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from Mexico, talking to the many women back in Australia who were eager to

hear about the worldwide feminist revolution we were embarked on, I was a real

downer. Unlike many of my sisters, I couldn’t express enthusiasm. I didn’t think

the gathering was wonderful. Because of those women sitting patient andunrewarded along the red carpet to the doors of the Maria Isabel Hilton, I felt

hame, and was overcome by the enormity of our task.s

 

The 1970s could be characterised as a decade when feminists (though we didn’t,

to begin with, call ourselves that) crept into just about every institution you can

think of, with the express intention of turning it inside out. The Labor Party, it

should be said, wasn’t exempt from this. In fact, I joined the party in the 1970s

with other feminists to support Susan Ryan in her bid to be selected for the ACT’s

second seat and, later, for her successful pre‐selection for the Senate, and I

worked hard to get other women to join, to the same ends. All these moves were

met with much suspicion – we were routinely compared with Santamaria’s

roupers.G

 

At the time I was a single mother, a low‐ranked journalist in the Australian

Information Service, though I was soon to be promoted to head a newly‐created

unit in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. This was the Women’s

Affairs Section, the bureaucratic back‐up, if you like, for Gough Whitlam’s

women’s adviser Elizabeth Reid ‐ the first such adviser in the world. To give you

an idea of the need for it, the minute Reid joined Whitlam’s staff, she was flooded

with correspondence, receiving more than any government minister other than

Whitlam himself. My first brief was to clear the massive backlog. Reid was a

ministerial officer, but my appointment represented the feminist entry into the

bureaucracy itself – a much more powerful institution than it is now after the

aggrandisement of the Prime Minister’s Office under Howard and Rudd, and

bbott today. Not to mention the cuts to the public service.A

 

I used to joke that I was Reid’s Sir Humphrey and I’m still drawn to the analogy,

but in crucial respects it’s unfair. Unlike Jim Hacker, Sir Humphrey’s minister,

who was more than a bit of a klutz, my Elizabeth Reid was full of insight and

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vision. She understood that lifting women’s status in a society like ours required

more than legislative reform and specific government services, necessary though

these were. But she believed above all that what was required was a radical

change in attitude, within society and inside women ourselves. There have beenstupendous changes since then, no doubt, but looking back from the privileged

position of hindsight we can see how essential that objective still is. It is not

enough to have women in positions of influence or power, even a woman prime

inister, if the bedrock of sexism remains.m

 

My entry into the bureaucracy coincided with certain tremendously significant

events, not the least of which was the return to office of a Labor government

after 23 years in the wilderness. I was riding too on the crest of the wave for

reform, triggered by the American civil rights movement, the anti‐Vietnam

movement and, of course, our own. It also, on a smaller scale, coincided with

changes afoot in Prime Minister’s, turning it into a central policy department and

effective rival to Treasury. Ideas were developing as well about new roles for

hitherto unseen and faceless bureaucrats. I was in the vanguard of this change in

that, unlike as it was for most other bureaucrats, it began to be accepted that I

ould have a public role, if a carefully prescribed one.w

 

All the same, it occasioned no little hostility. The creation of the four‐woman unit

in PM’s and the sudden elevation of a public servant journalist to one of the

highest positions in the bureaucracy were received with incredulity, and

resentment, within the department and without. From seasoned departmental

officers to press gallery journos, it was met at the very least with consternation.

Yet there was definitely a plus to this. Because it was all so new, we could take

people by surprise. We were pioneers, there was that clear open space before us,

where many of our feminist ideas could be tested, honed and executed. And no

ne was in a better place at a better time to seize the day than I was.o

 

I don’t want to go too deeply into the minutiae of public service procedure and

turn this whole auditorium into a sea of glazed eyeballs, but two aspects of it are

important, and remain so. Firstly, we resisted great pressure to ‘prioritise’. If

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with our pitifully low numbers we were often forced to, we took it as a guiding

principle that nothing in government should be ‘off limits’ to half the population.

In practice that meant that we sought, and obtained, the right to comment on

each and every cabinet submission as it would impact on the lives of Australianomen. This, in the context, was nothing short of revolutionary.w

 

We also worked to establish a machinery model for the oversight of the

lamentably labelled ‘women’s affairs’ – the innovative ‘hub and spokes’ that

Marian Sawer has written about. 1 This, like our impact statements, was based on

the idea that women’s voices were to be heard in a variety of settings not often

associated with so‐called ‘women’s interests’. But because we had to move

slowly here, we concentrated on getting units established in departments chosen

for their obvious impact on women. These included, unsurprisingly, Attorney‐

General’s, Social Security, Education, Health, Immigration and Aboriginal Affairs.

e did try for Treasury but, unsurprisingly again, here we were unsuccessful.W   2

Our lack of success with Treasury only serves to demonstrate what the British

classicist Mary Beard identifies as the ancient patriarchal tradition that works so

effectively still to stifle what she calls women’s ‘public voice’. Beard opens her

essay with the scene in Homer’s Odyssey when Odysseus’s wife Penelope

emerges from her chamber to listen to a bard downstairs in the great hall of her

house singing about the number of years Odysseus has been away. She isn’t

pleased about this, and asks the bard to come up with ‘another, happier’ number.

At that point her son Telemachus, who’s recently reached his manhood, tells her

in no uncertain terms to ‘shut up’. (Beard’s words) ‘Mother,’ he says and Beard

quotes, ‘go back up into your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and

the distaff ... speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all;

or mine is the power in this household.’f    3 

And it was just this tradition that operated in PM’s. We were able to overcome it

only by dint of our novelty and the fact that we had the power of the PM behind

us. ‘What does the PM want?’ we were often asked, meaning, of course, what did

Elizabeth Reid want, and that was all we needed.

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When push came to shove, however, as I’ve said, we did have to prioritise. We

used to joke that even on our deathbeds, a ministerial officer would come

rushing in to demand yet another cabinet submission on child care. Little did weknow how prescient such a premonition was. We also put a lot of energy into

refuges, raising awareness among ministers and bureaucrats alike of the extent

and severity of domestic violence. The latter especially was seen as a perfectly

legitimate ‘women’s issue’. Not so much women’s health services, but as long as

we could argue that access to effective, safe and accessible contraceptive advice

would steer women away from the political hot potato of abortion, we were on

relatively safe territory. The Section, then the Branch as it became, and finally,

(before we were booted out of PM’s and demoted to a department of home

ffairs in December 1977) the Office, had some notable successes in these areas.a

 

Although it garnered far less expenditure, and none of it ongoing, the IWY

program devised by Reid and administered through the IWY Secretariat can also

e counted a success.b

 

hy was this so?W

 

Because of all the measures taken under Whitlam, that was the one with

arguably the most lasting effect. That and free tertiary education, from which a

generation of women benefited. Child care today is almost unaffordable, with

fees and waiting lists rivalling that of exclusive private secondary schools.

Domestic violence rages, but funding cuts and administrative changes in NSW

alone threaten the viability of women’s refuges. But one thing that IWY did, and

remains with us, is to dramatically change the way we women think about

urselves, if there’s still some distance to go.o

 

It goes without saying, however, that there were very few feminists, male or

female, in either of the two main parties back in the 1970s. 4 But let’s speak

about the men. Schooled in their experiences of the Great Depression, when so

many of them suffered the double humiliation of unemployment and depending

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As it turned out, Fraser was more supportive than any of us could have believed.

He overturned a previous government decision that devolved oversight of

refuges to the states by resuming direct funding after trouble occurred with

Bjelke‐Petersen in Queensland. He straightened out a problem that saw the bulkof the $75 million dollar child care appropriation going to pre‐schools instead of

child care, especially in NSW. In 1977 the appropriation for refuges was actually

doubled, at a time when other areas were being slashed. Most significantly, from

1975 to 1977 he kept the women’s portfolio and gave us Ian McPhee, an

emplary small‐l liberal whose wife was a feminist, as his Minister Assisting.ex

 

That said, our relationship was strictly professional; in all that time I spoke to

Fraser face‐to‐face exactly three times. It was, I now realise, as tricky for him as

it was for me. Neither of us could afford to let this productive interaction be

known; he because of the hostility to feminism in the Coalition, and, believe me,

it was strong; and I because while my objective was to keep, or indeed when the

opportunity presented itself, strengthen Labor’s reforms, I couldn’t afford to be

seen, in those extremely polarised times, to be spruiking for the Coalition. Or,

ndeed, the architect of the coup.i

 

Fraser had his own agenda as well. Both Ian McPhee and Beryl Beaurepaire, then

the influential head of the Liberal Party Women’s Committee, had protested

against the blockage of supply. Whatever his own thoughts on feminism, perhaps

raser thought it politic to keep them both on side.F

 

Feminists, especially those of us in the 70s, were subjected to constant criticism

for being middle class. And white. There was substance to these charges, but the

crux of the matter lies with how they were manipulated, to work against all  

women. One of the key Whitlam reforms to my mind was, as I’ve mentioned, the

abolition of tertiary education fees. This was a social justice reform but also one

firmly in the national interest. It’s even possible to suggest that it was not only

the much‐vaunted economic reforms of the 1980s that brought the prosperity of

the 2000s, but the improvement in the standard of education of Australia’s

population at large.

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Indeed, many of underlying principles of the Hawke‐Keating reforms are being

called into serious question at the moment. The supremacy of ‘the market’ – as

much a god, it would seem, as anything religion has thrown up and just assacrosanct – has resulted in critical and, I would say, inevitable outcomes.

Countervailing Labor measures have served to cushion these: the social contract

of the 1980s alleviated some of the pain caused by the economic restructuring;

the quick action taken by the Rudd government to offset the threat of the GFC

saved us from the worst effects of what has variously been called economic

rationalism, market or neoliberal economics. But effects there have been. While

Australian debt to GDP ratio is one of the lowest in the developed world,

Australian household debt is one of the highest. 7 Figures from a variety of

sources show that socio‐economic inequality has been growing, and if present

olicies are allowed to continue, it will continue to do so.p   8 

So, back to women. I’m reminded once again that women were some of the chief

beneficiaries of the waiving of tertiary fees, and many of them, by dint of their

husbands’ occupations, were assumed to be ‘middle‐class’ – an assumption too

often ill‐founded. 9 The argument consistently put forward in the 1980s to

introduce HECS was that free tertiary education benefited only those who would

have gone to university anyway. But this overlooked a generation of mature age

students, women especially, who never before had the opportunity to further

heir education. And of course the case still stands.t 

 

Education should never be seen as a privilege, a meal ticket for those well‐off

enough to afford it. First and foremost, it’s investing in a country’s future.

Nothing will guarantee more our ability to withstand the challenges thrown up

to us than the skills and education of our people – all of us, women as well as

en.m

 

This might be considered an utopian objective, given the present climate and the

special problem we have with the Murdoch media. But it is a lodestar, something

to guide us, a priority, if you will. Julia Gillard did so much to signal its

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importance, and while I didn’t support every aspect of her approach to it, her

efforts can only be applauded; and the present government’s attitude, to it and

ust about everything else, deplored.j

 Now back to 1975, and the women sitting cross‐legged on their mats to the side

of the long red carpet leading to the entrance of the Maria Isabel Hilton. It should

be recalled that, as well as being IWY, 1975 opened with the visit of Milton

Friedman, doyen of the Chicago school of economics, crusader for monetarism,

as it was known at the time. How striking that the clarion call for market

scendancy coincided with the year for us women.a

 

As the Friedmanite philosophy percolated through the bureaucracy, parliament

and the press corps, we began to be bombarded with calls for cutting

government expenditure, given to be the principal cause of so‐called ‘stagflation’.

What with the rise of Thatcher and Reagan, we feminists were flying against the

tide, and saw our own philosophy reduced in the public mind to opening up

areer paths for women.c

 

The movement itself became formalised as more and more activists took up

positions in the women’s studies programs we had fought for, and began to teach

and devise what to me were ever more incoherent and irrelevant analyses of the

female condition. As for the public service, the women’s portfolio became more

bureaucratised. With the return of Labor in 1983, the position of femocrats was

for a time secure, even boosted. Labor’s policy was to return the Office, now of

the Status of Women, to PM’s as a full division, and to reinstate the women’s

desks in other government departments with ongoing involvement of their

permanent heads to give them the necessary clout. Nonetheless, the function

ecame inevitably more bureaucratised.b

 

Also on the Labor’s program were the two very important pieces of legislation:

the Sex Discrimination Act, so long in coming, and, two years later, the

Affirmative Action Act. Those of you who were around then may remember the

heated parliamentary debates around both of these; for those who weren’t they

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are a less than gentle reminder of where we could be headed if men like Cory

ernadi had their way.B

 

Yet for all the sound and fury that, I believe, is unlikely. Though the sociallyconservative backlash through the Fraser and Howard years was to be expected,

society has moved on. I don’t believe ideas about women’s place will ever gain

the purchase they had in the 1950s, Howard’s picket fence notwithstanding. And

I do believe that the terrible misogyny unleashed on Julia Gillard had as much to

do with the circumstance of her ascendancy and the brutal opportunism of the

pposition as it did with the pervasive sexism that sadly persists in our culture.o

 

For all that, the trickiest enemy of feminism – at least the feminism that

galvanised me in the 1970s and has stuck with me all through our ‘lipstick’ years

– has been the neoliberal ascendancy of the past three decades, the one that has

led us straight down the trickle‐down path to this shockingly blinkered and

inhumane Abbott budget. And so when someone like Peta Credlin says she wants

to give women a ‘hand up’ instead of a ‘hand‐out’, all I hear is yet another riff on

he Liberal party’s roll‐out of slogans.t 

 

In the 1980s we began to be subjected to new definitions of success, measurable

chiefly in material terms. Glass ceilings aside, there were blandishments for

women too; so much so that feminism itself began to be seen as a passion for

individual advancement. There are nuances to navigate here; I have no problem

with women in power – only a little while ago we had a government, indeed

governments, with brilliant women ministers, and a female prime minister

whose negotiating skills are only beginning to be valued as they should have

been at the time. But if such women are too eager to join the men’s club, if their

success is seen to be the sine qua non of feminist progress, then I can’t help but

eel disappointed.f 

 

So what are we feminists to do? Some clues, I feel, can be found in Rachel Nolan’s

article in the May edition of The Monthly . Nolan puts what we’re up against

forcefully and succinctly. And I quote:

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‘When the country’s first female PM has been stalked from office in a tide of

sexist abuse and the perpetrators have the same power they always had, when

the number of women in Australian parliaments has peaked and declined, andwhen the country’s most infamously sexist political leader can blithely describe

himself as a feminist (as Abbott did again at the International Women’s Day

event), the argument that if women learn the right skills they will soon justly

revail has been blown apart.’p

 

Nolan suggests that, instead of trying to toe the line and dress the dress, women

in politics should accept that we’re different and that the difference will be

beneficial, salutary for the national interest. ‘Too much testerone’ in one room is

to be avoided, says IMF chief Christine Lagarde. According to her, blame for the

FC can be squarely laid on just that.G   10 

I’ve suggested as well that what Australia’s parliament needs is a women’s

caucus. 11 Our political culture as it stands makes this difficult if not impossible,

but if enough of us put our heads to it, it could come about. Men find it easy to

pick off individual women, but my own experience has shown that there’s

nothing more powerful – and threatening – than women in groups. In other

words, what may be required is more solidarity among us, rather than the

roper way to dress. Or, god help us, ‘leaning in’.p

 

So here is another story from the 70s, and it happened, of all places, in the heart

of the Australian bureaucracy. In PM’s, to be exact. Along with my own

promotion, Lyndall Ryan, my second‐in‐charge, was offered one. But she would

only accept it if all the unit’s members were promoted as well. This, in the

context, was remarkable. I haven’t put my head to investigating it, but I think you

could trawl through the annals of the public service and never find another

instance like it. And we won. Because of one woman’s initiative and concern for

her fellow workers, every one of them found themselves on a higher rung of the

adder.l

 

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We learned solidarity, in part, from the union movement, although again,

expression such as this would have been uncommon among white collar workers

as we were organised then. And there were other differences. When this gesture

took place, unionisation of the workforce stood at around 50‐ 60 percent. It nowangs on at about 15%.h   12 

The irony is that, as is often stated, the very policies and mindset hailed for

boosting Australia’s prosperity, opened the way towards eroding union strength.

What this has meant for the Labor Party has been profound. This is not the

occasion, nor am I the thinker, to trace these changes, but I do believe that

Gillard made a critical strategic mistake in insisting that the ALP is a trade union

arty and not a social democratic one.p   13 

This same division of opinion raged through the Whitlam years, and there was a

lot more reason for it then, when unions were such a force. But today, when

people with progressive ideas and a belief in social justice are crying out for a

party in which to place their trust, it’s simply political suicide to even suggest

hat they would be excluded. Not to mention the unemployed.t 

 

Similarly, it may be useful to differentiate the party from the Greens, but it’s

politically inept to portray them as Labor’s enemy. 14 What Australia needs now

more than ever is a broad, strong progressive side of politics that is able to

triumph over the troglodytes now in charge. Because they only are in charge, in

large measure, because of the way Labor failed the people of Australia, by not

getting its house in order, by not throwing off the NSW disease, for not ensuring

that joining is worth the effort for members of its rank and file, and not resolving

ust what it stands for and what sort of party it is.j

 

In closing, I would suggest that nobody is better primed to change this than you

are, the women attending this conference. The women sitting in the audience

here tonight. We not only need to get women in positions of power, but we need

to return to examining what that power is about, and to developing long‐term

strategies for gaining a more just society. We need to convince other women as

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well. That may be, in the last analysis, even more important than forever trying

o convince a bunch of men.t 

 

We women represent slightly over half the population and there’s more strengthn that number than we realise, or have been prepared perhaps to act on.i

 

To go back to PM’s, back to 1975. At the very moment when the economy was

beginning to be deified, I was the only woman sitting at the table at the weekly

executives meeting. And I was, accordingly, the only one to ask: ‘Isn’t the

conomy meant to serve society, instead of the other way around?’e

 

I was made to look a little foolish and irrelevant at the time, but I have no

hesitation in asking the same thing tonight.

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 End Notes

. Marian Sawer, Sisters in Suits: Women and  Public Policy  in  Australia, Allen &

, 1990.

1

Unwin, Sydney Marian Sawer, Femocrats and  Ecorats: Women’s Policy  Machinery  in  Australia, 

anada and  New   Zealand , UN Research Institute for Social Development, Geneva,C 1996.

2. The Women’s Bureau, originating in the Department of Labour and NationalService in the 1960s, and carrying on until the 1990s, is something of an anomalyhere. Preceding the WAS by seven years, unlike the latter, it was a research unitwithout a direct influence on policy. But its publications, particularly the 1970one on child care, were used widely in the women’s movement in its demand forhildren’s services. It was a member of our original Interdepartmental Workingc

Group on Women’s Affairs.

. Mary Beard, ‘The Public Voice of Women’, London Review  of  Books, 20 March32014, pp. 11‐14.

4. Joan Child, for instance, the one woman in the House of Representatives at theime, from 1974‐75, was opposed to the push for child care, confusing thet 

centres feminists wanted with earlier infamous ‘baby farms’.

5. As a result, in 1974 the government lent its support to extending the wage towomen, though it was WEL’s Edna Ryan who went to the trouble to sift throughthe awards and argue before the Arbitration Commission that after the payncreases resulting from the 1972 Equal Pay decision, the extension wouldn’ti

cost anything like employers were arguing.

6. For more of this, see: ‘The Prime Minister’s Women’ in the papers from Australian women’s non‐ government  organisations and   government: an evolving 

relationship?  Edited by Judith Smart and Marian Quartly in the forthcomingDecember 2014 issue of Australian Feminist  Studies.

. Pat McGrath, ‘Household debt the big threat to Australian economy’,bc.net.au, 8 May 2014.

7a Trends in Household  Debt , Australian Bureau of Statistics, 6 May 2014.

. Mitchell Fletcher and Ben Guttman, ‘Income Inequality in Australia’, Economic8Roundup issue 2, 2013, Australian Treasury.

eter Whitford, ‘Income and wealth inequality: how is Australia faring?’, The onversation, 5 March 2014.

PC 

 

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Tom Conley, ‘Globalisation and Rising Inequality in Australia: Is Increasingty.Inequality Inevitable in Australia?’, PDF document, Griffith Universi

 im Colebatch, ‘Country’s rich have lion’s share of income growth,’ Sydney  T

Morning Herald , October 10, 2005.

9. This assumption was shown to be erroneous in principle and, as a result, inmany actual cases. See Meredith Edwards’s groundbreaking work in ‘Financial

rrangements within Families’, research report for the National Women’sAAdvisory Council, 1981.

, Ma 10. Rachel Nolan, ‘Men of a Certain Age’, The Monthly    y 2014, pp.18‐23.

e Story , 19 December 2009 11. Sara Dowse, ‘A Different Kind of Politics’, Insid    .

2. Andrew Leigh, ‘The Decline of an Institution’,  Australian Financial  Review , 7.

1March 2005, p.21 13. Julia Gillard, Speech to the  AWU  Conference, 18 February 2013.

4. Jane Garrett and Milton Dick, ALP Election Campaign Review, 20 June 2014.1