Political rights and electoral opportunities are granted to all Australians. The interests of women are inadequately represented, but the results of the 2022 election offer cautious optimism that this situation is changing.
Following the election, 58 seats, or 38 percent of total seats, in the lower house were held by women, an increase of 10 from the previous parliament, and women made up a majority of the Australian Senate, holding 57 percent of its seats. A notable feature of the 2022 elections was the role played by female “teal Independent” candidates, who in several cases ousted male incumbents in seats long considered safe.
The Labor Party employs an internal quota specifying that 45 percent of its candidates must be women, a quota that will rise to 50 percent by 2025). A majority—52 of 103—of the members of the Labor Party’s federal caucus are women. By contrast, the Liberal Party has long resisted calls to introduce a gender quota system, and Liberal leader Peter Dutton and National Party leader David Littleproud again ruled out introducing quotas in 2022.
Women in parliament have reported being intimidated and harassed by their male colleagues. A November 2021 report by Australia’s sex discrimination commissioner, Kate Jenkins, found that a third of federal political staffers experienced sexual harassment at work. That same year, a series of high-profile sexual assault allegations emerged, corroborating the commissioner’s report and highlighting the misogyny and physical endangerment women in Australian politics face. One of those cases was the alleged 2019 rape of Liberal Party staffer Brittany Higgins by a colleague in the office of the defense minister at the time, Linda Reynolds, in 2019. Higgins accused the Liberal Party of covering up the story and leaking her personal information to journalists in an attempt to undermine her credibility. Higgins’s alleged rapist, Bruce Lehrmann, was charged but, in October 2022, his trial before the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory was aborted due to juror misconduct. A retrial, scheduled for February 2023, was abandoned by the prosecution, citing the impact that retestifying was likely to have on Higgins’s mental health. Both Higgins and Lehrmann foreshadowed further legal proceedings in relation to the way the trial was handled and the surrounding media coverage.
The May 2022 elections resulted in improvements in the gender and racial diversity of Australia’s Parliament, with successful candidates including Independent representative Dai Le, a journalist and former Vietnamese refugee, and Labor senator Fatima Payman, the daughter of an Afghan Hazara refugee, who became Australia’s first hijab-wearing Muslim parliamentarian. However, Parliament remains disproportionately White compared to the make-up of Australia‘s population. Openly LGBT+ representatives have served in Parliament since the 1990s.
Indigenous Australians are generally underrepresented in Australian politics and some voting restrictions—including the requirement that voters hold a fixed address and a ban on voting by prisoners serving long sentences—disproportionately affect Indigenous populations. However, the 2022 elections brought the total number of sitting Indigenous legislators to 11, bringing the proportion of First Nations parliamentarians—4.8 percent—above the proportion of Indigenous Australians as part of the Australian population—3.3 percent.
After forming its government in 2022, the Labor Party pledged to hold a referendum by mid-2024 about constitutionally enshrining an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, a body that would advise Parliament on policy matters affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Text of the proposed constitutional reform was released in July 2022.
