Наташа Сторр-Деспоя: путь австралийского политика и дипломата

Australian politician

Natasha Jessica Stott Despoja AO (born 9 September 1969) is an Australian diplomat and former politician. Starting her career in student politics, she became an advisor to the Australian Democrats and was appointed to the Australian Senate in 1995 at the age of 26. At the time, she was the youngest woman to serve in federal Parliament. She went on to become deputy leader of the Democrats in 1997 and then federal leader from 2001 to 2002. She retired from the Senate in 2008 as the longest serving senator from her party. She has remained active in the public sphere, working with government and non profit organisations. She was appointed Officer of the Order of Australia in 2019 for her work on gender equality. Stott Despoja was the founding chair of Our Watch, a national foundation to prevent violence against women and children, and served as national Ambassador for Women and Girls from 2013 to 2016. She was also a member of the World Bank Gender Advisory Council from 2015 to 2017. She has served in positions at the United Nations, including on the High Level Working Group on the Health and Human Rights of Women, Children, and Adolescents in 2017, and as a member of the Committee on Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) since 2020. She has published several books and writes regularly on current topics.

Stott Despoja was born in Adelaide on 9 September 1969. She is the daughter of Shirley Stott Despoja, an Australian born journalist and Mario Despoja, who was from Croatia (then part of Yugoslavia). She attended Stradbroke Primary and Pembroke School and later graduated from the University of Adelaide in 1991. She was President of the Students' Association of the University of Adelaide (SAUA) and the South Australian Women's Officer for the National Union of Students. She then went on to work as a political advisor to Senator John Coulter and Senator Cheryl Kernot.

When Democrats Senator John Coulter resigned for health reasons in 1995, Stott Despoja was the successful candidate to fill the resulting vacancy. Her rise to prominence began when she won a full term in the 1996 election the following year, becoming the youngest woman ever elected to the federal Parliament at age 26. Late the following year, following the resignation of Cheryl Kernot and the rise of Meg Lees to the leadership of the Democrats, Stott Despoja was elected deputy leader of the Democrats. During this time, she built her image as spokesperson for Employment, Higher Education, Youth, Science and Information Technology, Consumer Affairs, Trade, and the Republic. Stott Despoja became the leader of her party on 6 April 2001. From the beginning she faced difficulties in working with Lees, who viewed her run for the leadership as a betrayal. Other senators, including new deputy leader Aden Ridgeway, remained sympathetic to Lees. In the 2001 federal election in November, the Democrats recorded a fall in their Senate vote from 8.5% to 7.3% and returned four of the five senators up for election. The party also saw a marginal lift in its primary vote for the lower house from 5.1% to 5.4%. The substantial rise of the Greens vote to 4.9% in the Senate and their election of a second senator ignited further discussion about the fortunes of the Democrats.

Stott Despoja remained active in the Senate and the Democrats after resigning as leader. The party's fortunes continued to decline under new leader Andrew Bartlett. In the 2004 election they failed to elect any senators, leaving only the four elected in 2001: Stott Despoja, Bartlett, Lyn Allison, and Andrew Murray. In 2004, Stott Despoja took 11 weeks' leave from the Senate following the birth of her first child. She returned to full duties as spokesperson for Higher Education, Science and Biotechnology, Women, Privacy, Territories and Local Government, and Work and Family. the Republic, genetic privacy, stem cells, captioning, and same sex marriage. Stott Despoja regularly attends the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. On 22 October 2006, after undergoing emergency surgery for an ectopic pregnancy, she announced that she would not contest the 2007 election and would leave office at the expiration of her term on 30 June 2008. She was the Australian Democrats' longest serving senator. As in 2004, the Democrats elected no senators in 2007, and Stott Despoja's retirement coincided with the end of her party's federal parliamentary representation.

Stott Despoja has been a casual host on ABC 891 radio, a guest panellist on Channel 10's The Project and a columnist for the Australian business news website Business Spectator. She was a board member of non profit organisations the South Australian Museum (SAM) from 2009 to 2013; the Museum of Australian Democracy (MOAD) from 2010 to 2013; and the Advertising Standards Board (ASB) from 2008 to 2013. She was a deputy chair at beyondblue (Australia's national depression initiative). She has been an ambassador for Ovarian Cancer Australia (OCA), The Orangutan Project (TOP); Cancer Australia; and the HIV/AIDS anti stigma campaign, ENUF, (along with her husband Ian Smith). She was on the board of the Burnet Institute (Australia's largest virology and communicable disease research institute) from 2008 until December 2013, when Foreign Minister Julie Bishop announced the appointment of Stott Despoja as Australia's new Ambassador for Women and Girls, a role she held until 2016. This involved visiting some 45 countries to promote women's economic empowerment and leadership and to help reduce violence against women and girls. visited Burkina Faso for Oxfam (2012); and went to Laos (2011) and Burma (2013) with The Burnet Institute. She was mentioned in June 2014 as a possible replacement for Kevin Scarce as the next Governor of South Australia, however Hieu Van Le was chosen. In July 2013, Stott Despoja was the founding chair of Our Watch, originally named Foundation to Prevent Violence Against Women and their Children. She left the position in July 2021, and was appointed life patron in August 2022. Our Watch is a joint initiative of the Victorian and Commonwealth Governments, based in Melbourne. It is an independent non profit organisation that is now jointly funded by all states and territories of Australia, after the New South Wales Government was the last state government to join the organisation in 2019.

On 21 July 2015, Stott Despoja returned to the Burnet Institute as a Patron. as of April 2019 she is still a columnist for The Advertiser and an Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at The University of Adelaide. as of April 2019 Stott Despoja is on the Advisory Board of the Australian Privacy Foundation (APF) and the Global Women's Institute Leadership Council. In March 2024 Stott Despoja was appointed as South Australia's Royal Commissioner into Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence.

Stott Despoja has authored a large number of essays, reports and non fiction works on a range of topics, both during and since her political career. In March 2019 she published On Violence, with the publisher's blurb asking "Why is violence against women endemic, and how do we stop it?". Stott Despoja posits that violence against women is "Australia's national emergency", with one woman dying at the hands of her partner or someone she knows every week. This violence is preventable, and that we need to "create a new normal". Despoja was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia in June 2011 for her "service to the Parliament of Australia, particularly as a Senator for South Australia, through leadership roles with the Australian Democrats, to education, and as a role model for women". She is as of lc=yes listed as one of the "Gender Equality Top 100" by the UK organisation Apolitical. In June 2019 Despoja was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Australia for her "distinguished service to the global community as an advocate for gender equality, and through roles in a range of organisations".