By Karen Fredericks and Anne Casey
In his "maiden" speech in federal parliament, in 1970, Paul Keating expressed grave concern at the number of women entering the work force. They should be at home, making babies, he said, because an Australian infant is so clearly preferable to an immigrant!
Keating's ascent to parliamentary leadership of the ALP has revealed little change in his attitudes towards women, attitudes which, in his time as treasurer, were concealed by a complete exclusion of so-called "social and cultural issues" (read "women's issues") from his economic rationalist agenda. As prime minister, however, Keating has been obliged at least to mention women occasionally.
On International Women's Day 1992, aware that his lack of popularity with women could cost Labor the next election, Keating fumbled for an explanation of his "problem with women".
"I have a feeling, an inkling that I am not widely regarded as a feminist", he said, perceptively. "This may be because I am regarded rightly as that most conservative of creatures, a family man."
That was March. By April Keating's minders, well aware of the widening "gender gap" (a historical tendency for women to show less electoral support for Labor than do men), and a significant drift of female opinion towards the Democrats, Greens and independents, decided it was time for action. Recalling a technique which closed Bob Hawke's gender gap in the early 1980s, they put out an SOS to New York, summoning Australia's most famous femocrat, Dr Anne Summers, to do a makeover on the new PM.
By October 1992, thanks to the work of Anne Summers, and fellow femocrats on her team — Susan Ryan, Jenny George and Wendy Fatin — Paul Keating was a reconstructed male. "While at the time I might have regarded this stuff [feminism] as extravagant", he was telling the press, "in its proper historical context it was correct. The tactics were correct. The message has seeped into the consciousness of Australian women. They're not going to be copping any of that stuff they copped back in the '60s and '70s."
Anne Summers established her credentials as a feminist when she wrote Damned Whores and God's Police, a woman's-eye view of Australian history, in 1975. Following publication of the book, she began a career as a journalist, including a stint as feature
writer on the National Times. Former National Times editor David Marr recalls that she was "a superb networker" and "very good at establishing good relations with politicians".
In 1983, with the '84 election looming and the gender gap gaping (53% support for Labor among men, but only 47% among women), Summers was recruited to head the newly created Office for the Status of Women. She has been credited as the architect of the sex discrimination and affirmative action legislation enacted in the mid-'80s.
The strategy worked. In 1984, for the first time in Australian political history, the popularity of Labor among women (48%) was higher than among men (46%).
In 1986 Summers returned to the United States where she, together with Sandra Yates, raised A$22 million on Wall Street and bought Ms magazine, the national feminist monthly which began at the height of the second wave of feminism in the US in the early 1970's.
In The Undeclared War Against Women, Susan Faludi writes of Summers' editorship of Ms: "The magazine that once investigated sexual harassment, domestic violence, the prescription-drug industry and the treatment of women in Third World countries now dashed off gushing tributes to Hollywood stars, launched a fashion column and delivered the really big news — pearls are back".
In 1990 Summers was forced to sell Ms by financial problems including a declining readership and withdrawal of advertising — due, she says, to content judged too racy for conservative US mores.
So now she's back in Australia, doing for Paul Keating what she did for Bob Hawke.
The gap between male and female support for Labor, in 1993, is back up around the 5% mark. Personal approval ratings for Keating and Hewson, according to a February Morgan Gallup poll of women voters, give Hewson a 6% lead. Only 22% of women polled said they were satisfied with the way Keating was performing as prime minister.
This makes women, especially middle-class women who may be swung away from the Coalition, the key to a Labor victory in '93, in the same way that greens, at the margins, swung the 1990 election for the ALP.
Anne Summers' brief has obviously been to make a big splash,
spend as little money as possible and, crucially, to target upper-middle-class women with surgical precision. While she has faithfully completed these tasks, Summers has perhaps been too obvious. Working women, and men, are unconvinced that Keating and the Labor Party can have changed so dramatically as to really consider child-care a fundamental economic issue. Even the mainstream media, while basically supporting the charade as usual, have referred to the blatant vote-buying tactics.
Tom Dusevic, in the Australian on February 11, noted that the ALP child-care policy carefully "ferrets out" 145,000 upper-middle-class women who presently receive no government assistance, or tax relief, for child-care.
The policy promises child-care subsidies for the rich who already have child-care, but does nothing to increase the availability of child-care places for either rich or poor. Australia is, and even if the new policy is implemented, will remain, at the bottom of the ranking of OECD countries in provision of child-care. Unmet demand for child-care in Australia has grown by 112% since 1987.
But the greatest shadow over this policy is the memory of the 1990 election and Labor's last-minute promise of 50,000 new child-care places. Three years later, only half the promised places have been delivered. In the 1989-90 and 1990-91 financial years, of $18.5 million allocated for federally funded child-care places, only $6.8 million was actually spent.
The remainder of the ALP's "women's policy" (developed at taxpayers' expense as the federal government's "New National Agenda for Women") consists of a negligible amount of new funding over the next three years for public relations exercises. These economical little policies have also been carefully targeted. Market research, commissioned last year by Anne Summers and the Office of the Status of Women (also at public expense) revealed that, after child-care, the major concerns of women are unemployment, domestic and other violence against women, and health.
At the launch of the policy, Paul Keating claimed his government would meet the total demand for work-related child-care by 2001. The crowd of 600 femocrats, obviously unfazed by the similarity of Keating's formulation to Hawke's 1987 "promise" that no child would live in poverty by 1990, rose as one, to give a standing ovation. Keating went on to promise "true equality' between the sexes by the year 2000.
The launch made headlines nationally: "Major Policy Victory for Feminists", raved the Australian, "PM to Wage War on Sexism", trumpeted the Sydney Morning Herald.
But a sober look at an agenda which includes little in the way of new initiatives and costs under $5 million, over three years, in new funding, tells a different story:
- $180,000 for a pilot program to develop educational material for judges and magistrates about their attitudes toward women. (A program which was well into the development stages before Judge Bollen stuck his foot in his mouth in South Australia.)
- $2.6 million for a 008 number to give domestic violence information to rural and isolated women. (No mention of the vastly under-resourced refuge and housing services whose specific domestic violence funding program finishes at the end of this financial year.)
- $750,000 additional funding for women's lobby groups, including the Women's Electoral Lobby, the Catholic Women's league and the Australian Federation of University Women. (That one received extra-rapturous applause from the audience at the launch.)
- $1 million for four "working women's centres" to provide information to women negotiating workplace agreements under enterprise bargaining. (Presumably to replace unions!)
Tacked on to the agenda, too, were measures such as the continuation of funding for existing women's health centres for at least one more year (gee, thanks) and a Medicare rebate for bone density testing.
Despite the vote-buying dishonesty of Keating's "conversion" to feminism, there has been little or no response from any organised grassroots women's movement over any of this.
The only criticism in the mainstream has come from Coalition spokespersons (who have complained, mainly, that it's ridiculous to be encouraging women into the work force by subsidising child-care in a time of such high unemployment) and the odd Democrat.
Former Democrat leader Janine Haines was the closest the ABC's Lateline could find to a spokesperson for the Australian women's movement when it ran a panel discussion on women and the election. Other networks and newspapers have garnered opinions from such diverse persons as dress designers, film producers and the editors of Vogue and Cosmopolitan.
The Democrats' response has missed the point. "All the
parties are talking about women, but their actual behaviour is disgraceful", says Senator Karin Sowada promisingly in a recent press release. The agenda she goes on to outline, however, is far removed from the task of building an independent women's movement to fight for real equality for women.
"Women are mainly preselected for unwinnable seats or unsafe positions", she complains. But, she asserts, four female Democrat candidates are standing in "winnable Senate seats", and "The Democrats are the only party which has given women real power".
International Women's Day organiser and the Democratic Socialist candidate for Brisbane, Susan Price, sees women's role in these elections, and in Australian politics generally, somewhat differently.
"We have to build a women's movement from the ground up, independent of any political party", she says. "That's the only way we will be able to expose the lies of the Paul Keatings and the Anne Summerses.
"At the moment the femocrats have taken 'feminism' and turned it on its head. They use the real concerns of working women to prop up a political system which still depends on unpaid labour in the home, and all the mechanisms which keep that labour docile: violence, lack of services and economic dependence."
Price says International Women's Day rallies and marches, to be held around Australia in the week before the election, will provide an excellent opportunity for feminist activists, independent of the mainstream parties, to make their voices heard and to draw in other women willing to fight for real equality.
"Child-care, legal, health and refuge services are still starved for funds. Our unions and our jobs are under threat, abortion is still not available to most women, and the legal and political systems in this country continue to oppress us", she says. "It is important for people representing a green, feminist and socialist platform to stand against the major parties.
"But I also think the essential task of feminists, greens and socialists is to build a mass movement outside mainstream politics. That's the way the suffragists and second wave feminists won the rights we have now, and that's the way we'll win in the future."