Getting Even - Women In Australian Politics

Описание: From the Film Australia Collection. Made by Film Australia 1994. Directed by Anna Grieve. In 1902, Australia became the first country in the world to grant white women both the right to vote and to stand for election. Despite this early achievement, by 1994, women occupied fewer than 15% of Australia’s parliamentary seats. Getting Even asks why there are still so few women in Parliament and what should be done to remedy this. From the victories of South Australian women, who won full political rights in 1894, to the maiden speeches of the first women to enter Federal Parliament in 1943, to the Australian Labor Party’s 1994 affirmative action measures, Getting Even traces a century of women’s struggle. Their right to stand has not easily been translated into the right to sit.
What emerges from interviews with some of our most significant female politicians - including Joan Kirner, Cheryl Kernot, Margaret Guilfoyle, Susan Ryan, Carmen Lawrence and Amanda Vanstone, is the similarity of their experience, no matter which government they have served or to which party they belonged. Now a new generation of political women looks set to benefit from the determination of those who’ve gone before. As Natasha Stott Despoja, a young Democrats candidate and adviser says; “women are taught to think that it’s somehow bad to want to wield power. I think about power as something positive. It’s something I can wield for change. That can be positive change.”