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Relationship between women and the Australian government

Government in Australia is elected by universal suffrage and Australian women participate in all levels of the government of the nation. In 1902, the newly formed Commonwealth of Australia became the first nation on earth to enact equal suffrage, enabling women to both vote and stand for election alongside men Women have been represented in Australian state parliaments since 1921, and in the Federal Parliament since 1943. The first female leader of an Australian State or Territory was elected in 1989, and the first female Prime Minister took office in 2010. In 2019 for the first time, a majority of members of the Australian Senate were women. At the time of its foundation in 1901, and again from 1952 to 2022, Australia has had a female monarch as ceremonial Head of State, while the first female Governor of an Australian State was appointed in 1991, and the first female Governor General of Australia took office in 2008. Prior to the 1901 Federation of Australia, some of the self governing British colonies of Australia had already enacted the right of women to vote or stand in elections. South Australian women achieved the right to stand for office in 1895 following the Constitutional Amendment (Adult Suffrage) Act 1894, which was the first legislation in the world to permit women to stand for election for political office. In 1897, Catherine Helen Spence became the first female political candidate for political office, unsuccessfully standing as a delegate to the Federal Convention on Australian Federation. Women won the vote in Western Australia in 1900, with some restrictions based on race. Indigenous Australian women could vote in some jurisdictions and circumstances from the outset, but did not achieve unqualified suffrage in all states and territories until 1962. Following Federation in 1901, the newly formed Parliament of Australia passed the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 allowing most women to both vote and stand at the 1903 Federal election. The states of New South Wales, Tasmania, Queensland and Victoria passed legislation allowing women to participate in government at the state and local levels soon after Federation. The first woman to be elected to any Australian parliament was Edith Cowan in 1921 (WA), but it was not until the 1943 election that Enid Lyons and Senator Dorothy Tangney became the first women to be elected to the Federal Parliament. The first female to lead a state or territory government was Rosemary Follett serving in 1989 and again between 1991 and 1995 as chief minister of the ACT. The first female premier was Carmen Lawrence, leading Western Australia for three years until 1993. Joan Kirner was the first female premier of Victoria, serving from 1990 to 1992. In the Northern Territory, Clare Martin became the first female chief minister in 2001 winning from opposition and was reelected in 2005 with an increased majority. In 2007, Anna Bligh became the first female premier in Queensland after the retirement of Peter Beattie, and in 2009, Bligh became the first popularly elected woman premier. In NSW, Kristina Keneally became the first female premier of the state in 2009 and was defeated at the 2011 state election. Lara Giddings was the first female Premier of the state of Tasmania between January 2011 and March 2014. In Queensland, in 2015, Annastacia Palaszczuk became the first woman to be elected premier from opposition and was the first female premier to be elected for a second term after winning the 2017 Queensland state election. Despite being the earliest state to grant voting rights and allow women to stand in parliament since 1895, South Australia has never had a female premier. Julia Gillard was prime minister of Australia from 24 June 2010 to 27 June 2013, the first and only woman to have held the position. Woman were allowed to vote and be stand for election in 1902 but many people thought that this was a bad idea so until 41 years later there were no women in parliament. The first 2 people were Edith Lyon in the house of representatives in Darwin (wife of prime minister Joseph lyon) and Dorothy tagney in the senate in Western Australia. Dorothy held the record for longest woman working in parliament until 2001 at 25 years. in 2014 research has showed that 28.2% of the house of representatives were woman while in the Senate was 32%. In 2022 we found out 39% of parliament was women.

Australia has been governed as a Federated Constitutional Monarchy since 1901. There have been two female heads of state in the history of the Monarchy of Australia. Queen Victoria, who reigned from 1837 to 1901, and was the reigning monarch when the Constitution of Australia came into force, on 1 January 1901, after she gave it Royal Assent. Queen Elizabeth II reigned from 1952 to 2022, and from 1973 she was styled "Queen of Australia", to emphasise the separate constitutional status of the Australian Monarchy from the United Kingdom institution. Queen Elizabeth celebrated her 70th jubilee in 2022 – the longest serving monarch in Australian history. The Monarch is represented in Australia by Governors at a state level, and by the Governor General at a Federal government level. There have been fifteen female state governors, since 1991 when Dame Roma Mitchell became the 31st Governor of South Australia. Dame Quentin Bryce became the first female Governor–General in 2008 and served until 2014.

During the 19th century, Britain's Australasian colonies were at the vanguard of achieving both male and female suffrage. Australia's first council elections were held with male suffrage in 1840, while parliamentary elections were first conducted for the New South Wales Legislative Council in 1843, with voting rights (for males only) tied to property ownership or financial capacity. The Australian Colonies Government Act, passed in 1850, granted representative constitutions to New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, and Tasmania and the colonies enthusiastically set about writing constitutions which produced democratically progressive parliaments – through the constitutions generally maintained the role of the colonial upper houses as representative of social and economic "interests" and all established Constitutional Monarchies with the British monarch as the symbolic head of state. 1855 also saw the granting of the right to vote to all male British subjects 21 years or over in South Australia. This right was extended to Victoria in 1857 and New South Wales the following year. The other colonies followed until, in 1896, Tasmania became the last colony to grant universal male suffrage. While the female descendants of the Bounty mutineers who lived on Pitcairn Islands could vote from 1838, and this right transferred with their resettlement to Norfolk Island (now an Australian external territory) in 1856, women in mainland Australia and New Zealand were next in the world to achieve such historic gains. Following the successful establishment of voter rights for males, women's suffrage groups began to organise in Australia from the 1880s. The first was the Victorian Women's Suffrage Society, was formed by Henrietta Dugdale in 1884. The organisations involved in the suffrage movement varied across the colonies. A national body, the Australian Women's Suffrage Society, was formed in 1889, whose aims were to educate women and men about a woman's right to vote and stand for parliament. Key figures in the Australian suffrage movement included South Australians Mary Lee and Catherine Helen Spence, Western Australian Edith Cowan, New South Welsh Maybanke Anderson, Louisa Lawson, Dora Montefiore and Rose Scott, Tasmanians Alicia O'Shea Petersen and Jessie Rooke, Queenslander Emma Miller, and Victorians Annette Bear Crawford, Henrietta Dugdale, Vida Goldstein, Alice Henry and Annie Lowe. In 1861 land owning South Australian women had a vote in local elections. In 1894, the Constitutional Amendment (Adult Suffrage) Act 1894 in South Australia followed New Zealand in extending the franchise to women voters – but went further than New Zealand and allowed women to stand for the colonial Parliament. South Australian women voted for the first time at the 1896 South Australian election. In 1897 Catherine Helen Spence became the first woman political candidate when she ran for election to the National Australasian Convention as one of ten delegates, but came 22nd out of 33 candidates. In 1899 Western Australian women achieved voting rights for colonial elections but not the right to stand for the colonial Parliament. Women from both South Australia and Western Australia voted at the 1901 election. On 12 June 1902 the Commonwealth Franchise Act came into effect, granting most Australian women the right to vote and stand in Commonwealth elections. Franchise of Indigenous Australians at the federal level was not universal until 1962, and voting by Indigenous Australians was not compulsory until 1984. The first election at which women used both the right to vote and stand for election was the 1903 election, held on 16 December. Following the inclusion of non indigenous women in the 1903 election, many Australian women and the Australian government, led by Prime Minister Alfred Deakin, used their experience to promote women's suffrage in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. 'Trust the Women Mother, As I Have Done', banner painted by Dora Meeson was carried at the head of the Australian and New Zealand Women Voters' Committee contingent in the Women's Suffrage Coronation March in London on 17 June 1911. New South Wales, Tasmania, Queensland and Victoria followed the lead of the other states in allowing women to vote, and later to stand for election. Victoria, the last state to grant women's suffrage, had briefly allowed women to vote when the Electoral Act 1863 enfranchised all ratepayers listed on local municipal rolls. Women in Victoria voted in the 1864 general election. The legislative mistake was quickly repaired in 1865, and it took 19 private members' bills from 1889 until Victorian women gained the vote in 1908, and were able to exercise the vote in 1911. Women in the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory were, as federal subjects, eligible to vote at the federal level from their establishment. By the time the territories achieved self government in 1978 and 1989 respectively, they did not need to enact specific legislation to enable the women's vote. The right to vote in local government elections was granted later in most jurisdictions than it was at the state and federal levels. The right to vote in local elections was also not automatic, as property ownership qualifications limited the eligibility to vote and stand for local elections. Significantly from 2010 to 2011 the city of Sydney was operating totally under female governance: from the Lord Mayor and State Member for Sydney Clover Moore, to State Premier Kristina Keneally, to State Governor Marie Bashir, to Federal Member for Sydney Tanya Plibersek, to Prime Minister of Australia Julia Gillard, to Governor–General of Australia Quentin Bryce, and of course, to the Australian Head of State, Queen Elizabeth II. The first women elected to Australian parliaments have generally been members of the non Labor (i. e., conservative) parties. This was the case in every state except for Tasmania, where an independent, Margaret McIntyre, was the first woman elected to parliament. The Labor Party first began to regularly nominate female candidates to parliament in the 1950s, generally only to the upper houses at first. Since 2015, 12 Indigenous women have been elected to state, territory or commonwealth parliaments, with 5 of whom having been ministers in a government starting with Marion Scrymgour in 2007. +The introduction of women's political rights in AustraliaParliamentRight to vote (a)Right to standCommonwealth1902 (b)1902StateSouth Australia18941894Western Australia18991920New South Wales19021918Tasmania19031921Queensland19051915Victoria19081923 (a) The dates for the right to vote at State level refer to equal rights for women and men, but not necessarily universal rights; (b) Women in SA and WA were able to vote in the 1901 federal election.

+Female participation in political life ParliamentRight to standFirst elected to lower houseFirst elected to upper houseCommonwealth19021943, Enid Lyons (UAP)1943, Dorothy Tangney (ALP)StateSouth Australia18941959, Joyce Steele (LCL)1959, Jessie Cooper (LCL)Western Australia19201921, Edith Cowan (Nationalist)1954, Ruby Hutchison (ALP)New South Wales19181925, Millicent Preston Stanley (Nationalist)1952, Gertrude Melville (ALP)Tasmania19211955, Mabel Millerand Amelia Best (both Liberal)1948, Margaret McIntyre (independent)Queensland19151929, Irene Longman (CPNP)n. a. Victoria19231933, Millie Peacock (UAP)1979, Gracia Baylor (Liberal)and Joan Coxsedge (ALP) Two women, Catherine Green and Ellen Webster, were appointed to the NSW Legislative Council in 1931.

The Commonwealth Public Service Act 1902 provided that every female officer was "deemed to have retired from the Commonwealth service upon her marriage", with the exception of women working in agencies transferred from a state to the Commonwealth. The very great majority of women were effectively blocked from non secretarial positions in the Commonwealth Public Service. In 1949 women were allowed into the clerical division of the service but they remained restricted by the marriage bar. In November 1966, Australia became the last democratic country to lift the legislated marriage bar which had prevented married women from holding permanent positions in the public service. However, Keneally would also go on to suffer a crushing defeat at the hands of Barry O'Farrell in 2011. In 2011 Lara Giddings became the first female Premier of Tasmania, serving until 2014 when she likewise suffered a crushing loss to conservative leader Will Hodgman. This again leaves South Australia as the only state or territory not to have had a female head of government. Marion Scrymgour is to date the highest ranked Indigenous woman in a government in Australia when she was Deputy Chief Minister of the Northern Territory from 2007 until 2009. Prior to Labor's massive loss in 2012 the Legislative Assembly of Queensland had the highest female parliamentary representation in Australia and the third highest in the world, with 30 out of 89 Members having been women. However, the next state election resulted in Annastacia Palaszczuk becoming the first woman to become Premier from opposition. The subsequent government would become the second in Australia to be headed by two women and the first ministry in Australia to have a female majority. On 3 March 2018, Australia passed another milestone when, at the 2018 Tasmanian election, Tasmanians elected a majority of women to the Tasmanian House of Assembly, with 13 women and 12 men. Seven of the ten Labor members are women, four of the 13 Liberals and both of the Greens. As at 27 November 2018, following the 2018 Victorian state election, 50% of Ministers in the second Victorian Andrews Government were female, and following cabinet changes on 23 March 2020, a majority of the cabinet was female. Dame Roma Mitchell was made the first female Justice of the Supreme Court of South Australia in 1965, at the recommendation of Don Dunstan, South Australia's 38th Attorney General. She was still the only female judge in South Australia when she retired 18 years later in 1983 although Justices Elizabeth Evatt and Mary Gaudron had been appointed to federal courts by the Whitlam Government. It was not until 1993 that the second woman was appointed to the court, Mitchell's former student, Margaret Nyland.

In 2010, Australia had female leaders occupying every major political office, with Clover Moore as Lord Mayor, Kristina Keneally as Premier of New South Wales, Marie Bashir as Governor of New South Wales, Julia Gillard as prime minister, Quentin Bryce as Governor General of Australia, and Elizabeth II as Queen of Australia. As of April 2023: The Governor of New South Wales Margaret Beazley, Governor of Queensland Jeannette Young, Governor of South Australia Frances Adamson, Governor of Tasmania Barbara Baker and Governor of Victoria Linda Dessau are women. Meaning that out of 6 Governors, 5 are women.