There were 10 women in Cabinet when Julia Gillard was prime minister, so you can understand her frustration to see just two women in similar levels of power now.
A change of government should not mean a dramatic drop in the number of female voices heard.
And yet that’s exactly what happened when the Coalition came to power in 2013.
Abbott initially appointed just one woman to his 19 person Cabinet (before later appointing a second). Within just a couple of years, Australia moved from having a female prime minister, a female governor general and a number female premiers, to having no women at all in such positions (until Annastacia Palaszczuk became Queensland premier in early 2015).
During the launch of a new ANZ White Paper on gender inequality yesterday, Gillard lamented new research that found female representation in Australian parliaments has declined from 30.8% in 2009 to 29% now.
That’s seen our world ranking on such progress drop from 20th in the world to 48th in 2014.
This is one of the areas where Australia has gone backwards, while other nations have moved ahead. It should be, as Gillard said, a competition we’d like to win, rather than come in 48th.
Gillard noted the figures particularly point to insufficient numbers of women in conservative governments, and more must be done to address the balance.
Some within the Liberal party agree. This week, a number of female MPs have spoken out about a lack of women in the Liberal party, following Labor’s commitment over the weekend to increase its number of women to 50% by 2025. They’re calling for the Liberal party to set a female target of 30%.
Setting such a target could be a painful process. Already the usual concerns about “merit” have emerged, with Foreign Minister Julie Bishop declaring that merit must always be the “element for pre-selection and election”.
But concerns about merit raises its own questions concerning our current line-up of MPs. As Gillard put it: “You’d want to say, as you wandered around our parliament, ‘And all of the men got here on merit, did they?’”
There’s little merit in a Cabinet that’s dominated not only be men, but by men of a similar age, race and background.
Unless both sides of government can make a commitment to increasing the number of women represented, we’ll continue to see any progress made in the future simply deteriorate again with a change of government.
“I’d like it if Labor was always in government,” finished Gillard yesterday. “But being a realist… I’d like it that the change of government did not mean a change in the number of women’s voices within a government because all sides of politics had women equally participating.”