Women in Parliament

The Hon. R.B. MARTIN (15:37): Thirty years ago, at the Australian Labor Party's 1994 national conference, our party made the significant decision to adopt affirmative action quotas for women to be preselected for winnable seats in the federal parliament. This decision prescribed that 35 per cent of candidates preselected for winnable federal parliamentary seats must be women by 2002. That figure has subsequently been increased in stages and now sits at 50 per cent.

Before I speak about what we have achieved, I must revisit where we have come from. When Tony Abbott was elected Prime Minister in 2013 he announced a cabinet of 19 members. Among them there was only one woman. Quite memorably, the Prime Minister declared himself to be disappointed that there were not at least two women in the cabinet, but said that he expected women to be promoted over time, with good and talented women in the outer ministry knocking on the door. As Prime Minister he chose not to take the utterly straightforward step of opening that door.

The addition of the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index that covered the year before Abbott's cabinet was sworn in reported Australia as ranking 47^th globally on the number of women in ministerial positions. Abbott's administration plunged us to 65^th. Today, scarcely a decade later, we rank 17^th. In 2022, the Albanese Labor government became the first Australian commonwealth government in history to comprise a majority of women. It also features the largest number of women ever in an Australian federal cabinet.

That magnitude of change over less than a decade is no accident. We need affirmative action quotas because too many people are more comfortable with the doors shut. They prefer women to have to knock. There is this persistent fallacy that quotas stand in the way of merit-based selection. Merit is regarded by many opponents of quotas as going hand in hand with fairness: the idea that no matter who you are or where you come from your talent and your level of effort will determine your outcomes.

Opponents of quotas not only believe that our systems should operate on the basis of merit; they believe that our systems already do operate on the basis of merit. This is despite the overwhelming evidence of an enormous body of credible data demonstrating that in Australia and across the world our systems and our institutions still tend to favour men.

Talent and merit are distributed equally across the human population. Opportunity is not. Where gender disparity exists it can only be because our systems and our institutions continue to fail to distribute opportunity on a fair and equal basis. They largely always have and, unless we act to implement a ballast against their bias, they likely always will. For representation in our parliaments, quotas are that ballast.

If the merit system worked we would see very different parliaments across our nation than we see now. According to data from the Australia Institute, women remain under-represented in seven of Australia's nine lower or sole houses of parliament. Only in the ACT and Western Australia have their lower houses achieved gender parity. In Queensland's sole house women remain outnumbered more than two to one.

In the commonwealth parliament's House of Representatives, following the most recent election, in 2022, the proportion of Labor MPs who were women was 46.8 per cent, the proportion of Liberal MPs who were women was 21.4 per cent and the proportion of Nationals MPs who were women was 12.5 per cent. It is a stain on our society that any person could argue there is no injustice in those figures that demands redress.

Remarkable strides have been made in our party over the last 30 years, and we owe that to the various affirmative action policies that Labor has adopted at federal and state levels. Over time, quotas will change our thinking and change our culture. Parity will become embedded in our systems as the norm, and the explicit aim of quotas is to make themselves obsolete.

Especially during a week when many women in our community may be feeling confronted about certain of their rights being called into question, I would like to place on record my personal commitment to the fundamental right of women to political empowerment and to their right to be represented within our parliaments—at the centre of decision-making and lawmaking in this state and this nation—in equal proportion to men.