Happy International Women’s Day 2008! I realise I’m a day late, but I hope you’ll believe me when I tell you that I was celebrating yesterday. In fact, because IWD was on a Saturday here in Australia, the celebrations took place on almost every day of the past week.

What a year it has been for the women of Australia. There are a number of events that have happened this year that make me feel especially good about being a woman in Australia. They have strengthened my identity as a woman and affirmed it. In fact these things have given me something to identify with that fits with my image of womanhood in 2008. I have confidence that there are other women leaders out there working to make the sort of difference I also am wanting to make.

1. There was the election of the Rudd Labor government and everything that   came with that for women.

2. There was  the media attention given to the Victorian Chief Commissioner of Police, Christine Nixon’s leadership style as she manages the cultural transformation of the Victorian Police Force.

3. There was the celebration of the centenary of Women’s Suffrage in Victoria.

4. There was the apology to the Stolen Generations by Prime Minister Rudd which was particularly a recognition of the enormous pain caused to Aboriginal mothers by the forced removal of their children from them.

Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd and the Empowerment of Australian Women.

• We now have a woman in Julia Gillard as the first female Deputy Prime Minister in Australian political history.
• We have a group of female government ministers that reflect the real diversity of women in our Australian society – unmarried, married, women with children, women who are childfree, women who are openly gay, women of other cultures, women who are daughters of migrant parents, women who have taken the surname of their husbands, women who haven’t.
• Most importantly, we had the dynamic, that was played out before the election, as the potential alternative Prime Minister and his wife and partner had to re-negotiate their professional lives. For the many readers from outside Australia, I’m going to explain what happened here.
• Therese Rein, wife and partner of the now Prime Minister, and mother of their children, had a life of her own, independent of his/theirs. There had never been a situation like this in Australian political history before. She was a highly successful, entrepreneurial women, running an award winning global recruitment business, Ingeus. She was earning more money than him many times over. Her business, however, tendered for, and won, Australian government contracts to find work for unemployed people in Australia. Should her husband become the leader of the government following the election, there was seen to be a conflict of interest. In the months leading up to the election, they considered various ways to manage this, seeking legal and professional advice, with each consideration pursued, examined and critiqued very publicly by the media. The final outcome was that, willingly but with much sadness, she sold her Australian interests in her company.
• Many women all over the country could identify with this dilemma, albeit not at this high powered level. So many couples today have highly successful individual careers and businesses. The question of whose takes priority is challenging and difficult for couples, when an opportunity for one to advance  significantly impacts on the other’s work. Most of us are able to negotiate that privately, but the then alternative Prime Minister and his wife had to do it under public scrutiny.
• For me, this was just such an important process to witness, even though I was not privy to how Kevin Rudd and Therese Rein reached their decision. There were some women who used what happened to argue that this is just another case of women still having to be subservient to men and their careers, that we haven’t advanced far at all when it is the woman who has to give up her career or business for the man.  For me, it was much more. To take this process, often so invisible and given so little import, to the nation’s stage was extremely powerful and significant. There was nothing to suggest that Therese Rein was being subservient to her husband. On the contrary, there was every evidence of a couple who respected each other’s needs and aspirations and who had, for all their married lives together, made decisions about whose needs and aspirations took priority on each occasion an issue arose. I doubt she has achieved the success she has – and stayed happily married – without Kevin Rudd putting his aspirations and needs second to hers on occasions.
• Women and men can, and need to, negotiate important issues in their lives, taking into consideration each other’s needs and aspirations, if they learn how. My earlier blog - Women and Their Partners Negotiating Work/Family Balance - outlines a way that this can be done.
• We also have a Prime Minister’s wife who chooses to keep her own name and continue to work. I hope no one is going to draw the inference from this that I am advocating all women “must” keep their own name and should all work. I didn’t keep my own name and I did stay home with my children until they commenced school. What Therese Rein is doing, as Australia’s First Lady, however, is giving legitimacy and value to something about which many women are made to feel guilty. To those women who want to work, who want to be successful, who want to be a mother and who want to maintain their individuality while being happily married, she is an example of how to do it.

It is the issues relating to marriage and family life and to women and their role in society that have been brought to the nation’s stage by the election of Kevin Rudd and his government that I find profoundly liberating as a woman.

Chief Commissioner of Police, Christine Nixon’s Leadership in the Cultural Transformation of the Victorian Police Force.

In many ways it was inevitable that the appointment of a female Chief Commissioner of Police in Victoria would not be welcomed by all. Christine Nixon was appointed in April 2001, the first woman to lead a police force in Australia. She has brought to her role a very different style of leadership to that of male commissioners who preceded her. She sees herself as “the leader of the ‘people’s police’ ”. She has brought inclusiveness and a very consultative style of leadership to the police force. She listens and seeks opinions and gives people the opportunity to speak. She supports and values diversity and accepts a wide range of differences within the ranks of the police force. One of the significant things that many people say about her is that when she enters a room there is real sense of presence about her. She is a woman of great integrity.

That difference in leadership style was never more obvious than it was recently in her very public on-going difference with the secretary of the Police Union, Paul Mullet, again played out very prominently in the media. Mr. Mullett represents the face of the old Victorian Police Force, that Christine Nixon is working to change. He also represents the masculinity of a 1950s male, and attitudes that are inconsistent with the Police Force Christine Nixon is seeking to create, in fact, inconsistent with any modern organisation.

As a woman, in such a prominent leadership position in the State and the nation she models a leadership style that all women can aspire to.  She seems to effortlessly act decisively, making the hard decisions, acting with integrity, displaying vision, but being also a woman of action. Yet she is most decidedly woman. That is one of the greatest challenges for women in leadership today – how do you get there without short-changing your integrity, selling your soul and denying your identity as a woman? Christine Nixon seems to have done it.

Women of the Past Empowering Women of the Present – The Centenary of Women’s Suffrage in the State of Victoria.

It was 1908 when the women of our State, Victoria, gained the right to vote. All around the State this year the centenary of Women’s Suffrage is being celebrated. It is very easy to take for granted something that occurred 100 years ago, but the struggle of those women who fought for this needs to be acknowledged and valued for what it was.

While it was inevitable that Victorian women would get the right to vote – all other States had granted it, as had the Commonwealth – it took 19 private member’s bills from 1889 onwards before the vote was won in 1908, and then another three years before women could exercise that right. It was yet another 11 years (1924) before women could stand for Parliament, however.

The Victorian Government website listed the arguments raised against granting the vote as “the desecration of the motherhood ideal, destruction of family life, immorality, blight of the fine character of Victorian women, employment displacement and the dangers of introducing biological weakness and feminine attitudes into public life.” Some of these same arguments have been used, even in the last ten years, in relation to particular situations regarding women’s place in society. So we still struggle for equality in today’s society.

Apology to the Stolen Generations, Our Indigenous People – An Acknowledgement of the Pain of Aboriginal Mothers.

Again I have to pre-amble here for my readers from outside Australia. On Wednesday, February 13, 2008, our new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, in his first sitting of Parliament, said sorry to our indigenous people:
“for the laws and policies of successive governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss..” ;
“for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country”;
“for the pain, suffering, hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for the families left behind”.
It was an historic and momentous day for Australia, having a profound and moving impact all around the nation, especially for our indigenous people.
 
Without wanting to diminish the pain of the fathers of the Stolen Generations, I want to focus here on IWD on Aboriginal mothers. Those of us who are mothers can, at least in some small way, imagine what it must have been like. We carry our children inside us for nine months. We give birth to them. To then lose them is pain that is not only emotional, but physically felt as well. To have them taken from you, stolen, snatched, often in the most deceptive ways, is unimaginable and beyond belief. That we can’t feel. Yet it happened.

I remember some years ago watching the film, “Rabbit Proof Fence”. The extraordinary cinematographic beauty of the Australian landscape contrasted sharply with the pain and anguish of the story of the Stolen Generations, especially that of the mothers and their children, played out in the story lines.

This “sorry”, however, is only the beginning. Our treatment of our indigenous people has left families decimated, with many experiencing the devastating psychological aftermath that has resulted in generations of difficulties to which we now need to respond so that our words are not merely words. I am proud to be part of the Australia that said sorry and I want to be part of the future that sees equality and reconciliation for our indigenous people.