50% of the spoils?
No doubt the 40 serving and former women Labor MPs who met in Perth on the weekend of November 13-14 to plot their campaign for 50% of state and federal Labor parliamentarians to be women by the year 2000, will be expecting support from their sisters in the broader women's movement. Should they get it?
Margaret Thatcher's stint as head of the British government has disabused most feminists of the notion that lack of a Y chromosome renders one a natural champion of the rights of all women. This simple fact is at least partially recognised by the ALP's "50% by 2000" campaigners.
Former West Australian premier, and now leader of the ALP opposition in WA, Carmen Lawrence, spoke to the media after the Perth meeting. Asked about her support, as a woman, for Senator Bronwyn Bishop's projected move to the federal House of Representatives, Lawrence was unequivocally unsisterly.
"She represents attitudes and values that I can't endorse and that I don't think are progressive of women's interests", she said. "I don't think her views are likely to improve the position of women in political life in this country." During the conference, Lawrence even went so far as to call Bishop "anti-woman".
Most of us would have no argument with that. But is membership of the ALP some kind of magical ingredient which, when combined with female biological characteristics, produces a person committed to progressive change for the benefit all women? It is difficult to see why that would be so.
Presumably ALP members, including the women, have ALP politics. This is the party which is implementing labour market "reforms" which, in the process of driving everybody's wages and conditions down, are increasing the gap between male and female wages and conditions, increasing the already phenomenal levels of gender segregation in the Australian work force and forcing the mass of women into the weakest economic and political bargaining position we have been in for many years.
This is the party which refuses to reform the archaic anti-abortion legislation in Queensland, which closed down the only independent, feminist rape crisis centre in Adelaide and which still refuses to recognise child-care costs as costs necessarily incurred in the process of earning a living.
But this is also the party which, at the margins, won a federal election on the votes of women who felt they had no alternative, and who desperately wanted to believe the ALP women who were trotted out to mouth the empty promise of "complete equality by the year 2000".
I think our "sisters" in the ALP do want "complete equality by the year 2000" — for Carmen Lawrence, Joan Kirner, Anne Warner, Anne Levy and other select few. They may even be able to get 50% of the seats in parliament one day. But until they join the real fight for equality, even they will still suffer, to some extent, the grim realities of a sexist society, even while they play their vital role in its maintenance.
By Karen Fredericks