CART (2)25/07/2012
The Fraser Oration 2012
Canberra
25 July 2012
Andrew Leigh, member for Fraser
Ladies and Gentlemen
It is a pleasure for me to be here tonight to deliver the annual Fraser Oration, a talk that honours the memory of Jim Fraser, the first member for Canberra. I would like to pay tribute to Andrew for continuing the tradition of this talk that was established by Bob McMullan, his predecessor as member for Fraser, the seat named for Jim Fraser. And I would especially like to thank him for selecting me to be the first person to deliver this address since he became its custodian. It is an honour. And I will do my best to meet his expectations.
It is also a treat to be talking in a venue named for Fred Daly.
I knew Fred when I went to work in the Parliamentary Press Gallery in 1979. Although Fred was no longer a member of parliament – he had retired at the 1975 election, after 30 years as member for the Sydney seat of Grayndler – he was a formidable presence around Canberra, his adopted hometown. He was of course known as “the king of Canberra”, a title he may well have bestowed on himself.
Fred was a gifted parliamentarian and debater. He had a way with words. For instance, during the great factional battles within the Labor Party in the 1950s he described the Split as having left the Coalition “laughing all the way to the front benches”. And when he first ran for office his winning electoral slogan was “Give us this day our Daly Fred”.
On going to Canberra in 1943, Fred had two years in federal Parliament under John Curtin’s Prime Ministership before Curtin’s untimely death. Fred was privileged to serve at a time when, as he put it and as was recorded in his obituary by John Farquharson, Parliament contained seven future prime ministers, four former prime ministers “and another half a dozen who could have been. Of all my years this was the most talented Parliament.”[1] I wonder if the current Parliament contains as many potential prime ministers.
IN DECEMBER it will be 40 years since the election of the Whitlam government, Australia’s first modern government and the first to adopt as national policy for the country equality between women and men.
“Men and Women of Australia!” Gough said, opening his campaign speech, with inspiring embracing language.
The goal of equality or, as I am going to call it tonight “the equality project”, was both ambitious and simple.
It was ambitious in that it entailed a radical restructure of virtually all of our institutions in order to reform the old, unequal basis on which most of them operated.
But it was simple because it was easy to outline what needed to happen: barriers to equality needed to be removed, regimes of equality needed to be put in place and women’s particular needs catered to. Equality would be achieved using anti-discrimination laws as a key tool to remove impediments, women would be given equal access to education, jobs and remuneration, and women would be able to exercise reproductive control by having access to contraception and abortion and, of course, childcare and other supports once they had children.
How hard would that be?
Extremely hard, as it turned out
Forty years on we are not even close to achieving equality.
It really is quite absurd when you think about it. Why have we not been able in four decades to bring about a series of changes that are logical, rational, just and of tremendous economic advantage to the nation?
In the past, we had been eager to embrace huge projects for national betterment that were also ambitious yet simple.
How ambitious, and yet how simple, to reroute several rivers, flood a few towns and create a massive hydro project that would generate electricity and provide irrigation waters to parched farmland?
The Snowy River Project was equally logical, rational, just and of tremendous economic advantage. We managed to complete that in just 25 years.
But while we are good at engineering such huge national projects – think also of the Overland Telegraph and, currently, the National Broadband Network – we are not so adept when it comes to engineering social change. In fact, we don’t even like to think of equality in such terms. We – or many of us – would prefer to talk about rights and fairness and entitlements. I would suggest that such talk has not got us what we want and maybe it is time to take another approach.
The question I want to explore this evening is this: Why have we Australians denied ourselves the benefits of equality? Why have we been so irrational as to forego the economic and other advantages that would stem from the equality project?
I will approach it from a number of directions, looking at where governments have failed us, and also at where the women’s movement has been side-tracked, derailed or, on occasions, just lost the plot and to some extent been the author of its own misfortunes. But it is not just the responsibility of the women’s movement to steer the kind of comprehensive national change that the equality project requires.
In addressing this topic, I am not going to talk about feminism.
Discussing feminism has become a major distraction from the equality project. We talk about feminism when we should be talking about equality; we confuse ideology with outcome. And feminism has become, especially in the eyes of the media, a credential. Are you or aren’t you? And if you are not, why not?
Last year, along with three other women – Germaine Greer, Elizabeth Evatt and Eva Cox – I was honoured by being put on an Australian stamp for, as the Australia Post citation put it, my role in “Advancing Equality”. The four of us did a lot of media and the one question we were constantly asked was: “Are you upset that young women don’t call themselves feminists?”
I was relieved that each of the others gave the same answer as I did: we didn’t care what women call themselves, it’s what they think and how they act that matters. The (mostly female) journalists were taken aback by this answer. Surely, they had imagined, these ancient feminists would insist that the next generation conform to their example.
Not so. Let me explain why.
Increasingly, feminism is given agency, as if “it” of itself had power, and could make thing happen, or stop things from happening. For instance, it’s “a victory for feminism” if a woman is appointed to an important job. Or it’s “a setback for feminism” if she isn’t. Almost everything to do with women is viewed through the prism of feminism. I am not sure this is especially helpful. Just look at what happens when a woman who declares she is NOT a feminist is appointed to a big job?
This occurred last week with the appointment of Marissa Mayer to be CEO of Yahoo, the global internet search company. Mayer is a heavy-hitter in the IT world and stands to gain $100 million if she can turn Yahoo around. She is also young, blonde, attractive and – she announced after her appointment – six months pregnant. She will not take maternity leave, she said, but will return to work two weeks after the birth.
The media could not make up its mind what the story was: the appointment of a woman to a big IT job (“victory for feminism”), the fact that a CEO was pregnant (“see how far we’ve come, i.e. victory for feminism”, or the fact that she had disowned feminism (“setback for feminism”). Or all three. Or none of the above. Maybe the various elements of the story cancelled each other out.
Perhaps the most absurd comment came from a writer at New York magazine who said “… it is perhaps an indictment of feminism that when a woman ascends to the tippy top of a testosterone-drenched field and accepts a job that will require from her unending hours of work and an ability to maneuver politically and a visibility that extends far beyond her office suite, her gender remains very much notable. “[2]
Whatever that means.
So let’s stop talking about feminism and instead let’s talk about success.
In saying this, I am taking my lead from US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, who in an important speech that went unreported in this country, laid out what needs to be done for women globally to achieve equality.
She delivered this speech last September to the APEC Women and the Economy Summit, a gathering she hosted and which was, she noted, the largest gathering of foreign diplomats to assemble in San Francisco since the founding of the United Nations. Her speech dealt with the urgent need to completely unlock the economic potential of women in order to get the global economy moving again.
I will return to some of the substance of her speech later on in my remarks but for now I just want to quote her as follows: “If women are already making such contributions to economic growth, why do we need a major realignment in our thinking, our markets, and our policies? Why do we need to issue a declaration from this summit? Well, because evidence of progress is not evidence of success…”[3]
This is, I believe, a truly revolutionary insight.
For the past forty years, we have looked at progress. We have measured and counted and tallied and in doing so, thought we were making headway. We have not looked at success. We perhaps assumed the two were synonymous.
Let me quickly review what has been achieved under the governments of the past forty years so that we can understand the limitations of using “progress” as our yardstick.
The Whitlam era (1972-75) was brief but it managed to set the parameters of the equality project: the position of women’s advisor created; the contraceptive pill was put on the PBS making it cheaper; a supporting mothers benefit was introduced; equal minimum wage decreed; paid maternity leave introduced for federal public servants; no-fault divorce and the Family Court established; government-funded child care was begun and funding was made available for women’s services such as health centres, family planning, refuges and rape crisis centres, anti-discrimination legislation was introduced (but not passed because of the premature dismissal of the government).
The Fraser era (1975-1983) introduced family allowances (a non-means-tested payment directly to mothers); it mostly maintained but did not expand the parameters established by the Whitlam government except that it downgraded the status and power of the women’s advisory function.
The Hawke/Keating era (1983-1996) passed sex discrimination and affirmative action legislation; massively expanded child care places and a established a rebate and other tax measures to help with costs; established the Child Support Agency and initiated a system to collect payments from non-custodial parents; reinstated the women’s advisory function to the prime minister’s department and established women’s desks in every federal department, created the Women’s Budget Program to put pressure on federal departments to review their policies for their “impact on women”.
The Howard era (1996-2007) saw women’s equality stall and in many respects go backwards. As I have outlined in great detail in my book The End of Equality,[4] Howard used taxation, employment, welfare and other policy quite ruthlessly to achieve his ideological goal of encouraging mothers to stay out of the workforce. He created the baby bonus; downgraded the Office for the Status of Women; reduced the Sex Discrimination Commissioner’s power; watered down and changed the name of the Affirmative Action Agency to Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA); abolished the Women’s Bureau and all the departmental desks; converted the Women’s Budget Program into a PR document designed to “sell” government policies on women; drastically reduced funding for child care, including reducing the amount payable under the child care rebate and encouraging the privatization of child care with disastrous results: the ABC Learning Centres debacle.
The Rudd/Gillard era (2007- present) saw the child care rebate increased to 50 per cent of capped costs and, initially, indexed; gender pay equity legislated for in the Fair Work Act; a paid parental leave scheme introduced; government support and funding for huge pay rises for community sector workers after a Fair Work ruling granted them equal pay; the Australian Defence Force opens all positions, including combat, to women.
During these forty years, women have won or been appointed to key positions: Governor-General; Prime Minister; Attorney-General; Premier; High Court Judge; Chief Justice; cabinet minister; member of parliament; CEO; COO; CIO; Ambassador and many more jobs that forty years ago were the exclusive domain of men.
(It is worth remembering that there was not a single woman in the Whitlam ministry; indeed, there were no women in the House of Representatives in 1972 although Joan Child, who would later become the first – and still the only – female Speaker of the House of Representatives – was elected in 1974.[5]
But if we have made progress, with these policies and with these positions, can we claim to have succeeded with our equality project?
Let’s do a bit of a stock take.
If we look at contemporary Australia through the prism of some recent domestic and international statistics, this is what we find:
- Australia ranks equal Number 1 in the world for women’s educational attainment (literacy, completion of high school and graduating from tertiary institutions) according to the 2010 World Economic Forum Gender Gap Index[6]
- But when it comes to women’s labour force participation we rank Number 45 (out of 135 countries)
- Australian women’s participation rate in the labor market is just 59 per cent[7], compared with 72 per cent for men, and 67 per cent for women in a comparable economy such as Canada.
- When it comes to workforce participation for women aged 25-44 – the prime childbearing and rearing years – we rank 19 out of the 30 OECD economies
- Women get just 82.6[8] per cent of men’s earnings
- Women have far less superannuation than men; in 2007 they averaged just $53,200 compared with men’s average account balance of $87,600[9]
IN OTHER WORDS women in Australia today work less, earn less and retire with less than men. This is, quite frankly, a very scary situation. And it is not getting any better.
In 1984 when I headed the Office of the Status of Women I used to give lots of speeches where I pointed out the progress women were making. Just look at the closing gap on pay, I used to say. It is now 82 per cent but given that just a few years earlier it had been 67 per cent, this is a sign of our inexorable progress.
I could never in a million years have imagined back then that in 2012 I would giving speeches saying that the gender pay gap had scarcely moved in 30 years – and indeed that on some indicators is actually worse. We also have to face the grim reality that this pay inequality is now firmly entrenched.
In 2008 the AMP/NATSEM (National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling) report titled She Works Hard for the Money projected that “if current earning patterns continue, the average 25 year old male starting work today will earn $2.4 million over the next 40 years, while the average 25 year old female will earn $1.5 million”.[10]
In other words a $900,000 difference. Almost a million dollars.
The way I see it, there is a million dollar penalty to being a young woman in Australia today. It is in effect a gender tax.
It’s even worse when you factor in education and childbearing.
The same reports has calculated that “men who hold a bachelor degree or higher and have children can expect to earn around $3.3 million over their working life”. And what will women with similar education and children expect to earn: $1.8 million or nearly half the amount men will take home.[11]
Nor is the fact that the gap between women and men’s retirement incomes is projected to increase. According to the Women and Super website, by 2019 men will have $121,000 while women’s will be $77,000.
In 2011 (the latest Gender Gap Index report), Australia ranked 23 in the world for gender equality.
Not bad, and the same as 2010 when we were also No 23, except that a new country joined the world that year so we were now 23/135 meaning we had actually slipped one ranking. But that was nothing compared with what has happened in the past seven years.
The alarming news is that we are GOING BACKWARDS. Today we might be Number 23 but in 2007 we were 17. And back in 2005, when the Howard government was still in power, we were 15. In other words, in the years of the Rudd/Gillard governments Australia’s international gender gap rating has fallen, and fallen quite sharply. And the reason? Our low workforce participation rate for women.
So we have made a lot of progress, as measured by the legislative and other accomplishments of governments over the past forty years. But has this progress indicated success?
I am going to argue that it does not. In fact it is cruelly deceptive, because our Enlightenment values tend to make us equate progress with betterment, which is another word for success. This optimistic view of the world cannot easily conceptually accommodate setbacks or reversals and that is one of its drawbacks.
Even within the overall trajectory of progress of the past forty years, there have been significant instances of such reversals and we need to be able to account for these. For instance, the number of women in the federal parliament actually went down in 2010. And in the 2012 Queensland elections, that state went from having the highest number of women parliamentarians to the lowest (from 35 per cent to 20 per cent)[12].
Similarly, Campbell Newman’s government in Queensland today is following the example of the Howard government in Canberra in the 1990s in abolishing or slashing the women’s policy advice function. (Without advice there can be no policy).
FOR THE EQUALITY PROJECT to succeed, we – and I especially include governments in this “we” – need to understand the interconnectedness of policy. There is a logic not just to individual policies but to how they relate to each other. The sustainability, or otherwise, of policy is a key element of success.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the two key areas of policy where, in my view, the Rudd/Gillard governments have – so far at least – not succeeded.
I am talking about child care and equal employment policies.
It is a statement of the bleeding obvious to say that in order for women to be able to be part of the labour market they need child care. And child care needs to accommodate a range of situations and age groups so it needs to be comprehensive and flexible as well as affordable.
Current policy fails on all criteria.
In fact, it is difficult to think of another area of policy where the government spends upwards of $5 billion a year with such meager political benefits. Few people are happy with current child care; it is either unavailable, unaffordable, or insufficiently flexible to meet the needs of large numbers of women.
In March 2011 the Commonwealth Bank released the results of national research it had conducted on childcare. The headline result was that one in four women are working for nothing.[13]
The findings were based on a market research survey of 2000 Australians conducted in November 2010. The key relevant finding was that “31 per cent of families that have returned to work [i.e. the mother has returned to work after childbirth] use paid childcare. Among these parents, 11 per cent say childcare fees outweigh their earnings. For a further 13 per cent, the cost of care means they will only break even.”
It has been noted recently that while government spending on child care has more than tripled since 2005, the number of children in care has grown by only 20 per cent. In the next four years, spending is projected to grow by 15.3 per cent but the number of children in care by just 2 per cent.[14]
Just yesterday the government released results of an Australian Institute of Family Studies report that shows that two out of three families with primary school children where the mother is employed do not use any kind of formal care.[15] The reasons for this are varied but the cost and lack of flexibility of current arrangements are bound to be a contributing factor.
Fortunately, the prime minister has recently been made aware of the shortcomings of child care policy and has instigated a policy review. We can only hope that this review will be expertly conducted so as to ensure that any changes represent improvements.
Policy needs to address not just the factors I have already mentioned but our failure to harmonise work, family and school. We have had forty years to start addressing this. As far as I can tell, we have done nothing. School children still get 12 weeks holidays while their parents get 4; the school day starts at around the same time as the office day but ends much earlier; parents with children in care and in school are required to exercise superhuman logistical exercises, through heavy traffic in many cities, to drop off and collect their offspring, often from more than one location, and before centres close and the kids are sent down to the police station.
One of the most disappointing acts of the Rudd government was the abrupt, and inadequately explained, cancellation in 2008 of the 260 new child care centres. Earlier, Tanya Plibersek, when she was shadow minister for women, had bragged about Labor’s child care policy in a debate at the National Press Club before the 2007 election:
You would have heard many, many months ago about our commitment to deliver 260 new childcare centres in areas of high need, particularly on school grounds. That incidentally is the sort of smart policy I think you get when you’ve got lots of women on your front bench and in your caucus. The people who’ve actually done the running around dropping the kids off in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon, know the value of ending the double drop off. [16]
There was nothing smart about cancelling that commitment.
I have been struck by the contrast with France where, according to Emma- Kate Symons, an Australian journalist who reports from Paris, French women have the highest fertility-rate in Europe (2.1 per cent compared with Australia’s below replacement rate of 1.8 per cent) yet still are economically active.
French feminist Elizabeth Badinter has written a book, The Conflict, that tries to explain why French women have more children. Says Symons: “Badinter links it to the fact that they don’t have to give everything up: i.e. they go back to work, they don’t breastfeed much, they have good state-backed childcare and importantly the culture and the mentality does not heap guilt upon them for doing so. No one thinks it is ‘bad’ to put your young child in a creche/childcare and go back to work. This judgmental attitude that prevails in Australia is almost entirely absent I have noted in France.
“That’s also because their childcare system is overall very professional and well-thought out and directly linked to the school system (often in the same building or across the road all very convenient if you have more than one child!). Also, there’s none of this carry-on about middle-class welfare because well welfare is middle-class in France, a country of middle class people. The state is seen as responsible for providing quality, affordable multiple childcare and early childhood education options for parents. No question.”[17]
Vive la France, is all I can say.
The other policy area that has so far failed is the EOWA reform process.
It has now been almost five years since Labor came to power and it has yet to fulfill its promise to reverse the gutting of EOWA’s powers that took place under the Howard government.
In fact, this government’s attitude towards EOWA and its important work was made brutally apparent when, soon after the change of government, Employment Minister and deputy prime minister Julia Gillard had EOWA moved from her department to the welfare portfolio.
It is almost unbelievable that the government has treated a policy so intrinsic to monitoring women’s equality in the workplace so shabbily. I don’t have time this evening to recount the entire sad story of endless consultations (in 2009 and 2010), of draft legislation being effectively vetoed by business, then revived after union and women’s representations. But the net result is that as we approach the end of 2012, the legislation is still not passed.
It went through the House of Representatives last session but was not given priority in order to have it pass the Senate. There is grave concern on the part of women monitoring the process that time is running out for effective legislation to be implemented.
The bill, as drafted, is weak. Any teeth it will have will be in the instruments setting out the performance indicators and minimum standards that companies will be required to comply with. These are not in the legislation but, as set out in the explanatory memorandum, need to be determined by the Minister who is given broad discretionary powers.
The reporting regime is due to begin on 1 April next year and here it is, almost August, and companies still have no idea what they are going to be required to report. Some organizations will no doubt be hoping that an early election will mean the legislation never sees the light of day, and they can go back to their bad old ways of treating women unequally at work.
It is a sad day, I believe, when the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) can develop and put in place a set of gender reporting requirements for all their members far more quickly and effectively than can a Labor government.
I would like to return to the APEC speech delivered by Hillary Clinton where she said: “The Economist points out that the increase in the employment of women in developed countries during the past decade has added more to global growth than China has, and that’s a lot. And in the United States, a McKinsey study found that women went from holding 37 per cent of all jobs to nearly 48 per cent over the past 40 years, and that in sheer value terms, these women have punched well above their weight”.
“The productivity gains attributable to this modest increase in women’s overall share of the labor market accounts for approximately one-quarter of the current US GDP. That works out to more than three and a half trillion dollars, more than the GDP of Germany and more than half the GDPs of both China and Japan”.
She also cited a Goldman Sachs study that measured the likely impact on GDP in a number of developed countries were women to participate in the economy at the same rate as men. The Australian version of this study estimated our GDP would increase by 11 per cent.[18]
You’d think a government determined to promote growth would be throwing our best brains at how to make this happen. Instead, it ignored Henry report recommendations; pretty much disregarded the advice of the EOWA consultations; and further downgraded the women’s policy advice function.
The role of the women’s movement within the equality project could easily be the subject of an entire oration. It is worth exploring in great detail. For instance, was our decision to literally get into bed with government, by working on the inside, at the expense of ensuring the movement maintained political efficacy? We embraced the partnership – indeed we invented a term (“femocrat”) to describe the work we did. And it was an effective means of making progress, of moving the agenda along. It did not take into account, however, what would happen if government decided to end the agreement.
Our dependency on government meant we did not develop strong, independent means of operating and – especially – of raising money. Women lack the political clout of the mining lobby or the union movement. And yet our contribution to the economy equals and perhaps exceeds any other sector. Maybe it is time to mobilize…
The equality project needs constant vigilance. Ideally, all arms of society – including government – would be in step towards ensuring its success.
I greatly admire the way in which Hillary Clinton has thoroughly integrated the economic empowerment of women into US foreign policy goals. The way she has done this is explained in a thoughtful and often entertaining speech by Meryl Streep as she introduced Clinton at the Women in the World conference in New York City March 2012:
Streep mentioned that every State Department desk officer is required to know the fertility rate of the country he or she is responsible for.
It is exactly this kind of intelligence that informs successful policy. It is what is still lacking in Australia, and what is needed if we are to ever claim success for the equality project. As we need to because, to quote Clinton again, “we don’t have a gender to waste”.
Thank You.
[1] Farquharson, John, ‘Daly, Frederick Michael (Fred) (1913–1995)’, Obituaries Australia, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://oa.anu.edu.au/obituary/daly-frederick-michael-fred-1551/text1613, accessed 22 July 2012
[2] Lisa Miller, “Symbolism on Board. Marissa Mayer and the Lessons of Sarah Palin”. New York 21 July, 2012 http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/marissa-mayer-2012-7/ Accessed 22 July, 2012
[3] http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2011/09/172605.htm Accessed 22 July, 2012
[4] Anne Summers, The End of Equality. Work, Babies and Women’s choices in 21st century Australia Random House, 2003. Also available as an e-book from the Random House website http://www.randomhouse.com.au/ebooks/
[5] Joan Child lost her seat of Henty in Victoria in the 1975 landslide defeat of the Whitlam although she regained it in 1980 and went on to become Speaker in the Hawke government from 1986 to 1989. Child was the first ALP MHR but there had previously been three women members: Enid Lyons, UAP/LIB (1943-1951), Doris Blackburn IND LAB (1946-1949) and Kay Brownbill LIB (1966-1969). Source: Joy McCann and Janet Wilson, Representation of women in Australian parliaments Parliament of Australia. Parliamentary Library Background Note 7 March 2012 http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/library/prspub/1136144/upload_binary/1136144.pdf;fileType=application%2Fpdf#search=%22mccann%20wilson%22
[6] World Economic Forum, Global Gender Gap Report 2011 http://www.weforum.org/issues/global-gender-gap/
[7] Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency Gender workplace statistics at a glance July 2012 www.eowa.gov.au
[8] Ibid.
[9] Women & Super website: http://www.womenandsuper.com.au/Essentials/SuperGenderGap Reports that in 2009-10 men had an average of $71,645 in super compared with $40,475 for women.
[10] She Works Hard for the Money. Australian women and the gender divide AMP/NATSEM Income and Wealth Report Issue 22 April 2009 http://www.natsem.canberra.edu.au/publications/?publication=ampnatsem-income-and-wealth-report-issue-22-she-works-hard-for-the-money
[11] Ibid.
[12] The gender composition of all Australian parliaments is tracked and regularly updated by the Parliamentary Library in Canberra. Current tables can be seen at their website:http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/Browse_by_Topic/~/media/05%20About%20Parliament/54%20Parliamentary%20Depts/544%20Parliamentary%20Library/Browse%20by%20topic/Currentwomen.ashx
[13] CBA Viewpoint need details p. 12
[14] Adam Creighton, “Broken puzzle of childcare” The Weekend Australian 21-22 July, 2012 p. 15
[15] Many Australian families managing without childcare http://www.aifs.gov.au/institute/media/media120723.html
[16] National Press Club debate between Tanya Plibersek and Sharman Stone, October 24, 2007
[17] Emma-Kate Symons, private communication to author July, 2012
[18] Tim Toohey, David Colosimo and Andrew Boak Australia’s Hidden Resource: The Economic Case for Increasing Female participation Goldman Sachs JB Were Research Report 26 November 2009