Introduction

Abstract

Almost 100 years after the arrival of women in the masculine domain of parliament they began breaking the silence about sexual harassment and bullying they experienced. This chapter introduces concepts relating to this experience, including toxic parliaments, sexual and sex-based harassment and bullying, as well as the broader concept of violence against women in politics and its disproportionate impact on those from minority backgrounds. Characteristics particularly associated with Westminster parliaments such as adversarialism and conventions of parliamentary privilege are briefly introduced, along with the distinctive nature of the parliamentary workforce. Feminist institutionalism provides the theoretical framework for the overall argument—that in Australia parliamentary reform took longer than in other Westminster parliaments but that a combination of timing and local mobilisation created a critical juncture and powerful momentum. The chapter ends with an overview of the rest of the book.

I was sexually assaulted by an Australian parliamentarian’s chief of staff—I believe change is coming.

So read the headline from an article in The Guardian by a former political staffer.¹ She had been a volunteer in the early 2000s but ‘I did not volunteer for what happened next’. She did not report the incidents to anyone, fearing the consequences would be worse for her than for him. ‘I did not keep quiet to protect him. I kept quiet to protect myself’. Twenty years later, as a survivor of sexual assault, she became one of over 1700 individuals contributing to a landmark review of the Australian parliament and its workplaces.

Experience of sexual misconduct was common in the Australian parliament, as in other parliaments around the world. So was the silence of those who experienced misconduct, fearing the consequences of speaking out—for their party as well as for their own career. This book asks why it took so long for the silence to be broken and what happened when it was. Its main focus is the Australian Parliament but viewed in the context of developments in the three most similar national parliaments—in the United Kingdom (UK), Canada and New Zealand. We start by introducing some of the terms used in the book, including the Westminster conventions shared by these parliaments, and the theoretical framework within which our analysis is situated. We finish by outlining the complexities of the parliamentary workforce and the structure of the book.

Toxic Parliaments

In discussing the problem of misconduct in the parliamentary workplace, this book uses a number of different terms, reflecting usage in different parliaments. The term ‘toxic parliament’ refers to a parliamentary work environment in which employees and elected members do not feel safe. While workplaces may be disadvantageous or hostile, the term ‘toxic’ suggests a more serious meaning: that such workplaces are harmful and injurious. Broadening the focus to include staff in parliamentary spaces reveals how damaging they can be to individuals, many of whom are young and in precarious employment. Conduct that creates a toxic work environment includes workplace bullying, sexual harassment, sex-based harassment and sexual assault. This book focuses on the ways in which such misconduct is being addressed, within the constraints posed by Westminster systems. Although there is a significant new literature that brings misconduct such as sexual harassment under the rubric ‘violence against women in politics’, this book does not generally do so for reasons set out below.

Reports and surveys conducted in Westminster parliaments reveal that bullying is a relatively common experience for political staff and parliamentary workers and is less commonly reported by parliamentarians. Workplace bullying is repeated and unreasonable behaviour that can include threats of physical violence, aggressive or intimidating comments, belittling or humiliating conduct, unjustified criticism or complaints, and deliberate exclusion. It often involves an abuse or misuse of power.

The concept of sexual harassment developed in the 1970s, when it was identified as a form of sex discrimination—impinging on the right of women in the workplace to be free of unwanted sexual attention. The first case law came from Australia, Canada, the UK and the United States, with most European Union member states not following until the early 1990s.² Australia was a pioneer in explicitly including sexual harassment as unlawful conduct under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 and it became the most common ground of complaint. Despite this early legislative recognition of sexual harassment, the Australian Parliament was particularly slow in extending such recognition inwards.

Today sexual harassment in the workplace is explicitly addressed in both international and regional agreements, including General Recommendations flowing from the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), International Labour Organization Convention 190 and the European Union Directive on equal treatment of men and women at work.

Initially, sexual harassment was seen primarily in terms of sexual coercion, ‘whereby an individual in a position of power demands sexual favours as a condition of employment or promotion’.³ Subsequently the definition was broadened to cover all forms of sexual attention or references that might create a hostile work environment. It covers both ‘unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature’ and also sex-based harassment, defined as ‘unwelcome conduct of a demeaning nature by reason of the person’s sex’ which offends, humiliates or intimidates someone. It may include inappropriate and sex-typed assignment of tasks such as making tea. It may also include asking intrusive personal questions or making inappropriate comments based on a person’s sex or making sexist, misogynistic or misandrist remarks about a person, either in person or online.⁴ By 2018, surveys conducted by the Australian Human Rights Commission showed one in three people reporting experience of sexual harassment in the workplace and an even higher rate for Indigenous people.⁵

A new literature emerging from scholars such as Mona Lena Krook and from agencies such as UN Women brings sexual harassment under the rubric of ‘violence against women in politics’. The concept of violence against women in politics gathers together a broad range of harms intended to ‘attack and undermine women as political actors’.⁶ It helps to identify gender-specific harms that are distinct from other forms of political violence deployed to gain the upper hand in partisan competition. It encompasses online and offline physical, psychological, sexual, economic and semiotic forms of violence and is increasingly recognised as a major barrier to women’s full participation in public life.⁷

As Tània Verge (Minister of Equality and Feminisms in the Catalan Government at the time of writing) has said, because sexism and sexual harassment impairs women’s right to contribute under equal conditions to political debate, international organisations have viewed these parliamentary misconducts as part of the continuum of violence against women in politics.⁸ Campaigns such as the #NotTheCost campaign of the National Democratic Institute have attempted to counter the argument that threats and harassment are part of the normal cost of doing politics. In June 2023 the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights wrote an open letter to the permanent representatives of member states, urging states to take action with a view towards zero tolerance for harassment and violence against women in politics, including both in parliament and online. New standards were being applied to how parliaments operated.

Despite this burgeoning campaign on violence against women in politics, this book mainly uses the different terminology associated with campaigns around equal opportunity and respect at work. The arrival of significant numbers of women in parliament from the 1990s has raised new questions about whether they have equal opportunity to perform their representative roles, whether as elected politicians or staffers and whether the same standards exist as in other workplaces.⁹ When viewing parliament through such a lens, workplace terminology has become more common, both in naming parliamentary misconduct and taking steps to deal with it. Practitioners, scholars and commentators in the UK, for example, have preferred to use the terms ‘harassment’, ‘intimidation’ and ‘abuse’ rather than ‘violence’ and this has also been true elsewhere.¹⁰

Sexual harassment, up to and including sexual assault, was the primary focus of the #MeToo movement which went global via Twitter in 2017.¹¹ Going global began with sexual abuse allegations against Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein. It quickly spread beyond Hollywood and as we shall see in Chap. 4 it inspired women politicians and political staffers around the world to speak out about the sexual harassment they had experienced.

The revelations that followed made clear the importance of what is called an ‘intersectional’ approach to gender analysis. This means that overlapping identities such as race, class, disability, ethnicity or other attributes need to be taken into account as they result in intersecting identities and experiences. For example, women from racial or ethnic minorities have been disproportionately targeted for both sexist and racist online abuse and may also experience injustice when reporting such abuse.

People who identify as LGBTIQ+ are also more likely to experience sexual harassment, including in the parliamentary precinct, than people who identify as heterosexual.¹² The terminology to describe gender identity is evolving and varies between countries; the term LGBT+ is also used here, following UK practice.

Westminster Conventions

While the Australian parliament provides the focus for this book, close attention is paid to related developments in Canada, New Zealand and the UK. Australia, Canada and New Zealand were British colonies that inherited in full parliamentary practices from the UK, before developing their own variants. This Westminster inheritance was an amalgam of customs, explicit rules and established routines. From the beginning it was a source of policy transfer and policy borrowing and this has continued up to the present.

Westminster parliaments are instantly recognisable because of inherited features such as the government occupying the front benches to the right of the Speaker, the Opposition to the left, as well as the colours of green for lower houses and red for upper. Inherited rules included the original standing orders of the colonial parliaments. As Australia’s Constitution s. 49 says: ‘The powers, privileges, and immunities of the Senate and of the House of Representatives, and of the members and the committees of each house, shall be such as are declared by the Parliament, and until declared shall be those of the Commons House of Parliament of the United Kingdom, and of its members and committees, at the establishment of the Commonwealth’.

Despite dissimilarities that grew over time, the Australian, Canadian and New Zealand parliaments remain recognisably ‘Westminster’ parliaments. They share strong conventions about parliamentary privilege, which developed in the course of the historic struggle between crown and parliament in seventeenth-century England. In the Westminster tradition, parliamentary privilege has been understood as the right of each house of parliament to regulate its own affairs and the conduct of members without external interference. In accordance with the principle of ‘exclusive cognisance’ courts should not adjudicate on the internal proceedings of parliament and vice versa. In particular, the freedom of speech in parliamentary debates or proceedings ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court.

As we shall see in Chap. 3, the legacy of parliamentary privilege and self-regulation of conduct has proved one of the obstacles to reform in the parliamentary workplace. Such reform has become more pressing with the growth in the number of paid political staff working for both ministers and parliamentarians. Around the world there has been increased professionalisation of politics, with careers commonly beginning at a young age among these growing ranks of political staff. The skills and networks acquired by such staff often boost their chances of acquiring preselection for a winnable seat in parliament. The setting of professional standards, however, was slower in politics than in other professions. Loopholes in anti-discrimination or equal opportunity legislation also meant that coverage of parliamentarians was often uncertain and loopholes were only closed in the wake of scandals.

In the UK, the Nolan Committee on Standards in Public Life found in the 1990s that parliamentarians were not aware of the standards of conduct expected of them and that up to that point there was neither a code of conduct or any limit or ban on outside earnings.¹³ While the ‘cash for questions’ scandal in the UK was a particular catalyst for action, the other Westminster parliaments were also grappling with questions of a code of conduct.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is remarkable that the parliamentary codes of conduct under discussion prior to 2017 were all about conflicts of interest and financial misconduct and did not touch on the question of sexual misconduct. Scandals can help drive reform despite the weight of institutional inertia, but at the time the scandals were not about sexual misconduct.

In addition to the complications presented by parliamentary privilege, the family of Westminster parliaments also share a tradition of ‘majoritarian’ government, with parliaments organised around a contest between government and Opposition rather than consensus-seeking among a wider group of players. Typically, such governments derive from majoritarian electoral systems that have disproportional results and favour two-party systems.

Electoral change in the Australian Senate and in New Zealand has modified majority government¹⁴ and the grip of the two-party system has been loosened in all four countries. Nonetheless, the tradition of strong adversarialism across the despatch box remains the norm, with the rival teams jeering at each other across the chamber.

At the international level, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (formerly the Empire Parliamentary Association) has been one of the bodies along with the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) that has sought to set standards for parliamentary democracy and disseminate examples of good practice. In a pioneering report, it observed that the legacy of Westminster is reflected both in the architecture of Westminster-style debating chambers and in a highly competitive and adversarial political culture ‘reflecting male values’.¹⁵

Feminist Institutionalism

The theoretical approach of the book is that of feminist institutionalism, focusing on the norms and expectations that become part of the ‘gendered logic of appropriateness’ within institutions. This approach emphasises the importance of informal rules and practices, the ‘hidden’ aspects of political institutions.¹⁶ It has proved particularly useful in analysing the interaction of formal and informal rules in parliamentary institutions and gendered outcomes of this interaction.

Parliamentary conventions have been resistant to change and resistance has tended to be long lasting, despite the increasing diversity of parliamentary membership. New entrants are expected to conform to existing practices, despite being disadvantaged by them. This may mean compliance with traditional norms of masculine performance, such as the ability to work long and irregular hours away from home. The gendered nature of such norms is not recognised; instead those who question them are regarded as not understanding parliamentary institutions and how they operate.

Historical institutionalism, on which feminist institutionalism draws, envisages long periods of institutional continuity, where institutions are reproduced, interrupted at critical junctures by radical change, when new institutional structures are created. This tends to occur when people lose faith in current institutional arrangements. Critical junctures are periods of contingency when the usual constraints on action are lifted, creating opportunities for agents to alter the trajectory of institutional development.¹⁷

In this book we suggest that the events of 2021–2022 in Australia were such a critical juncture. The arrival of the #MeToo movement encouraged the breaking of the silence which for so long had protected existing parliamentary arrangements. A young woman staffer alleged a rape in a minister’s office had been covered up for party political reasons. The scandal took off and political mobilisation took place with the help of social media. Angry women converged on parliaments around Australia and the March4Justice dominated the news in early 2021. As we shall see in Chap. 4, other developments, including the role of Gallery journalists, ensured that the issue remained on the agenda in the run up to the 2022 federal election. The political force of these events interrupted the self-sustaining nature of parliamentary arrangements and created the opportunity for radical institutional change.

Feminist institutionalist analysis also draws attention to the importance of timing and sequence in institutional change and policy development. For example, when new political institutions are created after the adoption of international and regional gender equality frameworks, they are more likely to be gender-inclusive in design. Since 2012 the IPU has been a standard-setter at the international level for the ‘gender-sensitive parliament’, circulating examples of good practice. However, even when parliamentary institutions are designed to be more inclusive and gender sensitive, there are the effects of ‘nested newness’ and the problem of ‘remembering the old and forgetting the new’.¹⁸ In other words, the intention of new formal rules may be undone by institutional and cultural legacies.

Pioneering comparative work by Cheryl Collier and Tracey Raney has applied a feminist institutionalist lens to three Westminster parliaments, those of Australia, Canada and the UK. They consider whether ‘the characteristics of Westminster-style governance contribute to, encourage, and/or promote sexism and sexual harassment’. They identify such characteristics as ‘the myth of gender neutrality’; ‘a foundation built on adversarial political debate’; and ‘the embrace of parliamentary privilege’.¹⁹ This book follows Collier and Raney in exploring the role of adversarialism and parliamentary privilege in sustaining gender bias in the parliamentary precinct.

We also build on the work of Collier and Raney in showing how Westminster conventions can help preserve an institutional culture based on male norms and expectations. These informal rules have meant that despite their increased presence, women may still lack equal opportunity to perform their role as representatives. Entrenched expectations may make it difficult to combine caring roles with parliamentary work, while women may also be judged adversely against masculine models of leadership competition and norms of verbal aggression. The adversarialism associated with the Westminster model and its links with sexual harassment are explored further in Chap. 3 of this book.

Another concept usefully applied by Raney and Collier is that of ‘path dependence’. This is a concept developed within historical institutionalism and emphasises the role of past policy choices in determining future policy paths. This concept helps explain how the UK parliament was able to respond relatively quickly to the sexual harassment scandals of 2017. Because the UK had created independent oversight bodies as part of its response to financial scandals some 20 years before, it was easier to tread the same path and develop independent bodies to respond to sex scandals.²⁰

The significance of timing and sequence is yet another institutionalist insight. It is brought to bear by Raney and Collier to explain the relative weakness of the Canadian Parliament’s response to revelations of sexual harassment. Canadian policies and procedures predated #MeToo and meant that in 2017 the claim could be made the problem had already been addressed. In contrast, the exogenous shock of #MeToo was to result in more sweeping reforms in the UK.

As we shall see, timing and sequence was also to be of great importance in Australia. While claims continued to be made up to 2020 that a code of conduct was unnecessary because politicians were accountable at the ballot box, by the next year there were marches on parliament demanding they become safe places for women. With the help of women journalists this remained on the political agenda and an embattled government was anxious to resolve the issue before the forthcoming election. This timing meant that Australia was able to move very quickly to achieve bipartisan commitment to major reform.

Once pressure for reform had become overwhelming in Australia, policy borrowing became significant. This is often analysed in public policy studies through the concept of policy transfer and the related concept of institutional isomorphism, referring to the processes whereby institutions take on a similar form. The Westminster legacy means additional legitimacy for policy borrowing from within the Westminster family rather than from other sources. This has led to renewed impetus for institutional isomorphism, an original feature of the Westminster parliaments but seen again with the copying of independent parliamentary oversight bodies pioneered in the UK (so-called ‘mimetic isomorphism’). Within feminist institutionalism, the role of policy transfer and related institutional isomorphism has so far been studied most notably in relation to the diffusion of gender mainstreaming and of gender-focused parliamentary bodies, less so in relation to other parliamentary reform.²¹

Methods of This Study

As detailed in the Acknowledgements, this book began in 2021 with a workshop on parliament as a gendered workplace. Evidence was presented by past and present parliamentarians, parliamentary staff, the union leader with responsibility for parliamentary staff and Australian and international experts on the parliamentary workplace. The authors drew on this evidence and on their own previous research to engage with the Australian Human Rights Commission Review of Commonwealth Parliamentary Workplaces as well as the Joint Select Committee on Parliamentary Standards and the Parliamentary Leadership Taskforce set up in the Australian Parliament. These conversations, interviews and participant observation enabled us to learn from key actors in the Australian reform process, while also learning from experience in the three Westminster parliaments that constitute our ‘most similar cases’.

In addition to learning directly from key actors in the process of parliamentary reform we drew on the plethora of recent books by Australian women parliamentarians and surveys by networks of parliamentary staffers (the Elizabeth Reid Network) and by unions representing parliamentary staff. A wealth of information was found in the reports of independent reviews conducted in Westminster parliaments, both national and subnational, and in the reports and guidelines published by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, a significant reference point for parliamentary reform at the national level. These sources were supplemented by wide-ranging documentary review, covering Hansard records of committee inquiries and parliamentary debates, reports and submissions. There are many public documents available to researchers such as codes of conduct, protocols and role descriptions of Commissioners of Standards, and annual reports of parliamentary departments and complaints bodies. Parliamentary libraries can also publish detailed research briefings. In Australia and New Zealand, there is regular public reporting of progress in implementing the recommendations of external reviews. In a changing landscape, these are essential sources of up-to-date information about changes to rules and practice and they also help to identify the obstacles to reform.

Who Are the Workers in the Parliamentary Workplace?

The parliamentary workplace is not a single location, but includes many physical sites, populated by a range of different workers who operate under distinct employment frameworks. It comprises the parliament buildings—their chambers and their offices—as well the often far-flung constituency offices of parliamentarians. It also includes the online space. Thousands of people work in these places.

Those found inside the parliamentary workplace include parliamentarians and the staff employed by them, as ministerial and parliamentary advisers and in constituency support roles. It also includes staff employed by the parliament, working in committees, parliamentary libraries and dining rooms, for example. Other staff working in parliament buildings can include journalists, guides and interns. Most of these people are employees, though they have many different employers. Parliamentarians, however, are not considered to be employees. The parliamentary workplace is thus a complex ecosystem.

The number of people in parliamentary workplaces is large, and the vast majority are not parliamentarians. Should we include all parliamentary pass holders, visitors and volunteers, numbering several thousands? Finding accurate data is challenging. It can be difficult to directly compare the numbers of staff in Westminster parliamentary workplaces as they can be employed in different ways and in different locations. In the UK, there are over 3500 staff employed by members of parliament (MPs) at the time of writing and around 3000 staff working for the House of Commons Administration in the committee system, the Library and other roles. UK ministers employ 113 Special Advisers alongside civil servants in their offices, which are based in civil service departments rather than in parliamentary buildings.

This separate location of ministerial staff is also true in Canada. Along with over 2000 House of Commons Administration staff, there were 1920 parliamentary and constituency staff employed by Canadian MPs in parliamentary workplaces in 2023, and over 500 ministerial staff based in departmental offices. For this reason—that they work in departmental not parliamentary locations—Canadian ministerial staff and UK Special Advisers are usually not included in inquiries into the safety of parliamentary workplaces or in the numbers of staff in such workplaces.

New Zealand and Australian staffing arrangements are different. In 2019 it was reported there were 1100 staff working in New Zealand parliamentary precincts, electorate and community offices. This included around 600 staff employed by the Parliamentary Service (half in corporate roles and half working as support staff to MPs) as well as around 300 ministerial staff and portfolio private secretaries and 110 staff in the Office of the Clerk of the House of Representatives. In Australia, in 2021 there were 4000 people working in parliamentary workplaces, which included over 2000 staff employed under the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act—either as electorate staff or advisers to support parliamentarians and ministers—and around 1000 staff employed under the Parliamentary Service Act to work in the Parliamentary Library, the committee system and other roles within the parliament building.²²

Overview of the Book

After this Introduction, the book begins with the delayed entry of women into the male domain of parliament and the assumption both by the public and by political science that women’s primary responsibility as citizens lay in the private rather than the public domain. It examines the emergence in the 1970s of feminist critique of the gendered nature of legislative recruitment and of parliamentary institutions. The expectation of ‘two-person careers’, where wives undertook all caring responsibilities as well as assisting with constituency work, meant that parliaments did not need to accommodate the needs of political representatives as care givers. Examples of such gendered institutional practices are taken from the Westminster sample and particularly the Australian Parliament.

The third chapter further identifies the nature and problems of the parliamentary workplace and how it could become a hostile environment for women. It analyses the formal and informal norms that create resistance to independent oversight of members’ conduct, in particular the role of parliamentary privilege and of Westminster adversarialism. It looks at the constraints on speaking out about sexism, using the example of Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, and the role of the press gallery in upholding such constraints.

The fourth chapter examines how the silence over gendered experience of the parliamentary workplace was finally broken, including both international and domestic factors. It examines an important Australian court case over sexist slurs on the floor of parliament, repeated outside, and an unsuccessful invocation of parliamentary privilege. It finds that despite women politicians beginning to speak out in Australia, it was when women staffers began to tell their stories that sexual misconduct in parliament became ongoing news. Senior women journalists played an important role in ensuring women’s safety became an electoral issue—a distinctive element in the Australian response. While embarking late on parliamentary reform, Australia had the benefit both of popular mobilisation around the issue and the experience of Westminster parliaments that had been earlier movers, particularly the UK.

The fifth chapter dives into the complexities of parliamentary reform, given the diverse nature and legislative frameworks of employment in the parliamentary precinct. It describes the steps taken to reform parliamentary workplaces in the UK, Canada and New Zealand, revealing the distinct approaches taken in each country and the challenges that arise from their different models. The chapter reveals the difficulties involved in tackling sexual and sexist misconduct in parliaments, what core reforms are needed and what issues continue to be grappled with as parliaments try to create model workplaces.

This comparative analysis provides the backdrop to the account in the final chapter of the dramatic trajectory of reform in Australia. The Australian reforms are still unfolding and are consciously built upon the lessons learnt elsewhere. Despite commonalities flowing from Westminster parliamentary conventions and more recent international standard-setting, there are interesting differences in dealing with issues such as sexual harassment and bullying.

This book shows how similar parliaments responded to the external shock of the #MeToo movement which broke the silence about gendered misconduct. While moving in somewhat different ways and at a different pace, they were able to learn from one another in developing a reform agenda. Our aim is to contribute to this learning process and show how the workplace at the centre of representative democracy can be brought to adopt the kind of diversity and inclusion standards already mandated in other professional workplaces.