NSW Labor MP Jo Haylen recently excoriated her party for sexist structures and a culture that denies women equal participation. Reflecting on her experience in the recent state election, she wrote:
The 2015 campaign saw men continue to dominate campaign strategy meetings. Preparation for key campaign events and decisions involved very few women, those in attendance were occasionally explicitly invited for a “female perspective”. Despite years of political or policy experience under their belt, the existence of their ovaries was their most useful attribute.
I agree with many of Haylen’s observations. What I find ironic is that Emily’s List, the organisation currently pushing the ALP national conference to adopt a 50/50 “gender equality” rule across all Labor party offices and preselections, makes women’s ovaries a litmus test for determining which women it will support.
Don’t get me wrong – Emily’s List has provided assistance to some Labor women to secure elected office. But Emily’s List does not support all Labor women, and this weakens its credibility as the organisation demands gender equality in the Labor party.
Emily’s List provides fundraising and other support once a woman has been endorsed as a Labor candidate. But Labor endorsement is not sufficient to gain Emily’s List backing. Candidates are asked to sign up to a set of further commitments: a test applied by the organisation to determine if a woman who successfully won Labor party backing now merits theirs.
Most, but not all, of Emily’s List requirements for candidates accord with Labor’s progressive principals. On the issue of abortion, however, Emily’s List only supports women candidates who agree to always support a pro-choice position. Never mind that this is a matter on which the Labor party accords its members a conscience vote: Emily’s List makes it a mandatory litmus test. Fail their test on how women should use their ovaries, and you fail to get Emily’s List support.
In my time in NSW parliament, I’ve known many female Labor MPs who were not supported by Emily’s List. The reason was often their unwillingness to sign away their right to a conscience vote on a complex area of law and morality – and quite often, their views were shaped by their experiences as women. This includes MPs whose single mothers chose to give birth to them; MPs who struggled with their fertility or lost babies to stillbirth and miscarriage; and MPs who have strong personal objections to abortion. I’ve known female MPs who are advocates for abortion services and RU-486, but reserve the right to oppose other options, like late-term abortion. There are also female MPs – indeed I was one of them – who think abortion should be safe and legal, but also rarer than it is today.
Among these women were warriors for equal pay, advocates for domestic violence services and women’s shelters, and champions for girls’ education. Some of these women held marginal seats that enabled Labor to stay in government delivering services and policies that supported women. A few of these women became ministers in Labor governments, bringing women’s voices to the cabinet table. Yet Emily’s List deemed them unsupportable.
And here’s a reality check: most female MPs will spend an entire parliamentary career without needing to vote on or consider the issue of abortion. But they will be asked many times to consider child care, parental leave, domestic violence, housing, education, breast screening, ovarian cancer research, and equal pay. They’ll be asked to think about foreign aid, when women make up the majority of the world’s poor, and sexual slavery, a vile commodification of women.
It’s not that reproductive rights aren’t important. It’s that they aren’t the only important matter a female MP will deal with in her career, and abortion shouldn’t be given such prominence in determining which women merit support from Emily’s List.
If the wider Labor party can accommodate MPs taking a conscience position on abortion, why can’t an organisation supporting women in the ALP do the same?
The other litmus test Emily’s List applies is a factional one. This is an often obscured aspect of internal Labor politics, given that Emily’s List maintains it is a separate organisation to the Labor party, but an honest discussion of the proposed 50/50 rule demands a frank acknowledgment that factional politics infect the way Emily’s List operates.
While Emily’s List does back some women from Labor’s right, the organisation is far more likely to approach and engage women from Labor’s left. Consider that neither I, nor the former NSW branch president Ursula Stephens, nor the current NSW assistant general secretary Kaila Murnain ever received support or encouragement from Emily’s List – and were certainly never asked to contribute to Emily’s List “reforms”. How can an organisation backing women in the Labor party not even acknowledge the three most senior women in our branch’s history? By looking through a factional lens, that’s how.
In NSW, the Labor Women’s Forum is an organisation run by women in the right, and the left, to ensure that all Labor women, particularly those left out by Emily’s List, have access to support from other women in the Labor party.
Looking ahead to the national conference, I urge all women in the Labor party – left and right, pro-life and pro-choice, Emily’s List or not – to remember this: if women only back some women, then only some women win. But if women back women, as the saying goes, then all women win.
