The 1996 Australian Federal Election and its Aftermath: A Case for Equal Gender Representation

The last decade or so has seen much emphasis on the need for an increase in the number of women in legislative bodies. This issue has long been of concern to feminists and has given rise to considerable debate. There are three different but nonetheless interconnected issues which form the major foci of this debate. One of these is the issue of women’s citizenship, another addresses the question of whether women can or should be represented as women, and the third concerns acceptable strategies for increasing the number of women in legislative bodies. This article considers some of the problems related to women’s representation and canvasses some of the strategies which have been used or proposed to increase the number of women in legislative bodies. It then uses the case of the 1996 Australian federal election and its aftermath, an election which saw a considerable increase in the number of Liberal women elected to parliament, to examine some of these issues in situ. On the basis of this, the article argues that there is a case for radical efforts to bring about gender equality in legislative bodies. It has been argued that in terms of most classical and modern definitions of citizenship women are not full citizens and that there is frequently an ‘enormous gulf between the apparent guarantee of full citizenship for women and the actual lived experience of it’. Voet notes that most contributors to the feminist debate define citizenship in terms of either rights or participation, whereas she claims that a definition of citizenship must incorporate both rights and political participation. She argues further that if the ideal of democracy is to be taken seriously ‘there is something problematic in the fact that a specific group, which is the majority of mature rational citizens, namely the group of women, is hardly present amongst the rulers’. This is one strand of the argument for equal representation of women—that it is their right as citizens to be involved in the decision-making processes of government. A second strand concerns the loss to the community resulting from women’s inadequate involvement in this decision making. Carmen Lawrence, former Premier and Opposition leader of Western Australia and currently a member of the House of Representatives, has argued that ‘It is certainly true that ignoring 50 percent of the talent pool in our community is going to diminish the quality of representation ... if you include women you will get a better quality product because you are drawing on the full range of human talent available.’ Her words echo the earlier argument of sociologist Marilyn Johnson that: