John Allwright Address Social Inclusion & Leadership
Social Inclusion & Leadership
Wendy McCarthy AO runs her own corporate advisory practice McCarthy Management specialising in providing mentors to major corporations and the public sector, assisting these organisations with issues around diversity, leadership and work life balance. She has published many articles and is the author of five books, she enjoys public speaking and is an experienced speaker and facilitator.
Thank you for that warm welcome Paul. I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land here in Canberra, the Ngunnawal people and put on the record how much I learned when Chancellor of University of Canberra of their importance to their local community. Without their leadership and advocacy we wouldn't have a Ngunnawal Centre which helps us ensure that we graduate instead of just recruiting Indigenous students.
Let me also acknowledge John Allwright and the Australian Rural Leadership Foundation. When I read his story I thought what an iconic piece of writing it was about one person deciding to make changes. And perhaps many of you would not know that the Australian Rural Leadership Foundation was the model for the Australian Indigenous Leadership Program (AILP). I was responsible for raising the financial support from Citibank for AILP whose objective was and is to produce the next generation of Indigenous leaders in Australia. One of the Rural Foundation graduates, Russell Taylor, was one of the driving forces in establishing the Indigenous Leadership program. John Allwright may have been surprised to know how far his influence spread.
Tonight I am going to talk about social inclusion and leadership in communities. Leadership comes in all ways if communities make it possible. I will begin with a story of leadership denied. It is a precious story connected to this building we now call Old Parliament House.
In 1927 the opening of Parliament was a spectacular event. All the rich and famous, the great and the good were invited to the opening of this building including the members of the Royal family who were performing the official services and who travelled across the world by boat to be here for the opening of Parliament.
And one man arrived at the front door to pay his respects. His name was Jimmy Clements. He was in his best clothes – a jacket, trousers and a shirt – but when he presented and explained that he wanted to pay the respects of his people he was told he could not come in. He had walked from Tumut, a couple of hundred miles away, in order to be part of the new Parliament.
He said ‘I want to be here, I want to pay my respects.’ The response was, ‘You have no shoes you cannot come in.’ And so he was denied an opportunity to be included, as were his people. I thought so much about this when we had Sorry Day and Indigenous people finally took their place in the Parliamentary Chamber. But in this Chamber a place was denied them although we had an Aboriginal senator, Neville Bonner.
That sets the tone for tonight's talk. I want to speak about leaders in community settings and from the outset state that for me communities aren't just about bureaucracies and locations. There are also communities of the mind and these can be very influential. They can be defined; they can be about race, religion, education or privilege and disadvantage. People who are privileged tend to stick together, people who are disadvantaged are forced to stick together and so there are always many subsets. Throughout my life I have tried in whatever community setting I am working to ensure that most people are included rather than excluded like Jimmy Clements for a silly reason like not having a pair of shoes. But of course that was not the main reason.
In today's world of the internet and globalisation we can transform the community we identify with but at the heart of all dynamic and healthy functioning communities there has to be a balance between leaders and followers.
For me part of social inclusion is protecting the idea that leadership is everybody's business, not just mine or yours. Getting the balance right between leaders and followers so that along the spectrum people can move in and out of those positions is a healthy challenge.
Fred Daly, a politician who had a long life in this Chamber and was renowned for his very rich turn of phrase used to say, ‘Today's rooster tomorrow's feather duster.’ The girl’s version of that is of course ‘Today's Madonna, tomorrow's whore.’ It is hard to come back from the feather duster position but the female version is possible. It is good to remember this when leadership seems an impossible challenge.
I think of leadership as a horizontal spectrum – a place you move in and out of. When you persuade certain people of the virtue of your view they become your followers. At other times you become a follower.
Education gave me the courage to see myself as a leader and accept a leadership opportunity. Education remains the foundation of everything we need to do in every community. Education is what takes us out of the ghettos we inhabit whether they're ghettos of poverty or whether they're ghettos of prejudice.
Education is the only hope. And education is also the only gift that no one can take away from you. Riches can be taken away but once you have an education – even if it's a halfway decent education – it’s yours. It is yours to cherish, yours to nurture and yours to develop. And it is your opportunity through life to be able to challenge the status quo and if you don't challenge the status quo you just spin your wheels and the world around you remains the same or overtakes you. You need to do more than that.
Let me tell you a little of my story. I grew up in rural New South Wales. I was born in 1941 when there were 7 million Australians. I was born in a country town, I went to school at a one-teacher school and I learnt quite a lot from my one-teacher school. Of course when I say this to my children their eyes glaze over but the truth is that it is only six decades ago that I rode a horse or a bike to school. Those experiences shape your life.
My father had a soldier settlement block which was part of the resettlement program after the Second World War and he'd come from a grazing family that went broke. The allocated block was a small acreage and when it was clear he needed to grow wheat, he looked in horror and said, ‘No, I do sheep.’ Anyway we had good times when there was a wool boom in the 1950s and we had hard times and eventually he went broke. But it meant that I had a fantastic public school education. At my school I never had more than one other person in my class – this is probably really good for I was always first or second, positions I learned to love. And I listened to a lot of ABC radio which was in its own way an extraordinarily inclusive community. My love of radio stays with me to this day.
Many years later when I was speaking in the bush, a young Indigenous woman came up to me and said, ‘My mum went to school with you,’ and I said, ‘No, there were no Indigenous kids in my school.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, you thought they were Indians didn't you?' And of course they always told us they were Indians. When I read Sally Morgan's book about two years later I read that for years her family told her to say she was Indian as it was better than being Indigenous. Education has to change that, it has to change the way you perceive people.
My public school education enabled me to attend the University of New England. I would never have gone to university if I had not had gifted teachers who persuaded my parents that I was a bright girl and that I should be allowed to take a University scholarship. . They said, ‘She'll get married and she's better off being a nurse.’ Well the hospitals turned me back because I was too young and said l could come at 17 but not at 16 so off I went to university and I think now how lucky I was.
I took up my teaching scholarship and when I hit the classroom four years later I realized that teaching for me is like coming home. My education gave me self esteem, some competencies and confidence, so when I started teaching it was wonderful. I think now I was lucky I was given a girls school because it seemed normal to have women as leaders and women as role models. It could have been very different in another place.
After 3 years I did what many young women my age did, I got married and I married out of my scholarship bond. So instead of having to pay it back I married the man and went overseas with him. It is the only case of positive affirmative action I have had in my life. The men had to pay their money back when they got married but the girls didn’t.
Off we went to see the world. And we lived in the UK, and then in Pennsylvania, USA, for 18 months. I was teaching American history and Problems of Democracy. I’ve been to the Pennsylvanian State House. It was a very interesting time for two young people who had grown up in Australian country towns and lived in a world where there was really only one political party that we knew about, and where a conservative Prime Minister Robert Menzies was king and England was referred to as Home by many country people. We knew very little about the United States. Our dreams of travel were about Europe and going back to Britain. I think when I look back on that time that I went away to learn what it is to be Australian.
I learnt overseas what the world looked like for other people in other communities. I taught in London and Pittsburgh. I saw women who had completely different lives, I saw women who went back to work after having a baby. No one I knew went back to work after they had children. In fact I didn't know any women who worked when I grew up other than in the home and they worked hard at that. My mother certainly raised a family under difficult circumstances. No running water for the first 4 or 5 years, no electricity, no telephone, no refrigerator and I don’t ever recall her actually complaining about it. It was the way it was.
But then I saw a different world. When I came back to Australia I was a very different person. I’d been to a march in Washington about Vietnam after the principal of the school suggested I attend. And I saw different kinds of leadership; I saw schools where people said you have to do community service. The Pittsburgh school I taught in was a very wealthy school and the girls were required to do community service. This was a new experience and a valued insight for me.
I was a confident young woman when I returned and a great candidate for feminism and motherhood. And it was motherhood really that made me a joiner and made me brave. In my time away I had seen people having babies in different ways. In the UK home birthing was the norm and in the US women were insisting on their rights to be awake and aware with partners throughout the birth. So when I returned to Australia and my first pregnancy was confirmed I went to a doctor who described how he cared for his patients in childbirth by advising them to ‘Just lie back and I’ll give you gas for pain relief and when you wake up you’ve got your baby.’ I thought to myself I don’t think it’s like that. I will find another obstetrician and I did and his advice was to join the Childbirth Education Association which was an education and lobby group which was working to encourage greater choices in childbirth.
We wanted fathers at the birth, we wanted to practice controlled breathing and birth with dignity and choice. It was my first major lobby group. And it was a profound experience. I was proud about that because it was something I passionately believed in and wanted to do. The intellectual framework was about choice and the demedicalisation of childbirth. I felt passionately that if this is the best way to have a child, I’m going to do it the best way. If I’m going to do this 3 or 4 times in my life, I’m going to have a good time. And I want my husband, my life partner, to be with me.
It worked for us and many subsequently. However along the way we discovered that institutions tell lies to avoid making changes to their existing practices. It was a big shock. They said, ‘There will be bad consequences, we’ve never done it like this before.’ When I went back some years later to have a tubal ligation I was asked to provide a form signed by my husband before the operation could proceed and once more they said, ‘But nobody has ever done it without their husband's permission.’ I said, ‘They’re not his tubes they are mine! I never want to have any more babies and this is my decision.’ My gynecologist supported me despite the anesthetist following me down the corridor asking me to be cooperative and saying , ‘I don’t want to do this.’ I wanted to say don’t, this is my sexuality, it is my fertility that I am dealing with and this is the right decision for us. But lying on a moving trolley is not a powerful position to bargain from.
I found out later when I worked at Family Planning that of course there were women who were sterilized without the consent of a partner. People were told lies and the people who were told lies were disadvantaged, they had no voice, they had no partner, they had very little money, they had no advocacy. And that for me was the moment when I knew that everything I did in these seemingly ordinary life time events should be beneficial and include as many people as possible.
I went to work in Family Planning because I passionately cared about it and because my teaching career was ending because there was no maternity leave and it was hard as a married woman with a baby and my conviction that this needed to be changed led me to being the founding Co Convenor of the Women’s Electoral Lobby in 1972. It was an idea based on the American questionnaire published in New York magazine by Gloria Steinem and supported by the National Organization of Women who asked all the contenders for the US election their views on women. We rewrote the questions for Australia and polled our aspiring politicians.
The results were a call to arms and enabled us to plan how to change the rules which in hindsight was the easy part. We changed the perspectives about female leadership, we set up a women’s lobby – a powerful lobby. Within 6 months it had more members than the Country Party (National Party) and nearly as many as the Labor Party. The Women’s Electoral Lobby was a community of women who were learning leadership and engaged in social and political change. We had a ‘women in education’ group looking at the education of women and girls and a ‘women and work’ group working on maternity leave. We worked on family planning issues and were delighted when the Whitlam government responded to our lobbying to remove the luxury tax on the oral contraceptive. It is strange now to think that the oral contraceptive was classified as a cosmetic and had a luxury tax placed on it.
I worked in family planning for nearly a decade. For the first 3 years I was a community educator, Information and Media officer and I also wrote the sex advice column for Cleo magazine, which my children think is my finest achievement. ‘Your mother knows that!’ their friends would say admiringly. When I accepted that job my colleagues were less enthusiastic but it seemed to me that if family planning was for all of us, it provided great reach to people who were otherwise excluded from information. That experience taught me to be brave and constantly challenge the status quo and it also taught me that education and information are crucial to self esteem and leadership.
When I was the Deputy Chair of the ABC in 1983 together with the other women on the board we insisted that there be no interviews for any senior positions unless there was a woman on the interview panel. To punish me they put me on every interviewing panel in that period for about 6 months. But it changed the way interviews were conducted and it changed the pathways for the leadership of women. At that time only one woman had read the news on the grounds their voices were not authoritative. Can you think of a world now where women do not read the news?
Women were also not allowed to carry sound equipment as it was too heavy. I said, ‘Hang on, this woman has got twins. What do you think they weigh?’ These decisions were made on prejudices and assumptions which resisted change.
Education is the only way out. Education should make you brave enough to be a leader, to help break down those prejudices so you can bring other people in. Probably the greatest achievement of the contemporary women’s movement in Australia is the education of women and girls.
The women’s movement of the seventies was successful in introducing mature-aged study or second chance learning and when I was the Chancellor at the University of Canberra I found it very moving to see women in their late 60s and 70s graduating. When I asked one woman, ‘Why are you doing this?” she said, ‘This is for me, I’ve waited a long time. I’ve done a subject a year and it’s taken me forever because I love it so much and it matters to me.’ What I also understood was that it mattered to her co students. It gave them a whole different perspective and something that they treasured. It was another lesson in social inclusion.
Today 55% of university graduates are female and yet we see fewer women in leadership positions in business. A professional services firm I’m mentoring came to me about two a years ago concerned about the attrition of their women recruits. How is it that 65% of our recruits are female, yet 10 years later we are lucky if we have 10% of them and they’re not in leadership positions. What is going on and how do we fix it?
It's not just about changing the rules it’s about culture – that’s the hard stuff. Changing the cultural mind sets is a really hard task. Mentoring in this firm is proving to be very effective in changing this pattern but one to one mentoring is only one strategic response.
I believe when you accept education, you accept a social contract and that’s to ensure as many people as possible have the same opportunities as you and that you reach out to those who don’t. You try and find the ways in which you can do it and you have to take risks. All change involves a level of risk and despite the irony of being a risk averse family planner for 10 years I now advise women to say yes to risk and opportunity and think about it later. There may be no other opportunity for leadership. When you get a phone call asking, ‘Would you like to be on the board?’ don’t say, ‘I don’t think I could do that.’ Say ‘Yes’ to opportunity and experience. There won’t be anyone better than you. I keep observing that women get development while men get experience but women need experience as well as development. It’s experience that counts in leadership.
Well educated cohorts of women are now in evidence but they’re still not creating the cultural changes that need to occur so that more women achieve their potential. That is so true of rural areas. The leadership of women in rural boards, in recognized leadership positions, is appalling and an absolute disgrace in this country. It is below the national figure, which is also a disgrace and puts us right at the end of the major international social democracies. And we can no longer say it’s because of lack of competencies and skills – both those arguments are over.
Women are leaders in their communities, we know that. They are the minders, they are the glue of the communities. What they need is recognized leadership positions so they can demonstrate on a larger palate.
There’s a lot to do in rural Australia in terms of leadership, and health and communications are two areas requiring creative leadership. My mother’s dream for me was that I’d marry a grazier. Instead I married an economist and chartered accountant who after 20 years became a farmer and beef producer so the dream was eventually realized. The lifestyle comes at a high price as working in the bush is not easy despite the communications revolution. We live half way between Sydney and Canberra, yet we do not have access to broadband which is appalling. We aren’t even in the five-year plan. So we, like many couples, try to keep a city income.
If we want to live in the bush and we do, we have to have access to health services. We have to ask why professionally trained people do not want to live in rural Australia. How do we fix this? Why don’t my children want to be there? When we talk about rural doctors and setting up rural medicine programs, how are we going to guarantee they will return to their rural area? We need some big bold strokes for leadership in rural communities and we need to cherish people who are brave and speak out. It’s the only way that change ever happens. It’s no good just living in agreement.
I’ve always been supported by communities of women whatever group it is and I’ve been supported by my family, even when I embarrass them, by speaking out. We need to applaud diversity and bravery and think about who is being excluded. And we have to get rid of the idea that the leadership of women and Indigenous people is unusual. The leadership of all Australian life is predominantly male and the leadership capacities of women are not being developed. Gender is still very much the issue no matter how uncomfortable it makes people feel.
For me leadership is about making sure people are connected, included and inspired. I didn’t set out to change the world. It just happened along the way that I met many people who shared the same vision and we did what we believed in. As a continuing comfort I remind myself of Margaret Mead’s words, ‘A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.’
Be brave, be outspoken and get the energy back in those rural communities so that thousands of people want to live there for the rest of their lives…that’s leadership
Thank you.