When Nicola Roxon left politics, having spent six years as a minister and become – in 2007 – the first woman to serve in cabinet while raising a preschool-age child (2007! More than a century after Federation! After more than one hundred years of men breeding in office like ferrets in a box!), she was immediately asked whether her resignation was a confirmation that women in politics were incapable of doing the thing that she had in fact been very effectively doing for six years.

Immediately, a large and lugubrious crowd gathers at the graveside of modern feminism. The departing MP is asked mournfully how she feels about personally exterminating the dream of women "having it all", and if she has anything to say to the 51 per cent of the population now facing life in a laundry gulag.

Is he about to be charged with corruption offences? Has he been bonking the shadow minister for urban affairs?

In fact, the only response we are – across the board – virtually incapable of supplying when a politician announces that they are quitting to spend more time with their family is: "Oh! That's a pity. But good for you. And good luck."

In my fever-dream of an idyllic future, we will have found a way to discreetly leave at the station our national baggage that stubbornly insists that it's weird for mothers to be away from their children, and weird for fathers to be with theirs.

But in the meantime, I would say to Kate Ellis, who announced on Thursday that she is leaving politics after a successful 13-year career in order to be around when her son starts school: "Oh! That's a pity. But good for you. And good luck."

Also in the meantime: Here's an idea. In our sporadic national bouts of hand-wringing about the under-representation of women in the Federal Parliament, the talk always is of how to find or somehow engineer a class of women prepared to undertake the rigours of a job whose technical demands include flying to Canberra 20-odd weeks a year, and devoting a serious chunk of your time while there to gathering in a large vaulted chamber and yelling at 149 other people. One suspects that for a parent of either gender, the pointless pantomime of Question Time does not feel like a very convincing justification for missing sports day. Given that life of a federal MP in Canberra is – even at best – a public exercise wheel designed to suit only the most masochistic of hamsters, why are we endlessly searching for crazier hamsters when we could be redesigning the wheel itself?

Why, for instance, do we continue to assume that it's necessary for elected representatives to gather in Canberra to confer?