicities and the like. Yet that's not so much reflected in our parliament and I think we've got a bit of a way to come there. And I think if I can do anything as a leader and as a Senator to encourage more people of diverse backgrounds to put their hand up, to be part of our democratic system and try to represent people in their electorate, in their communities and the like then that is a really good thing because our Parliament at the end of the day should reflect the communities, the society in which we live."
Doctor Mehreen Fahruqi agrees - but says she sees hopeful changes taking place.
"We have to encourage more women, more diversity in our Parliaments and I hope you know if my being here kind of helps the younger women and men who come from different ethnic backgrounds to take more of a prominent leadership role in communities and in politics I think that will be great. Actually I am seeing that change in the second generation. I know that at the University of New South Wales where I was teaching before I took up this role, for the last 3 or 4 years the presidents of the student unions have been from Indian and Pakistani backgrounds. So that's really great to see and we need to encourage much more of that."
Share
