Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has fought fierce criticism over a lack of female representation in his government for weeks. Following July’s election, the Liberal Party lost a number of marginal seats which had been held by women. As a result, the number of female Liberal MPs dropped from 22 to 18—a grand total of just 22%.
This week, The Liberal Party looked set to take the issue somewhat seriously: signing a gender diversity strategy which aims to increase female representation to 50% by the year 2025. Its plan is to recruit more women at a grassroots level, report on progress and encourage one-on-one mentoring for women who show interest in entering Parliament.
While no direct quotas were attached to the plan, West Australian Liberal Senator, Linda Reynolds, referred to the development as a “watershed” moment for the party, and the PM confirmed that he was “committed to working on genuine organisational change” to see the framework come to light.
It may have been easy to believe such a “watershed” moment was upon us, had the Liberal Party’s former leader, John Howard, refrained from weighing in.
“It is a fact of society that the caring role — whatever people may say about it and whatever the causes are — women play a significantly greater part of fulfilling the caring role in our communities.”
Despite sensing that his remarks would open a can of rampant worms, Howard chose to dig further in, adding:
“It is not a terrible thing to say, it just happens to be the truth, and occasionally you’ve just got to recognise that and say it.”
We well know that women still take on the bulk of the caring responsibilities at home. The question is what more we can do about it, and why a person who takes on ‘caring responsibilities’ shouldn’t be able to enter politics. Indeed, the real truth is this:
We have finally reached an age where gender inclusion is taken seriously. Women are more likely to enrol in tertiary education than men, and graduate with higher averages. Although still under-represented, women are thriving in historically male-dominated subject areas, like tech, science and engineering.
Moreover, big corporates recognise that diverse workplaces equal prosperous businesses. The majority of ASX companies have implemented focused policies and programs in a conscious bid to close the gender gap. While there’s still work to do, they at least understand the business case for diversity — something that shouldn’t just be dismissed because ‘women are busy with babies’.
And, above all, we now live in a world where numerous men are relishing the opportunity to take on equal or primary “caring roles” for their children, and should be encouraged to do so. Funnily enough there is no innate trait in women that makes them better parents. Even if there was, that shouldn’t exclude them from being in the key roles that make decisions about this country’s future — especially when children are such a major part of that future.
But while it would be easy to dismiss Howard’s comments as outdated and misaligned with modern ideology, he is still repeatedly touted as the Liberal Party’s messiah. Turnbull himself has previously declared Howard to be the “gold standard” in Australian government, and, has openly confessed to emulating his leadership. Just last year, he declared:
“Every day I’m Prime Minister I’ll be benchmarking everything I do against how John Howard would have handled these challenges.”
And therein lies the problem. While the Liberal Party’s commitment to gender diversity should be seen as a promising step forward, sadly that’s not the case. We should be able to brush Howard’s comments off as missing the point but instead, we’re left to wonder whether Turnbull will take stock.
