Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for External Territories) Share this | Hansard source

I've been reflecting over the last couple of days on the poor state of affairs within the government, particularly on its representation of women and the possibility that after the next election it will have five women in the House of Representatives. I understand that the Prime Minister has made it very clear that he doesn't think that quotas should be introduced or there's a problem with bullying within his organisation but he believes that everything is hunky-dory, despite the protestations of a number of leading women from the coalition.

While I was reflecting on this I thought I would look back and see why Labor has been so successful. I first came into this place in 1987, which is a bloody long time ago. When I first came into this place the Labor Party in the House of Representatives had only eight women, there was only one woman in the coalition in the House of Representatives and the total proportion of women on both sides, in both houses, was 11.6 per cent of the total membership of the parliament. Contemplate that. When we think about what this parliament should be, who it represents and what it should look like, surely we should be saying that, as near as possible, half of the representatives in this place should be women. By 1994 the number of Labor women in the federal parliament had increased, thankfully, from 11 per cent to 14.4 per cent. Today it stands at 47 per cent. That's not an accident. That's by dint of a number of very, very important people—women in particular—taking the initiative to change the way we do business, to make it the responsibility of the Labor Party to ensure that representation of women was properly accounted for within our membership and within those people who represent the community in this parliament.

It grew out of some great initiatives. Long-term Labor community and women's campaigner Leonie Morgan had seen the work of EMILY's List, an organisation established in the United States in 1985 to fund campaigns for pro-choice Democratic women, and advocated strongly for the establishment of a similar network to support Australian progressive women candidates. Leonie joined with women such as Kay Setches, Joan Kirner and Candy Broad to build support for the idea, in Victoria first and then nationally. And it was in 1996 that EMILY's List was launched here in this place. Those determined women understood the importance of providing support to get women into parliament, and, after a campaign which involved Carmen Lawrence, Julia Gillard, Helen Creed, Jenny Beacham, Judy Spence, Meredith Burgmann, Jan Burnswoods, Carolyn Pickles, Anne Levy, Molly Robson, Sue Mackay and Fran Bladel, the ALP passed its first affirmative action rule as far back as 1994. It's not hard, I say to the Prime Minister. This required women be—a very modest target—35 per cent by 2002.

Despite this landmark achievement, the following federal Labor preselections resulted in the number of women preselected falling. So other action needed to be taken. It's important that the action taken was around driving change and getting the Labor Party to understand that we needed to increase that representation so that it was 50 per cent. And so a new target was set. We stand here today—and I see my colleague next to me here—proudly, looking at the fact that, beyond the next election, there's a very high likelihood that, if things come to pass as we would hope, well over 50 per cent of Labor representation in this parliament will be women. And that's something I think we all should be extremely proud of. I certainly am.

As I look at the despondency in the government benches and see the women jumping ship in the way they've been doing, talking about the bullying that has been happening in what must be a pretty awful organisation, I see no protection from and no advocacy for their position by the Prime Minister. In fact, I saw him standing aside as, only yesterday, one of their potential candidates resigned and said that she was not going to recontest—not because she didn't want to be the member but because of bullying within the organisation.

We all know that parliament can be rough and tough and all that sort of stuff—and we've heard people talking about women 'manning up', for god's sake! Let's be clear about it. We know what some people in the government believe of women, and one particularly offensive individual, Liberal MP Trevor Evans, called Labor women in politics 'cardboard cut-outs'. How bloody offensive!

In our leadership team of four people are two women: the Deputy Leader of the Labor Party, Tanya Plibersek, and the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, Penny Wong. We're proud of this.

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