Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is my great pleasure tonight to speak about the enormous contribution made by former Senator Pat Giles. Last week, Dr Giles’s contribution was recognised through her inclusion in the Australia Day honours list. She was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia last Tuesday for services to the community through a number of organisations that promote the interests of women, including the Women’s Electoral Lobby, through the union movement and as a senator for Western Australia for 12 years. As a fellow Western Australian and as someone lucky enough to know Dr Giles, I am delighted that her service to the Australian community and her advocacy on behalf of Australian women has received this recognition.

Pat Giles is part of a powerful network of feminists in the Labor Party who paved the way for the next generation of women, including women parliamentarians like myself. These women were at the forefront of critical campaigns for women’s rights at work, women’s leadership in the trade union movement, abortion law reform, improved education for girls, women-friendly health services, adequate support for single mothers and women’s representation in parliament. I, for one, will never forget that Pat Giles and others like her are behind many of the rights we take for granted today. She is an inspiration to me and a role model. Without her and her sisters in the labour movement, women like me would not be sitting in the chamber today.

It is easy with the passage of time to underestimate the barriers and challenges these women faced and, therefore, to underestimate the extent of their achievement. They made extraordinary progress. When Pat Giles helped establish the Women’s Electoral Lobby in WA in 1973 there were only two women in this chamber. Only seven had ever been elected to the Senate—and, I regret to say, only one of those women came from the Labor Party. Only seven women in over 70 years—an average of less than one a decade. Yet by the time Pat Giles entered this chamber in 1981 there were 10 women in the Senate. Now there are 26—and half of us are Labor women. Since WEL was formed in the early seventies, 67 women have been elected to this chamber, almost 10 times the number elected in those first 70 years.

From our position of relative strength, it is easy to fail to recognise what it must have been like to struggle to break into bastions of male privilege, this chamber included, and then to sit there, among a sea of faces, almost all of them male, and try and find your voice and try and find space for new issues and novel propositions that mattered to you and those you sought to represent. Pat Giles knew what this meant when she sat in her first few ALP National Executive meetings feeling, as she describes it, ignored, invisible and inaudible or when she spoke at her first ACTU Congress in 1977, at a time when, in her words, ‘women were rarely seen and hardly ever heard’ in union forums. As feminist sisters and as daughters of the labour movement, these women knew that the solution to the barriers they faced lay in solidarity, in working with other like-minded women to overcome the obstacles, challenge the conventions and shift the agenda.

Pat embraced this principle of progress through collective action as the inaugural convener of the Women’s Electoral Lobby in Western Australia and of the WA Abortion Law Reform Association, as the chair of the first-ever ACTU women’s committee and as the inaugural chair of the first Labor Caucus Committee on the Status of Women. And these new organising committees were very effective. Two years after Pat Giles first spoke at the ACTU Congress, she was part of a team running maternity leave cases coordinated by the ACTU. Now we are lucky enough to have women in key portfolios. A large proportion of the Labor caucus are women, there are women in cabinet and we have two Labor women as state premiers. So it is easy to underestimate the importance of these women’s committees: the power they gave women in these early years to share insights, organise, be heard and have influence when the numbers were stacked up against them.

Like many of the women of her generation elected to parliament, Pat Giles brought with her a wealth of life experience. She was over 50 when she arrived in this place. She was a mother of five, a qualified nurse and midwife, a successful mature-age university student and a single parent for the last five years. And like many feminist activists of her generation, her first involvement in public life stemmed from and drew on that life experience as an activist for public education, first on her children’s school committees and then on the WA Council of State School Parents and the Australian Council of State School Organisations. Her work as a union organiser for the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union, or LHMU, also drew on this life experience as she fought for a better deal for so-called ‘unskilled’ nursing home and private hospital workers. And it was this experience that informed and motivated her work as a parliamentarian whether she was working for the establishment of the Women’s Education, Employment and Training Group within the Department of Education, Employment and Training or chairing the Select Committee of Inquiry into Aged Care, which exposed the appalling working conditions and inadequate standards of care in nursing homes, or in the international arena, representing Australia at the UN General Assembly on people with a disability, aging and Indigenous people.

When the reactionaries amongst us allege that feminists are only interested in the rights of white middle class women, I see red because, as Pat Giles’s life and work exemplify, nothing could be further from the truth. Her work before, during and after her time in parliament was all about advocacy on behalf of those without a voice—the disempowered, the disadvantaged and the dispossessed, being children, nursing home patients, pregnant women in the workplace, impoverished single mothers, unskilled workers, Aboriginal people and people with a disability. It was the lived experience of caring for the vulnerable and campaigning for the disadvantaged that drove women such as Pat to seek public office. They were convinced by this experience, not only that more women deserved to be in parliament, but also that the community would benefit from having more women in decision-making roles.

Today, women in general and women politicians in particular have all kinds of advantages and protections that women lacked when Pat Giles helped establish WEL in 1973. Pat and her Labor sisters began with little and achieved a great deal and, like many other Labor women of her generation, she has kept on putting back, through the Labor Party, through community organisations and through Emily’s List. It is sobering to realise that with twice the privileges I would be personally proud to achieve half as much. So I offer Pat the warmest congratulations on becoming a Member of the Order of Australia, an honour she so very thoroughly deserves. And I commit myself anew to trying to live up to the legacy left by her generation of Labor feminists.