It’s just a story, but one that speaks volumes about the culture of politics in general, and the culture of the Coalition parties in the specific. It’s a story that women in the parliamentary precinct are all too familiar with.



On Tuesday in an effort to allow facts to speak louder than the great rolling unreason on climate change and energy policy that has taken the country hostage for a decade, Josh Frydenberg summoned a posse of business leaders to try to talk down a group of backbench rebels and a former prime minister intent on inflicting damage.

These days, in the great enlightenment that is 2018, it just so happens the posse was heavy in women. A trio of women run the associations representing the sectors of the economy once regarded as the pillars of the gentlemen’s club: mining, big corporations and the farmers.

At the other end of the room from Vanessa Guthrie (Minerals Council of Australia), Jennifer Westacott (Business Council of Australia) and Fiona Simson (National Farmers’ Federation) was a group of male politicians falling over themselves to fire off question after question. There were a few female parliamentarians in the room: Nola Marino, Julia Banks, Ann Sudmalis and Amanda Stoker.

According to people present, the blokes asked their questions, one by one, and had their questions answered by the business association leaders – little Socratic dialogues.

By the time it eventually rolled around to the female MPs asking their questions, the clock was well and truly ticking

There was some frustration in the room about Tony Abbott jumping in ahead of others, and Craig Kelly, whose brain works at a million miles an hour and who loves to talk, firing off 20 questions at a time when one of his duties was chairing Tuesday morning’s meeting.

To cut a long story short, the blokes who wanted to make a contribution found a way of making it.

Women in political life are easily stereotyped by their colleagues and the media. It doesn’t pay, certainly in the Liberal party, to be seen as pushy. It pays to keep your head down and your elbows in.

By the time it eventually rolled around to the female MPs asking their questions, the clock was well and truly ticking.

Marino, who is party whip, had issued a general warning that the meeting, which was of the backbench committee on energy and the environment, should not run over time because MPs were due in the Coalition party room meeting straight afterwards.

Kelly, presumably mildly frazzled and under time pressure, tried to get Banks and Sudmalis to ask their questions as a bundled job lot rather than allowing them the same courtesy as their male colleagues – to put their questions separately and have them answered separately.

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One can only imagine the internalised raised eyebrows from the high-powered women across the room having watched a gaggle of blokes hogging the microphone for the entire session, firing off various monologues, and then the gag motion abruptly applied to the women.

It might have seemed a bit strange. It was even strange enough to feel discomfiting to some of the MPs in the room.

By the time the Coalition party room rolled around immediately afterwards, Sudmalis, according to several accounts, was pretty wound up. Whether she was wound up because of not being able to get a word in because the landscape was cluttered with blowhards is pure conjecture.

Both Sudmalis and Banks hold marginal seats for the government. If one was thinking clearly, given the political stakes involved in this decision, one might want to listen to the views of marginal seat holders.

In the main meeting Sudmalis did not mince words. She noted the rolling nonsense about the national energy guarantee wasn’t helping marginal seat holders, and the government would be best placed just shutting up and getting on with it.



Banks, who, according to people in the room, spoke immediately afterwards – prefacing her remarks by noting she wouldn’t have expressed them quite so bluntly – agreed with her colleague.

As I said at the opening, this is just a little story, a little window on contemporary political culture.

Why bother telling it? Well, the answer to that question is simple. Telling these stories, recording them and sharing them, is the only hope we have for creating the collective self-awareness that might, just might, create the conditions for change.