Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to acknowledge it's been 30 years since the Labor Party adopted affirmative action and set quotas for women in parliament. It worked. At the time, when we had the debates in Labor, it was about changing party culture. We are the oldest political party in this country. We recognised that if we wanted more women to represent the Australian Labor Party then we had to change our culture, and we did that by setting targets. It's changed a few times over the years. At first, it was a target of 35 per cent, then 40, then to what we see today, which is the situation where we are in a government of majority women. That's because our party took the bold step to adopt the change at a party level, to encourage more women to be preselected.

Yesterday, Deputy Speaker Claydon, you and I, and the member sitting at the front desk there, acknowledged it has been 11 years since we were first elected to parliament. I was the first woman ever to be elected to represent the seat of Bendigo. It is a federation seat, and it took 113 years for a major political party to preselect a woman. I was the beneficiary of that and, as a result, we have a first in my seat. Like so many other seats on this side of the House, we have firsts because the Labor Party took the bold step to change its culture, to set quotas and give women an equal voice in this parliament.