Raising her Voice: Amplifying the voices of women and minoritised groups in politics

This years’ referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament will not be the first time that the rights of a minority group have been put to public vote in Australia.

I was 21 and on the cusp of coming out when Malcolm Turnbull announced his intent put same sex marriage to the public vote.

I was attending a church in a diocese which still vehemently opposes LGBTQ+ relationships and which practiced ‘conversion’ therapy.

I lived in a pocket of suburban Sydney that voted against marriage equality.

I know what it is like to have my identity up for debate, to hear people make harmful and ill-informed remarks about my community – and I know that for Indigenous Australians, that experience is too familiar and certainly not contained to any campaign.

The tactics of division and misinformation from the opposition toward the Voice is clear evidence that these public debates cause harm to marginalised communities. For women in those communities, an experience of harassment and discrimination can exacerbate the gendered barriers to political engagement and leadership.

These dynamics reiterate the value of a diverse and inclusive parliament, where leaders have lived experience or are active allies, and where the Party culture is to listen to and to amplify the voices of those who are underrepresented.

The research I have been privileged to undertake as this years’ Julia Gillard Next Generation intern set out to understand the impact of referendum campaigns on the communities they affect and to identify opportunities to provide pathways to politics for grassroots campaigners.

While my research shows that we shouldn’t risk a public debate like this unless our constitution deems it necessary, it also reveals the opportunity for these campaigns to leave a positive legacy on our social fabric. A yes will be an important symbol of Australia’s support for change.

And at the grassroots level, these campaigns can engage a more diverse community in Australian politics. Women are overrepresented in the informal and volunteer roles of campaigning: door-knocking, coordinating volunteers, recruiting supporters, connecting with local MPs. My research finds that these campaigns can be a transition point for women who might not have called themselves political before - women who might have faced greater barriers to formal involvement in Party politics, perhaps because their social, economic or caring circumstances meant they’ve not had the headspace or the opportunity to join a Party.

Across Australia’s history, progressive women have been prominent campaigners for social change: from the 1902 suffrage campaign to the 1967 campaign on First Nations rights to vote, to abortion law reform, to no fault divorce, to LGBTQ+ Australians’ right to marry – and of course, the Voice to Parliament.

Women are also critical to voting in support of social change. We often hear about women’s issues and the women’s vote as though women are distinct from the normal votes which men cast. I had a look at the electoral roll: 51% of enrolled voters are women. As EMILY’s List knows, women are the average voter – and so social campaigns like this year’s referendum are an important way to connect with voters, campaigners and emerging progressive leaders.

With the generous support of the EMILY's List Australia , Slater and Gordon Lawyers and the Australian Workers Union, I was able to travel to Ireland – a republic well-versed in running referenda – to speak to Labour politicians, campaigners, academics and women’s organisations about strategies and practices which can promote women’s political involvement and pathways to electoral politics during the galvanising moment of a referendum campaign.

Ireland’s successful campaigns to legalise marriage equality and to repeal the 8th amendment (one of the most restrictive bans on abortion in the world), and its emerging campaign to remove gendered language from the constitution (about a ‘woman’s place in the home’) present instructive examples of women supporting women in social campaigns.

Interviews with Australian MPs and campaigners on the Voice and on marriage equality also informed the findings and conclusions in this report.

This report makes three central observations which inform a series of recommendations for the ALP and for EMILY’s List.

Firstly, I find that campaigns reassert the value of progressive women as allies and advocates, to ensure a positive outcome and to minimise the cost to individuals with lived experience:

• There is mental health toll in public campaigns. Minoritised groups bear the load of educating others and representing their communities. For First Nations women, this adds to the cultural load of being a minority voice in the Parliament or their workplace.
• Public support for these women is necessary and effective. MPs told me of the value of their colleagues – often across parties – standing up to call out harmful remarks.
• The Jenkins Review thankfully sets a path toward a more inclusive parliamentary culture. My research primarily considered experiences of women MPs outside the Parliament, where of course we know social media abuse is persistent. We can no longer disregard it as the ‘rough and tumble’ of political life but enlist professionals to navigate those platforms. This is of course a duty of care to the campaign leaders but the literature shows that public support has a broader legacy for women’s perceptions of politics, and voters perceptions of the Party’s commitment to supporting women.
• Public campaigns can also recast a deficit narrative about minoritised communities by highlighting community leaders. There have been incredible First Nations leaders in our media in recent weeks, from across all domains of public life. I make recommendations about ensuring that Parties' messaging celebrates many different types of leaders.
• This chapter sets out ten principles for effective allyship in campaigning and policymaking. The principles are both ideological: “nothing about us without us” and practical: “write down what you hear and add it to the national record, so you don’t exacerbate consultation fatigue.”

Reflecting on the value of allyship, the report makes recommendations that the Party engage with local projects and campaigns to demonstrate to constituents what Labor values mean in practice and to reach diverse cohorts.

While referenda don’t occur too often in Australia, many social policy and equity issues provide a basis to implement these recommendations. Climate action arises as a clear opportunity – a significant issue in the 2022 election outcome and problem with highly gendered impacts. It’s a big transition from supporting one issue to supporting a party platform – and connecting to people on those issues will be important.

The second chapter of the report focuses on campaigns as a critical juncture in women’s pathways to politics. I find that referenda are an opportunity to amplify the voices of women leader, and to showcase the diversity of women’s voices within the Party.

• A 2009 report produced by the now leader of the Labour Party in Ireland, Ivana Bacik defined five barriers to women’s equal political participation, five Cs: cash, childcare, candidate selection processes, party culture, and women’s confidence.
• A public campaign is an opportunity to tackle two of these Cs: Referenda also provide practical experience and a training ground which can counter a gendered confidence gap for women. Referenda can also, in the longer run, also support women’s candidature. My time in Ireland included meeting with national organisations that support women to engage in electoral politics, often gaining members just after a public vote.???
• My report outlines mentoring and training programs across Ireland to support women’s transition to formal politics, including those which take an intersectional approach: among the examples I highlight are targeted training for young women LGBQT+ campaigners and for migrant women via the Migrant-Councillor Internship Scheme. Alumna from both programs are now elected, and representing communities that are still not prominent in the Irish Oireachtas.
• One organisation in Ireland, Women for Election runs a campaign called ‘Count Her In’. They ask the Irish public to focus on identifying community leaders as potential candidates for party politics. I scribbled in my notebook in that meeting the words “let’s get the netball mums of Australia elected – they’d get a lot done.”

In this chapter, I make recommendations for Parties to nominate emerging women leaders to take on leadership roles.

The third chapter in this report is focused on what happens within the party after a big campaign – to ensure that the system provides equal opportunities for those who are newly engaged to be represented in the Party’s platform and among its elected representatives.

• There is a risk that we glorify women as voluntary campaigners because they still face so many barriers to formal representation. Yes, we should celebrate women volunteers to the Voice campaign. But to make that a lasting impact, we need to be transforming our political systems to ensure women can be leaders at all levels – if we don’t fix the system, we risk trying to ‘fix women’, rather than support them.
• I reflect on the success of the Australian Labor Party’s affirmative action processes for gender equity across three decades, which supported a move from 35% to 40% to now 50% women in the Australian federal party room.
• The task now is to make sure the women and men that are elected represent a diversity of a social and cultural experience. I make recommendations that the party consider a quota for culturally and racially marginalised communities and that within the existing gender quotas, a cultural and First Nations lens be nested. Those models should be distinct and be self-determined by women from those communities.
• The recommendation for a cultural diversity quota has been made before. The lesson from the incremental approach to gender quotas within the ALP is that this does take time because work is needed across the candidate pipeline. Action must start now.
• In particular, I make a case in this report against the excuse that “culture is too hard to count.” I’m an economist, and I had the opportunity to speak with many academics with expertise in gender and diversity to inform my research. They pointed to best practice principles, statistical standards and existing analysis which provides a basis to identify the cultural groups who are underrepresented in the Party and how to use it to inform quotas.
• Those models need contemporary data. I recommend that the Party and EMILY’s List regularly collect data on the economic, social and demographic profiles of its members to understand who is underrepresented across the pipeline to determine where supporting actions are needed.

The final reflection in this chapter is about the principle of a critical mass – that is, the idea that minoritised groups must be well represented to achieve systematic change: you can’t just have one woman in the room, and that’s of course why we have quotas. But for minority groups, proportional representation in Parliament may not generate a critical mass (this is of course one key argument for the Voice to Parliament).

Alongside getting a diversity of women elected, the Party should establish frameworks to understand the impacts of policies both on gender and on equality – a model which has recently been adopted by policymakers in Ireland with reference to Articles of anti-discrimination. The intersecting barriers of gender and marginalised social identity necessitate that all our MPs to act as allies to these marginalised groups, and to take an intersectional approach to feminist advocacy.

Dr. Elise Stephenson GAICD , the Deputy Director, Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at the ANU said to me, “Yes, we need more women. We also just need more feminists in policy and feminists can be of all genders.”

This takes me to the final remarks in my report, where I take a different lens to understand the lessons from referenda. While the main research considers how campaigns provide a platform to support women leaders, there are boarder lessons to be learned from referenda about how to gain mainstream support for social change, and to change social norms – lessons which I think are instructive to the feminist movement within politics. The main observation is that diverse coalitions are important to achieve mainstream support.

We know that to ask a double majority to support Voice, we need every type of support: from First Nations people first and foremost, echoed by the voices of women’s groups, multicultural communities, businesses, rural and regional voices, and to reach all Australians, both the progressive and the more conservative politicians. As one Irish abortion campaigner said to me, “we need 500 different doors into the conversation, so that people see themselves – that’s how you get buy-in and lasting change”.

While support for women’s equal participation has long been mainstream , continued efforts are needed to both sustain an equitable representation of women and to respond to the rise of exclusionary gender politics which harm trans people.

I’d like to end with my thanks to the talented and creative women who have provided their time to speak with me about their experiences.

Many women and men – including sitting MPs and those who have been central to the Voice campaign – have made time to make contributions to the research, and I am grateful for their time and their reflections.

These contributors included Anny Druett , Nareen Young , Dameyon Bonson , Shireen Morris and Sheena Watt MP - folks whose perspectives I recommend as you consider how you might vote on October 14.

I would also like to thank Pamela Anderson , CEO of EMILY’s List Australia, Maree Overall , Stephanie Milione and Jananie Janarthana for their support, to Sharon Taylor at Slater and Gordon Lawyers and Sasha Doherty at the Australian Workers Union for their support of the internship, and to friends and colleagues Nicki Hutley , James Blake , Maxine Evers for their thoughtful comments and reviews.

The First Nations leaders I have met and heard speak in the last ten weeks are a reminder of all we have to gain from their Voice to Parliament, and in Parliament. I’m hopeful that the report provides evidence to inform actions to ensure we can continue to raise their voices in rooms where decisions are made.