Rocking the suburbs

Embracing a quota for suburban women is the outcome to victory, argues Kristy McSweeney in her opening remarks at The Gender Agenda event in Melbourne.

When I watched Peter Costello stand on a table at the Water’s Edge in Canberra, following the 2005 budget and raucously repeat his plea to the women of Australia to “have one for mum, one for dad, and one for the country” I didn’t think anything of it. I was 25. I had a great career ahead of me in politics – something I set out to stick at and did.

I like to think my career has gone ok. I’ve turned out to be one of only a handful of people in this country who have held senior media and strategy roles for all of our Coalition administrations.

I’ve run for preselection.

I defend the cause three times a week on Sky News, and am trolled and bullied online because women aren’t allowed to be attractive and intelligent and conservative. How confusing.

So, what I’m going to say is based on a long history, and a deep analysis of politics and electoral demographics.

It’s not about what you and I believe at our core – it’s about if what we believe is attractive to the electorate.

If our brand is surviving in the market.

Do we want to be the Kodak to Labor’s Apple?

So, if our brand, like any brand, wants to remain competitive in the market, it has to restrategise so it is reflective of community standards.

The AFL had to let women play football.

And before we say having positions for women decries the legacy of Menzies – it doesn’t.

Menzies actually supported mandated positions for women at a time when women would otherwise not be able to secure positions. They couldn’t get a loan, a bank account or have a job if they were married.

But he enshrined gender in our party. Very progressive.

I’ll also add that Menzies supported the White Australia Policy on the grounds of homogeneity, and for Indigenous Australians to not be recognised as citizens.

If we went to the electorate today with those 1940s views and refused to change because they were in the ‘spirit of Menzies’, we would be decimated.

But, to the core of my argument.

I now realise that I can only stand here in front of you because I wasn’t, in the words of Peter Costello, off “having one for the country, or mum or dad.” I can stand here today as a credible source because I could keep visible for the last 20 years due to not having children.

Sometimes not having children isn’t your choice.

Sometimes it’s due to medical or personal circumstance.

So, with the choice taken away from me, I never had to choose in the way that other women do.

The choice to be visible.

The choice to have a high enough profile or standing in branches so that you are heard, are thought of, are front of mind for selection. That you are that candidate for the winnable seat that is slotted in at the last minute when a scandal breaks, or a shock retirement comes.

The choice to be visible to be chosen, or the choice to forsake all the activity that one must complete in order to be chosen.

Both together is impossible in politics. That’s why women in our party have generally accepted that you either come to politics later in life, or you do not have children.

I can count on one hand the mothers raising children in our federal parliament on our side.

I will need to use all of my fingers and toes to count Labor MPs who are raising families and contributing to our democracy as elected MPs.

So, that dismantles your first point, doesn’t it? That women don’t want to enter politics if they are mothers.

And I’m about to tell you how being conservative and being an academic of politics has led me to believe in ensuring we have female candidates in winnable seats now more than ever.

It’s electoral necessity.

In our party, attending enough Sunday morning BBQs or Tuesday night factional dinners to get yourself to a level of somewhere that is acceptable enough for the party to look at you as a worthy contributor to the cause is impossible for women who have children.

The Tuesday night faction meeting clashes with the Under 9s netball dinner, and the commitment to work on a campaign means paying extra money for childcare in the school holidays that middle class mums just don’t have.

Women who argue merit and point to themselves as an example of doing it all at once are mostly lying about the fact that they have the economic means to pay for help.

We don’t like to talk about wealth.

We don’t factor that in when we talk about merit.

There is plenty of opportunity for women to be recognised on merit – if they are wealthy enough to be able to be visible.

This goes to another point I make strongly here and is the essence of why we must combine a system where women are better represented in our party, with acceptance of electoral reality.

And that electoral reality needs us to embrace the type of party we have become and the one we are going forward.

The acceptance that we are a party of the suburbs. We aren’t a party of the established enclaves of Toorak and Hawthorn, of Vaucluse or Applecross or Nedlands anymore.

The blue ribbon has turned green from being soaked in too much chardonnay.

We are holding the seats but their margins are reducing repeatedly.

We are winning and gaining in the Deakins, the Caseys, the Swans, the La Trobes and Braddon and Bass’s.

We have reverted to being a party of the Howard Battlers.

The suburban women of Australia vote for us. And we will need suburban women candidates to win the next election.

We need them more than they need us.

They want to see themselves, or, at least people who understand what it’s like to not have always had economic privilege.

Where I grew up, families were trying to convince their kids to finish Year 12, not having conservations about doing the IB or the VCE.

Going to an Ivy League University or to Oxford was the same chance as going to Mars.

That is still the case today in our outer suburbs and our regions.

Where people vote for us.

We spent some years trying to chase these people away from us – talking in circles about climate change, and our members from Kooyong and Pearce and the former member for Cook reincarnating themselves as refugee advocates.

In the end, Kevin Rudd won by appealing to suburban voters, OUR VOTERS, our Howard Battlers, our tradies, our mums, about the cost of living.

FuelWatch, GroceryWatch – useless toothless instruments that had no market intervention power, but were effective.

We lost our economic message.

Thank God it’s over.

Thank God, and Menzies, we’ve returned to a party that reflects the values of what he stood for – family values, suburban values of wanting not much more than to work hard so you can give your kids a better life than your parents gave you.

The demonisation of the Liberal-voting working classes is over.

Our suburban values will have to carry us through to this election next year.

Maybe this year.

The gains the party must make are in Western Sydney, and we must hold Queensland. There will be three losses in Western Australia.

And so it stands. It is the suburbs and the regions that will save us.

Howard knew the value of the female candidate of suburbia. The mum, the community advocate, the netball coach, the get-on-with-it-woman who looked, talked and thought like the voters.

Thirteen of these women were elected in 1996.

It is sad that we, as a party, never fostered this and within two terms most of them were gone.

We squandered it.

But it gave us an evidence base of the power of the suburban mum candidate who could actually win a seat. Back then, those seats were marginal. Now they’re considered safe.

Back then we used to think six percent was a bit marginal. Now, we won’t put any money into a seat with that sort of advantage.

And we are more suburban now than we have ever been.

And we need the women of the tuckshops and the workshop site admin offices more than we have ever needed them before.

And we have them in our party, in droves. They are there.

We don’t have to find them.

The myth of ‘having to find female candidates’ has been perpetuated. It bewilders me. We have so many women that participate, right in front of us. Who can win.

But we have to make sure that they can turn up knowing that it’s not a waste of time, that they don’t have to choose between their kids and their political passion.

That they don’t have to choose between paying the mid-tier Catholic school fees or spending that money on a babysitter three times a week so they can go to branch meetings and barbeques.

Only to be told by a group of blokes that a far more unsuitable candidate has ‘done more work for the party’.

Quite rightly he has. He’s got a wife at home.

The women who are doctors and lawyers and bankers and those who work in ASX top 100 companies, many of you in this room, will always be able to participate. They will always be able to afford the choice.

They will always be visible.

But they won’t win us any seats.

To truly talk of merit for women. We must first accept that those that make that argument will always be more advantaged than those in the suburbs.

Then we must accept the sort of party we are. A suburban party. A regional party.

As we were intended to be.

For the forgotten people.

To give power to the forgotten people.

Half of those forgotten people are women. And they live in the seats that will either win or lose us the election.

To win them, I suggest we embrace women who can win us those seats and understand, that we need to help them gain the experience and the networks in the party to be visible and recognised and chosen.

And if that means giving them a mandated female position, to win an election, so be it.

If that means changing the yardstick of how we measure a candidate’s worth by the number of times they turn up to a sausage sizzle, well, let’s do it.

Is the outcome of winning not worth the experiment?

It’s proved successful previously.

That evidence base.

It seems a long way back to go to 1996, and I, more than anyone, can see the irony in talking about women’s progression in our party by invoking John Howard.

But, he knew how to win elections.

And he chose 13 women in suburban seats to help him do it.

In conclusion, I add that we, as a party, don’t have to follow Labor’s system. It doesn’t have to be a certain percentage, it doesn’t have to be forever, it doesn’t have to be called a quota, but it has to be enforceable and change the structure of selection.

We have complete freedom to design a system that is fit for purpose for our party that reflects back to the community the sort of party we want to be.

For women, and for men, of the next generation.

Kristy McSweeney is the Principal of lobbying and political communications firm The PR Counsel.

“The Gender Agenda” - A conversation with Nicolle Flint MP, Bev McArthur MP, Kristy McSweeney and Tamsin Lawrence was held in Melbourne on Thursday 6 May 2021.