Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Australian Politics and Policy
House of Representatives and 5 per cent in the Senate (compared, for example, with
the UK, which had 6.9 per cent LGBTI representation in the House of Commons
after the 2017 election). 65 Worldwide, in February 2016 the LGBTQ Representation
and Rights Research Initiative identified 180 ‘out’ lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans
(LGBT) parliamentarians in 42 countries. 66
Studies of electoral systems across the world have shown that proportional
representation systems (as in the Senate) have a positive effect on the election
of female candidates, compared with majoritarian systems with single-member
electorates (as in the House of Representatives). 67 This can be seen in the Australian
parliament. Yet as Wilma Rule notes, ‘Negative electoral system features have been
overcome by women’s political mobilization’. 68
Until recently, research on the gendered impact of electoral systems has ignored
the role of sexuality. Manon Tremblay raises several possible avenues for inquiry,
including the fact that, unlike women, who are distributed fairly evenly across
different geographic areas, LGBTIQ+ people may live in quite dense concentrations.
In this kind of constituency, ‘to be an openly LGBT person can be an asset in the
selection of candidates’. 69 The finding that urbanisation had no impact on the 2017
Australian marriage equality vote – contrary to assumptions that rural areas are less
LGBT-supportive than urban areas 70 – affirms Tremblay’s point that further research
is required on LGBT-supportive attitudes and parliamentary representation.
In Australia, while Liberal women’s representation in parliament increased
significantly in 1996, supported by mentoring from the party’s Liberal Women’s
Forum, there have since been reductions in women’s representation on the
Coalition side; women comprised only 17 per cent of Coalition MPs in 2016 (which
was the lowest level since 1993) 71 and 27 per cent of senators. By September 2019,
this rose to 19.5 per cent of Coalition MPs and 42.9 per cent of Coalition senators. 72
By comparison, women made up 41.2 per cent of Labor MPs and 61.5 per cent of
Labor senators in 2019, while the Greens had just one male MP in the House of
Representatives and five out of nine (55.6 per cent) Greens senators were women. 73
In contrast, the number of openly LGBTIQ+ Coalition parliamentarians increased
from one in 2012, when Senator Dean Smith was elected, to four (all gay
men) in 2016 – the three new members being elected to the House of Representatives.
The ALP had three: two women senators, including Senator Penny Wong,
the leader of the opposition in the Senate and shadow minister for foreign affairs,
65 Williams and Sawer 2018, 647. Note: acronyms in this paragraph differ as they have been
transcribed from the source texts.
66 Tremblay 2019, 91.
67 Tremblay 2019, 92.
68 Rule 1987, 495.
69 Tremblay 2019, 106.
70 McAllister and Snagovsky 2018, 419.
71 Williams and Sawer 2018.
72 Hough 2019.
73 Hough 2019.
364