Media Tarts Read online

  Dedication

  To my parents, Judy and Bruce

  and my friend Martha

  Contents

  Dedication

  Foreword by Annabel Crabb

  Introduction to 2021 edition

  Introduction to 2004 edition

  Prelude

  1.Steel Sheilas: female MPs, ambition and power

  2.Housewife Superstars

  3.Florence Bjelke-Petersen: pumpkin politics

  4.Political Superwomen and MP Mums

  5.Feminist Politicians: ‘waving the flag of feminine feminism’

  6.The Cover Girls: ‘Forget policy, I’ve got great legs!’

  7.Natasha Stott Despoja: the ‘impossible princess’

  8.Cheryl Kernot: from Wunderfrau to whore

  9.Sex and the ‘Stiff-Dick Syndrome’

  10.Saint Carmen: canonisation and crucifixion

  11.How to Succeed in Politics Without a Penis

  Postlude: Pauline Hanson: ‘a man’s woman’

  Conclusion

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Notes

  About the Author

  Copyright

  A Deployment of Fashion

  In Australia, a lone woman

  is being crucified by the Press

  at any given moment.

  With no unedited right

  of reply, she is cast out . . .

  . . . she goes down, overwhelmed

  in the feasting grins of pressmen, and Press women . . .

  It is done for the millions.

  Sometimes the millions join in

  with jokes: how to get a baby

  in the Northern Territory? Just stick

  your finger down a dingo’s throat.

  Most times, though, the millions

  stay money, and the jokes

  are snobbish media jokes:

  Chemidenko. The Oxleymoron.

  Spittle, like the flies on Black Mary.

  After the feeding frenzy

  sometimes a ruefully balanced last lick

  precedes the next selection.

  Les Murray, 1997

  Foreword

  Rereading Julia Baird’s seminal book Media Tarts gives me two distinct feelings. One is admiration — nearly two decades after it was first published, this book still stands up well. The other is depression, because the reason it still stands up well is that the issues Media Tarts documents for women in parliament haven’t gone away.

  Since its publication, of course, women have made astounding inroads. There’s been a female prime minister, a female governor-general, two female foreign ministers, two female defence ministers, and a mounting horde of female MPs who have managed the juggle of young children with parliamentary careers in a way that still seemed exotic in 2004. Baird, who charted the shocking experience of Ros Kelly in 1983 when she became the first federal MP to give birth while in office, cannot but be heartened, one assumes, by the baby boom of recent years, including the talented young Labor MP Anika Wells who in the plague year of 2020 welcomed twins.

  There’s been a fleet of female premiers — so many that they have ceased to be particularly unusual — though new inductees into this league still run the risk of vapid media coverage like the sort afforded to Lara Giddings by the Australian in 2011. Under the front-page headline ‘Leftist Lara Still Looking For Mr Right’, the first paragraph of the news story announcing Ms Giddings’s elevation to the premiership read: ‘Lara Giddings says she still hopes to meet the “right man” but for now she’s happy to give all her time to being Tasmania’s first female Premier.’

  The occasional facepalm moment notwithstanding, progress has unquestionably been made.

  And yet, in early 2021, we witnessed a spectacular eruption of what has lain beneath, all these years. The volcanic emergence of Brittany Higgins’s story of alleged rape in the ministerial wing of Parliament House has redrawn the political landscape. Female politicians and staffers have begun to talk about episodes and experiences they had erstwhile kept secret.

  For a building in which the Sex Discrimination Act was created — drafted and propelled through the Hawke cabinet and then the parliament by the late Susan Ryan, who was at the time the only woman at the cabinet table — it appears that the parliament harbours an extraordinary subculture of sexist behaviour and harassment.

  It’s been shocking, particularly for those who have addressed themselves to the numbers task of getting women elected to parliament, trusting that equal representation would bring its own reward of a fairer and more balanced culture in parliament.

  What has become clear is that for women, getting into parliament is one step. Being heard and respected once you’re there is another. And the first does not presuppose the second.

  *

  The year 2021 marks the centenary of Edith Cowan’s election. In March 1921, she became the first woman elected to any Australian parliament when she won the seat of West Perth in the WA parliament.

  She was treated differently from day one, as you can imagine. There was no toilet for her in the building (she had to duck home when nature called). The long-held tradition of listening to the maiden speech of a new MP in courteous silence was — in Edith’s case — not observed. She was interrupted and jeered more than a dozen times.

  To honour Edith’s anniversary, I set about interviewing some of Australia’s surviving female political ‘firsts’ for an ABC documentary series reflecting on the experience of parliament for women over the century. These interviewees came from a variety of party backgrounds and eras. But the one thing almost all of them had in common was this observation: when they found themselves in a meeting with lots of men, they noticed that their ideas would sometimes be ignored, only to be picked up with enthusiasm once a man repeated them. We found archival footage of Nancy Buttfield (the first female senator from South Australia, elected in 1955) remarking upon this phenomenon, and a chorus of current and former female parliamentarians echoed her observations in arrestingly similar terms. Everyone from Julia Gillard to Sarah Hanson-Young to Bronwyn Bishop said the same thing.

  How extraordinary that the experience of finding oneself somehow inaudible in a room was so common that women joked about it regularly between themselves.

  This question of audibility is a central one. The woman who is ignored in a committee meeting and the woman who chooses not to speak about being sexually assaulted for fear of losing her career are deeply connected. They’re responding to the same culture. It’s a culture that prizes men’s experience over women’s, that listens out for men’s voices and erases women’s.

  But it’s changing. The courage of a new cohort of young women who refuse to shoulder a burden of guilt and shame that does not belong to them, plus the influence of senior female journalists who do not minimise the significance of sexual harassment and assault, have created a new age of audibility for women in politics.

  It’s a perfect time to revisit Media Tarts, which is almost an oral history of women in the parliaments of Australia; a conversation between women across party lines and across the generations that is only now becoming audible to a wider audience.

  Julia Baird – herself a young journalist when she conducted these interviews and compiled the book – has matured since its publication into one of Australia’s most thoughtful and erudite writers on gender. Her warmly perceptive style is evident throughout the work, coaxing recollections from female MPs about details of their professional lives from the relatively trivial to the profound.

  How often are women in politics asked in depth about gender? Most are familiar with the handful of questions at the end of an interview; pretty much every woman I spoke to for the ABC series harbours, I know, a dee
p caution about discussing gender ‘too much’, lest her gender become all that people see when they look at her.

  It’s only when you hear all their accounts together, in a book like this, that the near-unanimity of experience is laid bare. I found Media Tarts striking and instructive when first I read it. In a new era of attentiveness to women’s experience, let its new iteration fire the pistons of change.

  Annabel Crabb

  May 2021

  Introduction to 2021 edition

  Lava flows slowly. Following an eruption, a burning mass of melted rock can snake down slopes, hills and streets for months, steadily glowing red, quietly devouring anything in its path. It cannot be controlled, hurried or hushed. It can only be respected, as molten earth should be, and allowed to run its course.

  This is what I saw when I stood on the fringe of the crowds at the Women’s March 4 Justice in Sydney in March 2021, taking notes with my teenage daughter by my side.

  It was an unstoppable lava flow of dissent, which saw thousand-strong crowds throng the streets of Australia — Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Darwin, Hobart, Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, and a host of regional towns, including Alice Springs, Armidale, Bathurst, Bundaberg, Byron, Cairns, Gosford, Kangaroo Island and Warrnambool.

  I had never seen so many women so angry as in the few weeks prior. Deeply, implacably, unmovingly angry, as though pent-up fury was steadily spilling from their collective core.

  The marching slogan was clear: ‘Enough is Enough’.

  This wasn’t a spontaneous outburst, but the eruption of long-held, boiling frustration at the absence of accountability and consequences for perpetrators of sexual assault, the failings of the criminal justice system, the lack of interest and action by our most powerful politicians — and the fact that most of them are still male.

  On 15 February 2021, former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins told journalists she had allegedly been raped on a ministerial couch in a ministerial office two years earlier, which her superiors had failed to respond to, and which she had not reported to police because she feared losing her job. A stunning series of stories exposing misogyny and treatment of women swiftly followed, ranging from the unethical to the criminal.

  The next — and even more politically explosive story — was an allegation that the attorney-general Christian Porter had sexually assaulted a woman thirty years earlier. The story sickened thousands, not just with horror but with familiarity. Porter robustly and repeatedly denied the allegations, and began legal proceedings against the ABC for defamation.

  The police were unable to investigate this case because the alleged victim was now dead, having taken her own life. Her friends asked to testify on her behalf, proposing an independent inquiry.

  And Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s insistence that to establish any kind of inquiry into the matter, given that the charges were being made against the nation’s most senior legal figure, would flout the ‘rule of law’ — even though leading lawyers had suggested it would uphold the same — and his lack of interest in familiarising himself with the facts of the case had inflamed women across all sectors of the community. Higgins left politics; Porter changed portfolios but remained in cabinet. After mediation, he dropped his case against the ABC. In turn, the public broadcaster affixed a note to an online article about the allegations saying they ‘did not intend to suggest that Mr Porter had committed the criminal offences alleged’. They added: ‘However, both parties accept that some readers misinterpreted the article as an accusation of guilt against Mr Porter. That reading, which was not intended by the ABC, is regretted.’ The calls for an independent inquiry have continued.

  At the rally, the placards repeatedly expressed utter weariness.

  ‘I’m twelve and already sick of this shit.’

  ‘I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit!’

  One woman dressed as a suffragette held in her gloved hand a sign reading: ‘Still protesting this shit . . . FFS, it’s 1911 2021!!’

  It was obvious that what was being protested was not new, just another iteration of an ancient story of women being assaulted, belittled, ignored, slut-shamed, punished and shoved aside as powerful institutions somehow, just naturally, as though requiring no effort whatsoever, continued to protect the men involved, even from allegedly criminal acts.

  A story of women ousted and blamed, bearing the consequences for men’s bad behaviour, while the men marched on mostly unscathed in official positions.

  The Prime Minister, who floundered when trying to respond to the claims of rape in an office metres from his own, as well as allegations of rape by one of his most senior cabinet members, at one point, grabbing at any potential solution, said he would now be open to the idea of quotas in his party to get more women into parliament.

  The Liberal Party has long held the position that quotas would undermine the idea that purely ‘merit’ determines a path to parliament, even though it has become apparent that ‘merit’ has historically just meant ‘being male’. The party had introduced soft targets in 2016 (of 50 per cent representation of women in parliament by 2025), but since then the number of women in parliament had gone slightly backwards at less than a quarter of the House of Representatives. On the other side of the house, a long fight for equal representation and quotas had resulted in a near fifty-fifty split of women and men in the ALP.

  It appeared the PM now believed two things. First, soft targets hadn’t worked (and aren’t quotas just targets that need to be met?). And second, that having more women in the parliament might clean things up a bit, make it nicer and less . . . what’s the word? Rape-y. Former Sydney alderman Kathryn Greiner, a member of the Liberal Party for fifty years, told me she resented the idea of women needing to be ‘God’s police’ and said the blokes should tidy the place up themselves; after all, it’s their mess.

  This idea is nothing new. Women have long been expected to bring buckets and mops to public spaces, ministries and troubled or failing governments. This has been part of the problem.

  And in response, men have masturbated over female MP’s desks and sent each other videos of it. What a lark! Who’s got a mop? In the aftermath of the Higgins revelations, we also learned some members of cabinet considered themselves part of a group they called the ‘big swinging dicks club’ (and acted in concert to try to prevent former foreign minister Julie Bishop from replacing Malcolm Turnbull as leader of the Liberal Party). Of course, they protest too much.

  It has long been assumed that once women have seats in parliament it’s all going to be tickety-boo: nicer, calmer, cleaner. But we know from history that until there is a critical mass, the fact that women are cast as outsiders, as interlopers in a male space, or as gentler operatives, more morally virtuous and altruistic politicians, will work not to cement their positions in a house of power designed for and by men, but make them more precarious.

  *

  History is crucial. We already know that treating women as decorations, subordinates and playthings, even and sometimes especially in our houses of power, is not new. We don’t need more reports, rumination or research. We know that from the moment women walked into parliament and took up space alongside men, they have been treated as objects: openly salivated over, described lasciviously in print, pursued and placed on pedestals simply by virtue of their gender — only to find the simple fact of their being on a pedestal, of having a high profile or powerful position, was used to argue they were ill-equipped for political office. They have been asked to pose with vacuum cleaners and in bikinis, to have makeovers, to endure being fawned over or ignored. And they have been asked to exist in an environment where sexual harassment has been tolerated and normalised and gone unreported, and where women who speak about sexism are derided as playing a ‘gender card’.

  When men were featured often in the press, they were rising stars.

  When women were featured often in the press, they were media tarts.

  For decades, it has been the female MP
s who have been sexualised — their bodies scrutinised, private lives gossiped about. They have been the first to be exposed when having affairs. They have been called sluts and ‘alley-cats on heat’, with one even effectively pushed out of parliament after being falsely accused of exposing her private parts to a male colleague. And all the while, the sexual indiscretions or ‘bad behaviour’ of their male counterparts have been hidden behind a press gallery code, created by men, that a politician’s private life should not be written about unless it directly impacts their political work (or they’re a woman). Even former National Party leader Barnaby Joyce’s affair with a staffer was not exposed until she was obviously pregnant.

  When writing this book almost 20 years ago, I thought that upholding this code would protect women from prurient questions and gossip. But I now see it’s not women it was protecting, but primarily men. What is now clear is that what has also been hidden is not just the odd sexual tryst or clumsy come-on but decades of harassment, sexual assault and misbehaviour by the men running our country. And all while this has been happening, they have been calling women in their ranks whores and simpletons.

  We must know the history of women entering parliament if we are to fully understand how this has happened, and how long we have tolerated the public, sustained abuse of prominent women, particularly those who make mistakes. And we must know it if we are to understand the grotesque nature of the abuse endured by our first female prime minister. It has all happened in plain sight, in front of our eyes, sometimes at our incitement.

  It’s not just the last few months or even years. It’s the last few decades.

  *

  When I wrote this book, in the early 2000s, the political landscape was littered with the smoking effigies of women who had been touted as leaders then vilified as losers. It was astonishing, picking my way through this graveyard of characters whom had become cautionary tales for the next generation of young female MPs like Julia Gillard, Tanya Plibersek and Marise Payne — women who hoped that through dint of sheer hard work they could avoid the ‘flamed out meteor’ syndrome, avoid being cast as imposters. I was trying to understand what had happened, and I had years of research for my history PhD at my disposal to help.