This is the third in a three-part series looking at what needs to be done to make Parliament House a safe place for all. Read the series here.
This election was a decisive reversal of two decades of gender equity decline in the Australian federal government. Female representation has rebounded 10% over the previous Parliament — women will represent 38% of the total members in the House and more than 50% of positions in the Senate.
The community independents — who really stole the show — are also largely female, as well as working mothers. Further, a large proportion of the volunteers supporting each member of the newly expanded crossbench were also women, mothers and grandmothers.
If nothing else, the results have taught us that Australians, particularly women, are sick to death of the way politics has been done for decades. They are reclaiming their voices by actively supporting and electing people who have lived experiences that might help them relate to the struggles of the everyday working Joanne.
There are 20 female first-time members heading into the lower house. They are CEOs, healthcare workers and academics. They are successful professionals. They will have to balance the demands of their families with the demands of a very exacting job — something that they are each quite practised in.
They were elected because they spoke directly to their communities, including about cost-of-living concerns such as childcare expenses. And Australians chose to say yes, we want improved gender diversity in our government, and we want people who understand our struggles and have ideas to address them.
But an increase in female representation may not be enough to force a meaningful shift in the structures of parliamentary participation. We need material structural change to make political life more family-friendly for people of all genders.
One only needs to look so far as recent chief minister for the Northern Territory, Michael Gunner, who resigned in May because the burdens of his job were too much for life as a father to little kids.
But it could. And arguably it should.
If we have learnt nothing else through the past three years of COVID and remote work, we have surely discovered that bums in office chairs do not necessarily equate to better productivity outcomes for workers or employers. A study out of Stanford University showed that work-from-home arrangements resulted in a 13% increase in productivity. There is no reason to believe the job of governing is best served by 20 weeks a year of physical attendance at Parliament House.
The technology exists to make Parliament just as remotely accessible as any other workplace. It is not “special” in that regard.
When Greens Senator Larissa Waters chose to breastfeed her daughter in the chamber in 2017, it was read by many as a feminist political statement. But in the intervening five years, has the cultural needle shifted sufficiently to say that parenting in Parliament could be if not the norm at least a norm?
For a long time, I have argued we need to refocus the way we think about gendered workforce participation. We constantly hear cries for “returning women to the workforce”, but I believe that argument is incorrectly ordered. Instead, I argue for “returning men to the home”.
Thinking about the problem of participation in this way, we can recentre the domestic as meaningful and important. As a byproduct, we improve women’s access to paid labour — or in this case, political participation — while simultaneously improving men’s access to family and domestic responsibilities. In countries with more equitable domestic arrangements, you see improved familial relationships, happier children and better mental health outcomes.
This isn’t just about improving access to political representation for women but for people with all kinds of familial and personal obligations. Real diversity. Women included.
We could put an end to the farcical mad panic when the lights flash in Parliament House to announce a vote and everyone has to run to get into the room within a limited window of time. I’m talking middle-aged (and older) men and women racing through the halls of Parliament to get into a specific room to sit in a specific chair and cast a physical vote.
They could do that from the quiet of their offices. Or even from home, in their electorates, where they are infinitely more accessible to the people they represent.
Moreover, our Parliament sits for an average of 10 hours a day, 67 days of the year, spread over 20 sitting weeks. That is a matter of procedural choice. There have been different patterns of sitting days over the course of Australia’s political history and there is no reason parliamentary sitting hours could not be rendered more family-friendly. It is a choice.
Creating a structure that allowed for remote participation, and more typical and predictable hours, would improve the participation of people of all kinds with all sorts of obligations and interests that might actually make them better and more creative problem-solvers and decision-makers.
Until we get a more accessible Parliament, we will never see true diversity of representation in our government.
