BY LISA MACDONALD
SYDNEY — The women of Australia can expect an earful from the Labor Party over the next six to nine months. Indeed, the wooing has already begun.
More ALP women hold seats in the Queensland parliament than ever before, boasted Premier Peter Beattie as he declared victory for Labor in the February 17 state election. On the same day, the ALP's "sisterhood" organisation, Emily's List, proudly declared that three states have now met the party's quota of 40% of women pre-selected for safe seats.
The ALP spin doctors are, it seems, going to go hard for women's votes in the next federal election. They, like every political machinist since women won the franchise, know that which way women's votes trend can be decisive in the election outcome.
The Coalition government's record will ensure that Labor's pitch to women gets some resonance. Alongside a government which has cut public child-care funding, given tax rewards to traditional, single-income family units, forced single mothers off benefits, facilitated an explosion in low-paid casual employment, principally of women, and begun to fund men's rights and anti-abortion campaign organisations, it's not hard for the opposition to seem progressive. And alongside a prime minister whose name has become synonymous with "back to '50s" outlook, Labor leader Kim Beazley can sound like a committed feminist.
But practice speaks a lot louder than spin and, while the Queensland election result may have produced a new high for those women pursuing careers in the Labor Party, in NSW, the party's stance on women's rights has hit a new low.
Last September, a Young Democrats member accused the Labor MP for Fairfield, Joseph Tripodi, of sexual assault. The incident occurred on September 14 in Tripodi's Parliament House office.
The woman, dubbed "Ms C", did not to lay charges after the police advised her that the lack of forensic evidence meant her case was unlikely to succeed. Instead, Democrat MLC Arthur Chesterfield-Evans lodged a complaint on her behalf with the house speaker, John Murray, "so that the incident was on record in case it happened again".
What followed says more about the ALP's real attitude towards women's rights than any number of internal quotas or policy statements on gender equality.
First, Murray refused to act on the complaint, citing a signed statement he had received from his chief of staff, Christian Gillies, that Ms C had, on the night concerned, been "flirting and drinking", and acting "sexually aggressively" towards him.
Premier Bob Carr publicly denied knowledge of the case for more than a month after being told about it, and then defended Murray's refusal to take action on Ms C's complaint, claiming that it is not the job of the speaker "or anyone else in this parliament to do the work of the police". He dismissed calls for a judicial investigation into the incident, saying the woman's refusal to press charges made an inquiry redundant.
In a remarkable exercise in hair-splitting by a woman whose political career has been built in large part on her reputation as a solid feminist, Labor's upper house president Meredith Burgmann then joined the club, stating that it was doubtful if the NSW parliamentary guidelines on harassment, which require the heads of the two houses of parliament to "act appropriately" when informed of allegations of sexual harassment, applied when the alleged victim was not a member of parliamentary staff.
After publicly dismissing the assault claim as "complete nonsense", rising Labor star and MP for Kogarah Cherie Burton was found by an Independent Commission Against Corruption report into the incident to have covered up what she saw that night to protect Tripodi (he was sitting on his office floor with his trousers undone, across the room from a fully clothed Ms C, when Burton entered there looking for him). Tripodi and Burton have been close friends since their battles together in Young Labor's right faction.
As for the rest of the party, there has not been a squeak of protest about Labor's cover-up from anyone — male or female, right or "left", politician or party official. This is because the Labor Party's response was no aberration, a temporary stumble back into pre-feminist politics. Nor was it the unfortunate outcome of an internal faction fight. Rather, it was a carefully thought out, well-organised plan to close ranks in defence of a fellow Laborite at the expense of women's right to, at the very least, be taken seriously when they accuse someone of sexual assault.
Ms C has since resigned her job. In contrast, Tripodi, while the claims of sexual harassment against him mount, (the October 28 Daily Telegraph reported that two women journalists working in Fairfield lodged complaints with their editor about Tripodi's "lewd" behaviour in the last 12 months) has been assured by party officials that he will keep his endorsement in the safe Labor seat. According to senior party figures, "ALP head office has been 100% supportive of him ... he was not charged with a criminal offence and that is how it is being looked at".
No amount of hypocritical spouting by Beattie, Beazley, Carr or any other Labor leader about what the ALP will do for women when it's re-elected will change the reality that, when push comes to shove, women's rights are dispensable as far as the party is concerned. And for Ms C, and anyone else whose struggle for justice for women gets in the road of Labor's governmental ambitions, no amount of Labor women in parliament will make a fig of difference.