Feminist Acts

What would Parliament look like if it was remade by and for women?

Australia's first female parliamentarian was told Parliament was "no place for a woman". Her name was Edith Cowan. She got elected and helped change the laws governing women’s lives.

But within the chambers of Parliament itself, little has changed. 

Whether it's long stretches away from family, or the shouting matches of Question Time, Parliament still operates by rules designed around men’s lives. 

In this episode, we take on a political system that needs to change.

What if two people could share one MP’s job? What if Parliament made room for caring responsibilities, shared power and a different way of doing politics? 

In this episode, you'll learn:
  • Why getting more women elected is only part of the battle for better laws
  • What trailblazing women who broke into politics and law can teach us about changing the rules
  • How job-sharing MPs could open Parliament to more people and challenge the idea that power belongs to one person

Guest: 
  • Professor Kim Rubenstein, Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Business Government and Law, University of Canberra; Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney; Honorary Professor, ANU.
Hosts:
  • Becky Batagol, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Monash University
  • Kate Seear, Professor, Deakin Law School, Deakin University

Take action today:

The book is free! The provisions are drafted. Take them to your parliament. Adapt them for another jurisdiction. Or start your own feminist legislation project.

Download the full book for free (open access):
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003372462/feminist-legislation-project-becky-batagol-heli-askola-jamie-walvisch-kate-seear

The Feminist Legislation Project: Rewriting Laws for Gender-Based Justice 
Edited By Becky Batagol, Kate Seear, Heli Askola, Jamie Walvisch
Published by Routledge
Copyright 2025


Mentioned in this Episode:

This podcast was funded by Monash University through the Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Enterprise).

Produced by Miniature

Creators and Guests

Host
Becky Batagol
Host
Kate Seear

What is Feminist Acts?

A how-to guide for MPs and policymakers to change the law to improve women’s lives.

Becky Batagol:

Welcome to Feminist Acts. If you still use cash and you're lucky enough to have a $50 bill in your wallet, one side of your yellow plastic note will have an image of a greying woman with a sharp part looking directly at you with an expression telling you to go bore someone else. She is Edith Cowan. Edith Cowan was the first woman to be elected to an Australian Parliament in 1921. She gave her maiden speech to the West Australian Parliament that year.

Becky Batagol:

She said, many people think that it was not the wisest thing to do to send a woman into Parliament, yet the views of both sides are more than ever needed in Parliament today. Cowan was jeered and interrupted frequently during this speech. She was told Parliament was no place for a woman. For the three years she was in Parliament, Cowan was instrumental in passing two bills which gave West Australian women crucial economic freedoms. One giving married or single women the right to enter the professions, the other giving inheritance rights to women.

Becky Batagol:

Cowan shows us the importance of gender representation in Parliament and the connection between the diversity of who we elect as parliamentarians and the kind of laws made by Parliament. Our next guest has thought a lot about gender and how Australia's democracy was established and what it means for lawmaking and citizenship today. Professor Kim Rubenstein is an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Business and Government and Law at the University of Canberra, adjunct professor at the University of Technology Sydney, and an honorary professor at the ANU. She's Australia's leading expert on citizenship and this has led to a scholarship around gender and public law. Welcome to the podcast, Kim.

Kim Rubenstein:

Thank you so much, Becky.

Becky Batagol:

Kim, how would you describe yourself and your work to someone who didn't know much about the law and legal system?

Kim Rubenstein:

I think, Becky, to everybody, whether they're lawyers or not lawyers, I tend to describe myself as an active citizen. And by that I mean that I'm someone who feels responsible for myself and for others in our community and that I have many privileges that have been bestowed upon me, including my education. And I want to use that to ensure that we have a better world. That's how I would describe myself. At the top

Becky Batagol:

of this episode, we talked about Edith Cowan, the first woman to be elected to Parliament in Australia. It's just over one hundred years ago. Can you tell us a little bit about her and do you think it's necessary to have diversity of representation in Parliament to create better gender laws.

Kim Rubenstein:

So the simple answer to your latter question is absolutely, and we will probably come back to that. And I'm delighted that you opened with Edith Cowan. Look, she is a remarkable Australian. She was born in 1861 and I can encourage all the listeners who want to read a bit more about her that there's a lot on the web and the National Museum of Australia has a great representation of her standing with her hands crossed in a very assured way. When she was seven her mother died and giving birth to her sixth child and she was then sent off to boarding school.

Kim Rubenstein:

A very difficult start. And at the age of 18 she was married to James Cowan and he became a magistrate and they settled in Western Australia and had children. But she was obviously very attentive to the broader community. She became actively involved in public life, mainly advocating on behalf of women and children in what we would now think of as a social work sort of context. She advocated for compulsory voting and proportional representation, so she must have been influenced.

Kim Rubenstein:

I'm sure she would have read Catherine Helen Spence's work. And she was instrumental in setting up a hospital for women. So all of the things that were seen as the domestic sphere, and this is very much about the suffragette movement at the turn of the century, the things like domestic violence, drunkenness. Mean, how poignant it is that these are the ongoing issues of this very day in terms of women's place in society. She spoke openly about venereal disease and prosecution and contraception and really campaign for lived experience of women.

Kim Rubenstein:

And yes, she was someone who then realised that she wanted to bring that into the Parliament. She ran for the lower house seat of West Perth for what was then the Nationalist Party, which was a precursor to the Liberal Party in 1921. And really brought those issues into the Parliament. And we really do have a lot to reflect on what that must have been like as a person in an environment that already then by virtue of all those issues that she was campaigning on would not have been particular, perhaps central concern to all of the other members of Parliament. And she was defeated, I mean, no sorry, she defeated her opponent by a mere 46 votes after preferencing.

Kim Rubenstein:

So she got in very much on the skin of her teeth, whatever that to say is. She just got in but she made the most of it over those next three years and when you next look at your $5 note have a look at that very important part of Australian history, a person as a part of Australian history.

Becky Batagol:

Of course, Edith Cowan wasn't alone in advocating for women's issues and women's citizenship. Who else was active at round about that time?

Kim Rubenstein:

Well, I would say in fact that Edith would have relied very much on the guidance and inspiration of Catherine Helen Spence. So Catherine Helen Spence really was the first woman to put her hand up for civics in the sense of being a drafter of the constitution. She was what I would call a political junkie in the sense that she was so interested in all political matters. She brought proportional representation to Australia. So she's one person to add into the mix.

Kim Rubenstein:

She wasn't elected to be part of the convention and I've written a bit as you know about what that had meant in terms of women not being part of the drafting of the constitution. But then by 1902, Australia enfranchised white women, disenfranchised indigenous women from South Australia who had been part of that original enfranchisement. And from that time on, from 1902, there was the capacity for Australian women to be elected to Parliament. So before even Edith Cowan got elected to the Western Australian Parliament in 1921, there were people like Vaida Goldstein who ran for Parliament but wasn't elected. She ran five times for the Senate because she refused to join a political party.

Kim Rubenstein:

So I think it's really important in thinking when we do identify wonderful women like Edith Cowan that, there were a group of women who were really active citizens. And lastly, before I get into the answer, the substantive answer, for the historical context, there was an amazing woman who went to the same high school that I went to in Melbourne called Presbyterian Ladies College. Victoria was the first school in Australia to give women equal access to education. Her name was Marianne Phillips. She did a PhD over in England and was elected to a national parliament.

Kim Rubenstein:

She was the first Australian elected to a national parliament in The United Kingdom. So Edith is without doubt important as the first woman elected to Parliament in the sense that it was a state parliament. We live in a federal system. She was in Western Australia and that's remarkable and important and we'll talk about her too. But there are so many women upon whom we all stand.

Kim Rubenstein:

Their shoulders are so important. And perhaps because I have been someone who ran for election and didn't get elected, perhaps I take particular attention to those who ran and didn't get elected that they are also part of the story.

Becky Batagol:

It's interesting that when I hear you talk about Vita Goldstein that I know we have an electorate here in Melbourne named after her, but not an electorate named after Catherine Spence. Yes. And that some of those women have been heroised and some have not.

Kim Rubenstein:

No, that's right. I'll put in a plug that I'm actually working on a campaign to get a statue of Catherine Helen Spence diagonally opposite Andrew Inglis Clarke whose beautiful statue in Canberra.

Becky Batagol:

Who's one of our so called founding fathers,

Kim Rubenstein:

He is. Was one of the drafters of the constitution. People think of the hair Clark system for proportional representation when they should be saying hair spent system because she was the person who brought it into Australia and then he was at the table at the convention. So we want a statue of her opposite him, it's a very large statue and if it's replicated with her as if it's a partnership statue, it would be of her talking to him with a plaque saying it was her idea that he gets all the credit for.

Becky Batagol:

So revisioning the meaning of that statue by putting something around color Yes. Of Before you go on, I just wanna you talked twice about proportional representation. Can you tell us a little bit about what you mean by that and its importance to Australia's democracy?

Kim Rubenstein:

Yes. So there are two different ways in which we elect in the House of Representatives. It's a preferential system as well, but it's who gets the most votes through preferences, who wins a single seat. In the Senate, by virtue of the fact that each state has 12 senators, we vote in a way where we identify who our various preferences are, but then you need a proportion of the vote to get elected. So for instance, in Victoria with 12 seats, the way it's worked out is 100 divided by 13, whatever that number is, that's the percentage of vote you need to be elected.

Kim Rubenstein:

And so you get a broader cross section of society by virtue of achieving the percentage that is needed in order to be elected. So in our Senate, we see much more diverse representation than we do in the lower house by virtue of those different voting systems.

Becky Batagol:

So just going back to the issue of representation and the kind of laws that are made by Parliament. So it's nearly one hundred years ago since we've had at least one woman in one of our parliaments across the nation. But I wouldn't say we've achieved gender equality by any stretch of the imagination. So it seems a bit murky to me the connection between representation and the kind of laws that Parliament can make.

Kim Rubenstein:

So this, I think this is a really important point and I'll direct people if they have the time to go and look at a piece that Deborah Kass and I wrote in 1995 called Representations of Women in the Australian Constitutional System. In that piece we look at the question of what does representation mean? Do women actually need to be in there to feel that democracy is fulfilled? And we untangle a little bit of the High Court's implied freedom of political communication discussion about representative democracy being so important through section seven and twenty four of the constitution. And we also talk about representation not only in that direct sense, but in terms of the way women are represented in public society in terms of their active citizenship.

Kim Rubenstein:

And we argue that it is important for women and a broad range of women to actually be in there and not to have to always be represented by men. And I think we've seen progress, you know, from the time of Edith Cowan and Wyder Goldstein, we've seen a lot of women who have put up their hands and who have been elected. I might add that women got the right to vote and stand federally in 1902, but it took until 1943 before Enid Lyons and Dorothy Tagny were each elected. On a theme of statues, which seems to be evolving here, there's a gorgeous statue of the two of them on the If you're facing Old Parliament House in Canberra, I'm going to encourage everyone to come up to Canberra, on the left hand side of the two of them walking together as if they were about to enter the Parliament, which is from a photo of them having done that on the first day in 1943. But we've seen a tremendous increase of numbers, so much so that we have now more than 50% of women in the federal Senate.

Kim Rubenstein:

So I actually think we're at a point now where we can say whilst those numbers are important and important for what we can see as a change in focus, for instance, women's health, see more discussion about women's health, we see more attention to childcare, we actually haven't seen much of a change in the style of the nature of Parliament. And that's something that I think we also need to unpack a little bit in terms of the diversity of people who were there and the expectations that are required of men and women to get into that place in the first place which has gendered issues involved as well.

Becky Batagol:

I thought we were doing a podcast about feminist statutes but maybe we are doing one about feminist statutes. Kim, you've spent much of your life at universities, but you've stepped off the campus and into the Parliamentary Chamber too. In 2022, you ran as an independent senate candidate for the Australian Capital Territory, the ACT, in the federal election that was held that year. You weren't elected to Parliament as you mentioned, but you attracted significant votes in Canberra and the ACT. Part of your mission was to change the way that politics is conducted in Australia.

Becky Batagol:

What is it about federal politics you were seeking to change? What did you learn about a political system in standing for election?

Kim Rubenstein:

It was an absolutely thrilling and wonderful experience, and I have absolutely no regrets for doing it. And I'd learned a lot and gained a lot from that experience. My main motivation wasn't to become a politician per se, but to bring the ideas into our parliamentary framework that I see as vital for a healthy democracy. And so I was actually very committed to running a campaign in a way that I believe we should run our discourse in democracy. So one of the reasons I had the capacity to seriously run and have a chance of winning was that one of the candidates was had become of concern to the electorate in that he had not been representing the electorate fully in the way he was voting.

Kim Rubenstein:

And so there was a chance to essentially, with the notion of preferential vote and proportional representation to win that seat. And of course David Pocock as an independent proved that I was right in that respect, just the different candidate. However, the reason why I'm saying that is for a lot of people it was about removing the person who they felt wasn't doing a good job. And I was insistent and the entire volunteer campaign were insistent about not talking about the negatives of the other person, but talking about what we would bring into Parliament and the positivity of what my expertise in constitutional law and my interests in legislative drafting and my interest in climate change and gender and representation and open government, that's another really key one, that that was why people should vote for me in terms of what I could bring in, not who I was getting out. And I still think that we have concerns in our whole discourse that is just so adversarial in a pernicious sense.

Kim Rubenstein:

I mean, it's important to test out arguments, but it shouldn't be personal. It's about the issues. And so I felt that I had an influence there. And certainly the issues that are really important to me, including specifically for the ACT of increasing the number of representatives, because I referred earlier to the states having 12 senators, But of course, the ACT in the Northern Territory since 1975 have only had two. So that's an ongoing campaign that I think will eventually happen and will have been influenced by the fact that I made that a major part of my campaign.

Kim Rubenstein:

You can seed ideas without actually winning and those ideas actually then getting traction even if you're not in there. And so for the purpose of active citizenship, just being part of the nominating and being part of the public discussion during an election campaign can improve democracy.

Becky Batagol:

So you're interested Kim in rethinking how Parliament and parliamentarians do their work. Is there anything you'd say in your rethinking that's explicitly feminist?

Kim Rubenstein:

Yes, I do. I think that there is a feminist element to the concept of collaborative and collective decision making and a specific issue that I chose not to focus on that election, but is one that's an ongoing interest of mine, is specifically to do with representation and the capacity for more than one person to hold the single position of a representative. So job sharing in Parliament is an idea that actually began in The United Kingdom. In Wales and Scotland and in England itself, there have been moves for two people essentially to come together to job chair. And I think that has a very strong feminist element to it in terms of not necessarily just biologically that women might be more inclined because they have been allocated in society to be responsible more for caring and therefore can't work full time.

Kim Rubenstein:

But more broadly in terms of thinking through how one makes decisions in a productive way that can interrogate issues without actually having to exert power over one another, but having power to enable others rather than to have power over them. So job sharing is one example that I didn't prosecute during that campaign but if I were to ever run again would be seriously considering doing.

Becky Batagol:

So how does job sharing an MP role work?

Kim Rubenstein:

This is one of the things that would of course you have to get your electorate to vote for you. So there are constitutional issues which I have developed in my thinking and writing about why I think this is constitutional. But if on a practical level, I supported two women who ran at the last election or intended to run, developed a campaign to run to be a job sharing candidate for the Senate in Victoria, Lucy Bradlow and Bromwun Bock. And the way they were going to do it, but of course every job sharing candidate can work out what's best for them, they were going to have one week on, one week off with a handover in between so that each of them would be on top of all issues. But at any one time only one of them would be doing the work.

Kim Rubenstein:

So only one of them would ever sit in the chamber to vote. Only one of them would sit in a committee hearing for instance. Only one of them would attend the school end of year high school presentation. So that it was a single representative but the two of them would work out their own schedules, which would enable them to not be full time in that role. One of them was a parent with three children and the other had other diverse interests and had worked in Parliament before and could see that a full time job would be too onerous.

Kim Rubenstein:

Not only too onerous, but not healthy. And so she was very keen to test out job sharing in that respect.

Becky Batagol:

I love this idea.

Kim Rubenstein:

And so I'm just trying to kind of imagine what it would look like. What would the voting paper look like? So they would be the senator for Victorian. It might say they had been elected Senator Bock Bradlow. It had both their names, but one of them would be sitting on the seat.

Kim Rubenstein:

But the vote would be their joint vote. Because only one of them would ever be in the Parliament at the time of voting. And a lot of people, in fact this morning I met with someone who kept coming back, but what do you do if they don't agree on something? This is something they had to prosecute and was very clear. They said first of all they were very aligned, that's the whole reason of coming together, that they felt that they had similar values that they wanted to bring into Parliament.

Kim Rubenstein:

But secondly, they'd worked out a way that of course you can't necessarily agree on everything. And what their approach would be is when there was an issue that they didn't align with, they would go first to their electors because they are representing an electorate to see what the view of the electorate was and they would work out ways of gathering that information. They would then go to the experts if it was a particular area and get their views. Then they'd sit down again to see if they could come to the same point. But if they didn't, then whoever was sitting in the chamber on the day would have the final decision making power and the other person committed to that process so that they would support one another if they'd gone through that process.

Kim Rubenstein:

And I think, well, that's great modelling for all parliamentarians. They're not going to agree. That's exactly what Parliament's about, about thinking through in a transparent way how you deal with difference and how you get to a particular end. So I think not only would it enable a more diverse range of individuals to be thinking seriously about putting their hand up to be in Parliament, which would be healthy for democracy, but it would also be healthy I think in terms of the culture of how you exercise power.

Becky Batagol:

It occurs to me Kim that part of the reason why job share would be needed is because of where Canberra is physically located. It's a long way from much of the rest of the world if you happen to live in the Kimberley or even in West Australia or Tasmania, it is a very long way away and travel is not always direct. So what does the physical location of our national capital in Canberra tell us about how our nation was established and what are the ongoing implications for who represents us at a national level?

Kim Rubenstein:

Well, there's a feminist story there too, Becky. And in fact, that piece that I wrote with Deborah Kass back in 1995, we referred to a comment that Justice Elizabeth Everett, was the first Chief Justice of the Family Court of Australia, still alive to this very day, an eminent Australian, she said, you can tell that

Becky Batagol:

we- Can't just say she's a hero of mine. I think she's amazing.

Kim Rubenstein:

She is a phenomenal person. We could spend a whole session on Elizabeth Everett. Elizabeth very rightly pointed out that you could tell that there were no women at the constitutional convention because who would ever agree to their capital being at least 100 miles away from Sydney. Like actually mandating that your workplace is at least 100 miles away from where you live.

Becky Batagol:

So hang on, is that what it says in the constitution?

Kim Rubenstein:

Yes, because what was happening was that there was rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney as to where the capital would be. And so in order to placate that rivalry, they said, well, it will be in New South Wales, but at least 100 miles away from Sydney so that the New South Wales Sydney people didn't get privileged. So that was all about a fight between the states as opposed to the lived experience of what that means. Now that was only Melbourne and Sydney, as you rightly point out, of course Australia is a vast nation. And so the requirement to be coming to Canberra from Western Australia is so much more onerous than anywhere else.

Kim Rubenstein:

And so in that sense, it is a reminder that lived experience is quite profound in thinking about structures and institutional frames that we set up. And we need to be more thoughtful about how a more diverse Parliament would need to change in order to better accommodate the needs of the very people it's meant to be serving.

Becky Batagol:

So my question then is, and this is going back to the issue of representation and the kind of laws that come out of Parliament, what are the limits then on those diverse representatives? Because there must be through, I can imagine through the party system, through some of the personality politics, even maybe the physical set up of Parliament, limits on what can be negotiated by individual representatives even if there's a number of them. So what are those limits and have you seen any examples where women for example may have come together across the party lines to pass laws?

Kim Rubenstein:

Well there is a very famous instance in relation to the abortion pill that when historically and this is really taking it from the top of my head, from my history, I don't have specifics so anyone interested in this should do their own research to validate what I'm saying.

Becky Batagol:

Have some great podcast notes

Kim Rubenstein:

so Indeed, that we can indeed. But there was a senator from Tasmania, and of course we know that Tasmania has 12 senators like everyone else, so that by virtue of being a smaller population they have better representation. And of course in my arguments for the ACT increasing from two to four, I made the point that ACT and Tasmania were similar sizes, but there's a very big differential in your Senate representation. But that Senator from Tasmania who had an influence in the Senate by virtue of the numbers in the Senate sought to restrict women's access to abortion and women across the parties came together to resist that. So that is a perfect example where a very particular lived experience and abortion and bodily autonomy of course is something that we often can go to as an example.

Kim Rubenstein:

But there are many examples I think where women's lived experience, not only in a physical sense but also in gendered expectations of society, play out in ways that if we were more open to thinking through how that becomes the centre of our world rather than our working world spinning around it. So in many ways, as you said earlier, the fact that the Parliament is away from where we live is profoundly influential on people's decision as to whether they want to be part of it. But we know also from the Sex Discrimination Commissioner's Report Raise the Standard or Set the Standard that there's a culture that has evolved also, is very unhealthy in relation to it being far away. There's those elements as well. But then I think there are also other aspects of, as I said, structures of power where the egotistical nature of it and the party system then becomes another framework for assessing this, becomes an obstacle for people who want to exercise power differently.

Kim Rubenstein:

And so, for instance, those wonderful organisations like Women for Election and Women in the Pathways to Politics program, which have been really successful in getting more women, they've all been about teaching women how to do things that other politicians do and they have been largely men. So even though we've seen an increase of women in Parliament, which I think is important for the reasons I said earlier about more focus on certain policies, we haven't actually seen a change in the style and culture of how we engage in civilised discourse. I think a perfect example, was very depressing, was during the Brittany Higgins fiasco and two women from the Liberal Party just letting loose on two women from the Labor Party in the Senate in ways that seemed even more grotesque than what we'd seen before. It really brought home to me that it's really not about just having women in Parliament, it's about changing culture of how we engage with one another. And that culture at the moment comes from over one hundred years of doing things in a particular way, so we have to be more creative about it.

Becky Batagol:

That's certainly the premise of our podcast, is really trying to rethink not just the process but also the laws that could come from any of our parliaments, whether it's Federal Parliament or our State and Territory Parliaments, and demonstrating that better laws are possible and they're possible today. And they've got 16 proposals in our book that the podcast is based on

Kim Rubenstein:

the Feminist Legislation Project, which attempts to demonstrate that could be picked up tomorrow or today even and implemented. Indeed. Indeed. And as you know, our common colleague, Ramona Vijayaras' gender legislative index is a really helpful tool to show that there are ways to analyse legislation drawing from the Convention on the Illumination of Discrimination Against Women as a framework for thinking through those things and how we do that in a more profound way and mainstream something like that is an ongoing sort of project I think.

Becky Batagol:

Kim, I'm interested in moving our conversation towards a project you did a few years ago which was the Trailblazing Women in the Law Project. And that project talked about the experiences of seven decades of Australian women within the legal system and whether or not they are lawyers or politicians or judges or other roles in the legal system. Can you tell us a little bit about that project and what you learnt from doing that project?

Kim Rubenstein:

Well, first of all, it was just a wonderful way of meeting such a diverse range of really inspiring women who were the trailblazers in the sense of being the first of doing something in the legal profession. And we also, as you said, over seven decades, wanted to make the point that that happening to this very day and is still happening in terms of the first woman to be in a particular position, institutional position or other legal practice position. So that was just a wonderful opportunity and to encourage people to have a look on the National Library's website because all of those oral histories which range, some of them the sort of the shortest I think was about five hours but some of them go for thirty hours. But they are interviews that can be dipped in and out of depending on their release. So of the 50 that we added to the library's collection through this project, some of those women have said they're happy for them to be accessed immediately and people can go from this podcast and do a search and have a look to see those that are accessible now.

Kim Rubenstein:

Some of them are closed until their death because of the sensitivity of some of the things that they've shared. And others are for research purposes, which means people can contact the library. The library contacts the interviewee to see if they're happy for the particular researcher to look at it. So it's terrific as a resource and will be an ongoing resource. We were also keen to show diversity in terms of background beyond age and also different types of lawyering.

Kim Rubenstein:

So it's quite rich. We set up a web website which is there for people to also go and look at called Australian Women Lawyers as Active Citizens. And if people Google that, they'll see the breadth of that project. But to come to your question about things that were particularly interesting, I think we obviously couldn't interview the very first women lawyers because they've since passed. They were the people at the turn of the century who were really the first.

Kim Rubenstein:

But in reflecting on their lives and the lives of the next generation, can put it that way, There was quite a difference in terms of social milieu in that the very, very first women, of which one of them is my great aunt, my grandmother's older sister was Joan Rosenov, who was the first woman QC in Victoria. She was the daughter of my great grandfather, think that's right, my grandmother's father, great grandfather. And he was a solicitor in Ballarat. So she was article to him. And most of those first women in her milieu were already in, in the sense they were in legal families or they had some connection to someone who could auspice them.

Kim Rubenstein:

They had a challenge in making sure that the rest of the profession enabled them to be accepted and that was quite grudging. So it's not as if they had an easy time, but they were still in. And then once they were in, Joan Rosenov did do some important family law work and she did represent Egon Kisch, but generally they didn't come in necessarily and others in that period to change the system. They were in the system and they progressed the system. And it wasn't really until the next generation that we see some of the real, I'd even say feminists, because these women were obviously very conscious of being women lawyers, but I don't know if they would have necessarily identified as feminist lawyers, although we'd need to do some work and really interrogate that.

Kim Rubenstein:

But certainly the next generation, we see groups of feminist lawyers in the sense that they not only got into the system but they weren't prepared to take the system as it was. They wanted to change the system. And I think that's really interesting in terms of reflecting on women's experience in the legal profession. Where you fit in society more broadly obviously influences the way you lawyer or the way you think about law and its role in society. Could it also be about the burden of being the first or the only and the battles just to be there makes it harder to undermine the system because

Becky Batagol:

you're just battling to be there?

Kim Rubenstein:

I think that's absolutely right and perhaps interrogating my slight judgement on those women not wanting to change a system, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, that whole concept of being the only person and then expectation that you shouldn't be there, maybe just being there was in fact the important step. And certainly was in the sense of enabling the next generation to really break those barriers. Kim, across this podcast, one of the ideas we lean on to think about gender justice is the idea of radical imagination and using imagination to

Becky Batagol:

rethink what our democracy is and what our laws could be. So if you imagine that in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, instead of a group of founding fathers, we had a group of founding mothers or aunts, grandmothers or sisters. What would our laws look like today? What would our I guess, firstly, what would our democracy look like today? And what would our laws look like too?

Kim Rubenstein:

It's a wonderful question and of course very difficult because we've all been inculcated and educated in a world that is very different to that. But I do think that if we had, right from the start, had family as the core of what we do as a society and thought about our National Parliament in terms of its being a place that we use to centre our thinking about balancing our responsibilities as human beings to one another, both in family context but in community, then we might have been able to not only ensure that women were in there in the decision making circles, but in ways in which everyone was responsible for thinking through where their children would be when they were in those roles. And it actually makes me think about a lot of people ask me with the job sharing and coming back to the link with this concept, why haven't we seen it happen in Scandinavia? You know, the sort of progressive countries that we think of for democracy. And I actually, not that long ago, met with someone who was in one of the Scandinavian parliaments, so I asked her.

Kim Rubenstein:

And her answer was quite profound actually. She said that the need for part time work is less because society provides for families to manage work life balance in the sense that childcare is integrated so well into their lives that the need from a caring point of view is less for people to be working part time. So I think that helps in fleshing out what I'm saying, which is if we'd started from a base where there was that expectation, it wasn't the harvester case where there was the expectation that the man was the breadwinner and the woman was staying at home, that we started from a base of mutual responsibility, then that would have been brought into a parliamentary framework where we would have heard more voices. And so then I think legislation would flow with that as your core. Now, you know, it's so hard to know what that would actually mean, but I do feel that that sort of base provides more likelihood that you're going to create legislation that is much more cognizant of that sort of balance of us as human beings.

Kim Rubenstein:

And therefore cultures that flow from that you would think would be, I mean not all humans are perfect. There's no question about that. But that need of relationality has been central to the ways in which you make decisions, but also then in terms of the impact of legislation on everybody that I think would create a healthier society. It

Becky Batagol:

sounds like the kind of Parliament you imagine would be quite different to the polarised, even toxic Parliament we have across our nation. Can you imagine how our Parliament would look?

Kim Rubenstein:

Well, think it would look more like our committee system. I don't know if you've appeared before Parliamentary Committees but when you said before I've been out of the university environment, I've appeared many times before Parliamentary Committees. And that is a more engaged experience. Sometimes they can get pretty partisan. But on the whole, there is this sense of parliamentarians being responsible for developing good legislation.

Kim Rubenstein:

Now, they end up being hijacked ultimately by partisan issues in the end. But when you're actually in that committee that is sort of honestly and authentically doing its work, that's what Parliament is actually about. So if we could transform our chambers of Question Time to being more engaged in true depth of governance issues, I think we would have a completely different environment. So it's astounding for every single Australian going for the first time into a Parliament at question time to see just the theatrics of it. And everyone says we would not allow that of school children.

Kim Rubenstein:

To have that as the model and standard for our highest legislative body in the country is demeaning of everyone.

Becky Batagol:

I was listening recently to ABC Radio at the top of the news they had a grab from what I assume is Westminster in The UK and this guy was screaming at the prime minister. And I I had that same thought too. I was

Kim Rubenstein:

like, who allows screaming in a workplace? Exactly. Exactly. Yes. I mean, it sees itself as above workplaces and legislates for work places but does not conduct itself in a healthy way as a work place.

Kim Rubenstein:

The other part I think that I was keen to talk to you about that happens in any hierarchical workplace and I think Parliament's

Becky Batagol:

a very hierarchical workplaces with the MPs at the top of that pyramid is abuse of power. And can you see a way of rethinking how our Parliament works so that abuse of power are less prevalent?

Kim Rubenstein:

Yes. Well I certainly think that job sharing is a trigger for rethinking the nature of power. That it's a responsibility, the power is not of the individual, but the power is for a role to enable others. So rather than having power over, it's power to assist to enable. And I mean, I keep coming back to it because it's a hobby horse, but it's also I think just a catalyst for thinking more broadly about how do we create frameworks where there's accountability for that exercise of power.

Kim Rubenstein:

And one of the aspects of that set the standards report is thinking about different ways to enable that accountability issue. You know, there is a democratic sort of attention by virtue of the people there because they've been elected by their representatives and so their authority comes from their election. But then in between elections, and we know as administrative lawyers as well, that we have rules that apply to keep them accountable, But we need perhaps more authoritative outcomes or immediate outcomes when people really do cross the line in undertaking or being responsible for totally improper action. And we used to have under our system of ministerial responsibility for ministers a convention that if a minister does something wrong in their role that they resign. That sadly also has diminished over the time.

Kim Rubenstein:

But maybe that should also be built into a parliamentary, any member of parliament. You know, they're elected on the basis of certain conventions and expectations. If they breach them, that there are consequences.

Becky Batagol:

Kim, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. It's been so good bringing together both your historical thinking and your legal sharp legal mind, as well as your experience standing for Parliament yourself into the studio.

Kim Rubenstein:

Well, thank you very much for inviting me. It's been an absolute pleasure, and I think this series is so important. I encourage everyone to listen to many more that will flow from today.

Becky Batagol:

You've been listening to Professor Kim Rubenstein, who's a fellow of the Academy of Law and a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. If today's episode inspired you, take a look at our book, The Feminist Legislation Project. Kate, we've been working in law reform, both of us, for some time, but I think there's still more to find out. What can we find out

Kate Seear:

from this book? Well, the book itself, which you can find in the show notes, free to download, completely open access, available to all, contains detailed law reform proposals across a range of different areas of law from construction law to migration, family law. And each proposal has been really carefully refined and developed over time. Sets out why law reform is needed and then how to actually go about it. And so it's a bit of a template, if you like.

Kate Seear:

And if you're interested in these areas of law, they're there for you to look at. But also we hope to inspire all of our listeners to think about having a crack at law reform themselves in other areas that we didn't think about, that we haven't yet looked at, but are there and ripe for the picking. This podcast was recorded on lands of the Boon Wurrung and Bonnarang people of the Kulin nations located outside the city of Melbourne or Naarm. As professor Rubenstein explained in today's episode, women have long been excluded from Australian systems of lawmaking. They have been and remain underrepresented in parliamentary offices.

Kate Seear:

But the situation is even more dire for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women. They have been actively excluded over years from voting voting and from standing for election. We'll hear more about this in the episode of this series that focuses explicitly on voting and disenfranchisement. But it is worth noting that the first aboriginal woman elected to the Commonwealth Senate was Nova Paris, and that only happened in the year 2013. For the Commonwealth House of Representatives, it was Linda Burney elected to Parliament in 2016.

Kate Seear:

These examples remind us that there is a lot more work to do when it comes to representation and to voice. We acknowledge their efforts, and we pay our respects to them, as well as to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are listening in to this episode and following along the series. You've been listening to Feminist Acts. This podcast was produced by Miniature and funded by the Monash University office of the deputy vice chancellor, research and enterprise.