Our major political parties fail at diversity. While it’s easy to focus on the Liberal Party’s current disastrous shortage of women on the frontbench, no other party is excelling on diversity at the moment.
Last week, Fairfax Media profiled the Greens new economics team, which includes Richard Di Natale, Adam Bandt and Peter Whish-Wilson – three straight, white men.
Bandt is a former industrial relations lawyer and Whish-Wilson was a Wall St banker and academic. These are typical backgrounds we have become used to leading economics in Australian politics.
Men have always dominated economic policy in Australia, with women rarely getting a look in. While the first woman appointed finance minister occurred during the Fraser government, and Helen Coonan later served as assistant treasurer, no woman has ever been federal treasurer.
Rightly so, the Greens have been on the front foot in criticising Prime Minister Tony Abbott on his government’s lack of women in his ministry. They went so hard that you would think that they would have made it a priority to appoint a woman to a non-traditional policy area like economics, but we are left wanting.
Last year, I undertook research into women in political leadership and found that left-wing and progressive parties are more willing than right-wing and conservative parties to promote women into leadership roles. In politics we still tend to see women filling the ‘soft’ social policy roles and men in ‘hard’ economic ones.
That is what is so confusing about this current Greens team. By failing to appoint a woman have they bought into a conservative view of politics? Well, partly.
Greens women in Federal Parliament all come from either social sciences, legal or environmental backgrounds. The pipeline for female economic talent in the Greens is as limited as it is for the Labor and Liberal parties.
As we know, many organisations fail to cultivate a strong pipeline of female talent in order to fill senior roles. Like political parties, such organisations are shooting themselves in the foot with homogenous teams, in that their teams will not be as disruptive or innovative, or accurately reflect the general population.
Economic debate in Australia is primarily still the domain of white men. Even though there are some notable exceptions, it remains difficult for women to access these roles.
I would have thought that a party like the Greens, which went so hard on Abbott when he had only one woman in his 2013 cabinet, would have pushed to have more diversity in its economics team. A failure to attract and elevate diverse candidates in politics is a failure to represent the nation.