Making a difference?
On June 8, Australian Democrat Senator Natasha Stott Despoja described her experiences of being a woman politician. She was addressing the launch of the New York-based Women's Environment and Development Organisation (WEDO) campaign 50-50 by 2005: Get the balance right!, a campaign which aims for 30% women in government by 2003 and 50% by 2005.It is a great honour to take part in this international demonstration of sisterhood, said Stott Despoja. The voices of half our population are not heard in political debates and policy-making, and governments around the world must implement measures to support women, and address this failing, she added.
The WEDO campaign declaration states that at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, 189 governments committed to take measures to ensure equal access to and full participation in power structures and decision making and increase women's capacity to participate in decision making and leadership. The principal action they pledged was to establish the goal of gender balance in governmental bodies and committees, as well as in public administration entities and the judiciary.
Very little improvement in the proportion of women in these positions has occurred since the conference, according to WEDO. It states that it recognises that numbers are a necessary but not sufficient condition for women's full, equal, active and informed participation in economic decision-making, and correctly points to the alleviation of poverty as crucial to achieving this goal.
However, along with the Tributes to Grassroots Women Leaders at the campaign launch was a session called Women Making a Difference featuring Indonesian vice-president Megawati Sukarnoputri and US secretary of state Madeleine Albright.
As a leader of a country whose commitment to neo-liberal economic policies is devastating the lives of millions of Indonesians, Sukarnoputri has shown concern for neither the Indonesian people in general nor the rights of women in particular.
As for Albright, she rates alongside British former-prime minister Margaret Thatcher as living proof that women are not necessarily more caring, sharing and compassionate than men. According to her, the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people by bombs and an economic blockade is justified if it teaches Saddam Hussein that US imperialism is the boss.
Almost every country has women in power carrying out the same anti-people policies as their male counterparts. Stott Despoja herself is deputy leader of a party which voted for the Coalition government's anti-worker, anti-women Workplace Relations Act, and, with only minor modifications, the GST, which disproportionately disadvantages poorer people, the majority of whom are women.
While Stott Despoja and her sisters in the WEDO would probably not argue that all women in positions of power are progressive, their focus on this sort of campaign takes the focus off what would make a difference.
It is not a politician or administrator or judge's gender that determines their attitude to women's rights; their actions are the only test. More Jocelyn Newmans, Amanda Vanstones, Bronwyn Bishops, or even Joan Kirners, Carmen Lawrences, Meg Lees and Natasha Stott Despojas will not advance the rights of women because they and their parties are not committed to fundamentally changing the status quo.
They are not committed to changing the basis for the distribution of wealth in our society, which leaves indigenous women with a life expectancy of around 20 years less than non-indigenous people and single mothers and many other women way below the official poverty line.
Rather than utter platitudes about sisterhood, Stott Despoja should have used the WEDO launch to question why Albright was being held up as a woman making a difference. In Australia, Stott Despoja would, if she is serious about improving women's lives, become part of a political force which will seriously challenge the anti-women, anti-worker status quo, not remain an apologist (albeit with good career prospects) for a party which merely spouts indignant hot air before capitulating to its conservative older sibling in government.
BY MARGARET ALLUM