Role models show young people how to live with integrity, optimism, hope, determination, and compassion. They play an essential part in a child’s positive development.
Young people may only be 20% of the population but they are 100% of the future. We owe it to our young people to surround them with leadership role models we can all aspire to be.
I don’t know about you but I was appalled when I saw this photo. Far too many of our politicians seem to not have any concept of what integrity looks like or even any idea how to be polite.
Yesterday I listened to Cathy Goes to Canberra a very powerful episode of Conversations with Richard Fidler. As I listened I asked myself how much more could we improve the well being outcomes for our children if we had more political role models like Cathy McGowan
Below is a transcription of some of the conversation that truly resonated with me
“What does modern effective representation look like? Couldn’t we do better if we had a community representative who the community elected rather than a party representative who owed their allegiance to the party and all the party funders?” Cathy McGowan
Cathy McGowan:
I think that argument really worked for people. They actually could see and think, “Yeah, that’s a really good point. Cathy, if we get behind you, we’ll hold you to account,” which is what they did. That was the commitment I made to my community, that I would be true to them, that no one would ever buy my vote. It would always be what would be good for Indi.
Richard Fidler:
There was something new about that idea, but very old fashioned at the same time, wasn’t there? In so far as, it seemed fresh in a new approach to contemporary democracy, but it did embody it into a large degree, the kind of original spirit of the whole Westminster system, that you would have independent people elected to the parliament. They would exercise their judgments, having been entrusted into the job by the local people. Did you see it that way at the time?
Cathy McGowan:
Well, look, I certainly did. If we’re going to have a country that reaches its potential, people have got to participate. You’ve actually got to turn up, speak up and step up to positions of responsibility in your community. Then, you learn the job as you go along.
Cathy McGowan:
That was my belief. I’m a great believer in democracy and participatory democracy. I really trust in like our political system, but it works on competition. If you haven’t got any competition in the system, then you’re invisible. We had no competition in Indi. I was pretty sure that if we could make the seat competitive, we could change the outcome. Even if we didn’t win the seat, if we were competitive, then Sophie, if she won, she would bring more things into the electorate.
Cathy McGowan:
That’s certainly what happened in 2009. On my word, the Liberal Party bent over backwards to promise things to Indi. It was making the seat competitive that would make the difference. I would say through your program today, to all the seats who are somehow safe, one side or another, it just doesn’t work. You’ve got to be in the competition. It’s the marginal seats that actually get the goodies.
Richard Fidler:
What was your approach going to be, being a newly elected member for Indi after that extraordinary victory you had in the 2013 election? How did you think you would be best able to draw attention to what you thought were the most urgent issues, both nationally and locally?
Cathy McGowan:
I have to admit, I was terrified. Oh, I didn’t know how to do the job really. I’d been a staffer and it was the new parliament house and I hoped I could hide. I was scared, all these really famous people, all these important people. Someone had told me that there was this other chamber in parliament, called the Federation Chamber. It was Anna Burke who was the speaker at the time.
Cathy McGowan:
She said, “There’s the Federation chamber. You can make speeches there.” I thought, “Oh God, I’m going to hide there. I’ll hide in the Federation Chamber,” and because it was just the enormity of the job, it just totally scared me, but I got over that I have to say reasonably quickly, because one of the early bits of legislation, other than dismantling the carbon trading system, was one that was going to have severe implications for education provision in Albury-Wodonga.
Cathy McGowan:
That really motivated me. It was probably six months in. I could see, oh, if this gets voted through, then it was going to ruin La Trobe and CSU in Albury-Wodonga. I knew about education and I could see a way through, of working in parliament and working with the senators. If we could work together, we could defeat the government’s legislation, which is what did happen.
Cathy McGowan:
The government lost that vote, because the senators voted it down, I think by one vote in the end and they brought it up again. There was that story. What I really learnt was to work with the senators, because there was a lot more chance to influence debate in the Senate because Tony Abbott had all the numbers in the House of Reps.
Cathy McGowan:
At the same time, Clive Palmer, he was also a member of parliament. His office was just down the road from me and we became an unlikely duo. We worked together with his senators as well and we were able to do some really good work on amending the government’s legislation around arena and the clean energy finance corporation, but what I came to understand was parliament’s a community and that there are people who are there, who … a bit like working with the fire brigade in Indigo Valley.
Cathy McGowan:
You might not agree with their politics on everything, but when there’s a bush fire, you’re all on the same truck. I was able to build alliances across parties, around topics of interest, and that worked really well for me. I didn’t actually have to be the captain of the team and I didn’t have to always be the one leading out. I could be a facilitator and bring people together. Over the six years I was there, I love the position of being on the cross bench, none aligned to any of the major parties and basically being able to work with anyone in parliament, depending on what the issue was.
Richard Fidler:
I went to see Question Time for the first time in my life around about that time, Cathy and I took my son along. As I was watching from up in the gallery, suddenly it became apparent to me that hasn’t been apparent after all these years of watching Question Time on TV, is how much like it is a set piece battle viewed from above, how you can see there’s the government, that wants to maintain its occupation of the treasury benches. There’s the opposition that are facing it and seem to be almost pushing forward to occupy the benches. It feels like a set piece military battle, when viewed from that distance.
Richard Fidler:
What does that feel like from the cross benchers? Do you get the same sensation?
Cathy McGowan:
Well, look. Absolutely. How I would explain it to the volunteers who came and worked in my office in Canberra, I said, “Just imagined it’s like an AFL footy grand final. You’re Carlton versus Collingwood and they’re athletes, they’re elite athletes and the whole game is choreographed. That’s the main game. The thing about being on the cross bench and being from Indi,” and I would say to my colleagues, I’d say, “it’s a bit like playing for [inaudible 00:20:18] in the grand final. I’m allowed on the field, but I’m only occasionally allowed to get a pass. As long as I don’t interfere with the main game, I’ll be allowed to do …”
Cathy McGowan:
That was good enough, because I only needed to get six behinds to get a goal. Over the six years I got three or four goals without interfering with the main game, but those three or four goals really made a big difference to my community. I suppose I say in the book that I stuck to my knitting. I didn’t pretend to be Collingwood or Carlton. I really knew my place in that parliament. I knew I was on the cross bench and I knew I had to build coalitions and then get the coalitions around my issues would work for me.
Cathy McGowan:
I never thought I was part of the government, never thought I was part of the opposition. I was always an independent member of parliament and really prized that ability to report to my community as being really important.
Richard Fidler:
Of course, you go into the parliament, seeing these famous political figures. Then, after a while you realize that not all of them are rocket scientists, so to speak. Some people then genuinely surprise you. Were you pleasantly or unpleasantly surprised by the caliber and character of your fellow members of parliament?
Cathy McGowan:
Oh, there’s a long pause here. I am significantly disappointed, I have to say. Really, the calibre, the life experience, the values of many, many members of parliament disappointed me. There is a thing called the parliamentary handbook and you can look through people’s occupation at the back of it. There is so much similarity. There were no nurses there. The women from rural and regional Australia that I’d been working, with Australian women in Ag, they were really capable women. They were running properties; they were managing families. They were multimillion-dollar businesses buying and selling wool on the stock exchange, going overseas, traveling, doing business.
There was none of the women who I had met through Australian women at the calibre of those women who had a deep commitment to community who were in parliament. The people who were there, I often had to question their motivation for being there and the role that the parties have to control people’s agenda. The thing about parties is people pay money to belong to a party. Then, they sign on to agree to the agenda that somebody else sets. Then, they go into parliament and follow it.
Cathy McGowan:
I just constantly saw that argy bargy happening. It’s not that I’m against parties. I understand the need to set up alliances, but I just think we’ve lost it in the middle somewhere that we’re actually there servicing our communities and their interests. I think if I could have anything happen, it would be more of the women I knew through Australian Women in Ag, who actually knew about drought and flood and bush fires and communities and working across difference. If there was just a handful of them in parliament, it would be really different, but they’re not there.
Richard Fidler:
Maybe there’s something about the quality of political life that it’s really quite horrible for normal people. To that extent we get, in some ways the parliament we deserve. The kind of people who are prepared to put up with the life that’s asked of them to be a member of a political party in the government or an opposition, maybe it’s so unappealing for the people you’re talking about, they don’t run for parliament. What we get other people who are prepared to stay.
Cathy McGowan:
Certainly. If I could change that perception, because I was there. Being a politician has got a very bad reputation, but my experience was so different. I had six good years and I loved the job. I love being of service. I didn’t want to keep doing it forever. Six years was a good period of time. I know Helen Haines feels exactly the same way. She now goes in with strength and ambition and she’s loving the job.
We can change it. It will change if women of calibre, people of calibre getting there and do the job professionally, but what makes it so special is when I go shopping now, my community says, “Thank you. Oh, thank you, Cathy. I really appreciated how you helped me do this. And thank you for doing that. And I’m really glad that you did the work on the ICAC. And thanks so much for the work you did on the drought,” and that’s recognition, not that I did it for thank you, but that recognition now, 18 months later.
I go, “Yeah, it was a really good job.” If we had more people doing it for the community, people would really enjoy it, because there’s so much satisfaction in it.
Richard Fidler:
What are you most proud of as a member of parliament, Cathy?
Cathy McGowan:
The fundamentally most important thing for me is that we’ve kept the seat independent. That the people of Indi liked what we did enough that despite the Liberal Party and the national party throwing millions of dollars in inducements, the people of Indi voted for Helen Haines. The community got the vision and they moved from being cynical and sceptical about politics to saying,
“Actually, it’s about us and if we get involved … not only getting a member of parliament up, but getting involved in state politics, getting involved in our local government … if we get involved and have opinions, if we turn up and we speak up and we step up to responsibility, we can actually make our communities better.”
Richard Fidler:
You were a big supporter of the establishment of a federal anti-corruption commission, the federal ICAC or ICAC, if you like. The government has indicated that it has support for it in some form, but it’s too busy right now to go about implementing it, because of the COVID emergency. What do you think of that and where we’re at, at the moment with establishing an anti-corruption commission?
Cathy McGowan:
Well, it’s a bit about the morals and the values, isn’t it? I’m profoundly disappointed. The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull said that he would support a ICAC. Scott Morrison told me to my face that he would support an ICAC. Christian Porter said to me that he would introduce an ICAC. Two years later … this is after I introduced my private members bill in December 2018 … and still the government hasn’t done it.
Why haven’t they done it? The only reason can be because they are so terrified of what skeletons there are in their closets, because there’s no other explanation that would explain why they haven’t done it. Then, that just makes me feel so incredibly disappointed to the place we’ve got in Australia, where our government is not brave enough to have a fully funded, really robust, modern Australian Integrity Commission.
It’s not an Anti-Corruption Commission. It’s actually an Integrity Commission where we can be proud of who we are and we don’t work from the negative. We work from the positive space of government being for the people, of the people, by the people and how proud we are, because we’re a nation of integrity.
I don’t think we are that. I’m so, so disappointed that our leaders don’t have the vision for what we could be as a nation and that they’re working from the lowest common denominator. They’re making pathetic excuses about why things can’t be better.
Richard Fidler:
Is an Anti-Corruption Commission the same thing as an Integrity Commission? Or is it a different thing in your mind?
Cathy McGowan:
No, they’re basically the same, they’re just different words, but what I really like about Helen Haines private member’s bill, it actually works from the positive of what would we need to do to create integrity in our system and how do we protect it?
It’s a very strong, positive opportunity-based bit of legislation. What the government is proposing is anti-corruption, which means we’ll just get you into trouble if we catch you doing something wrong, which I don’t think is what we as a nation need. I think we actually need to be striving to be better. We actually need to strive … for the long-term is to actually keep re-inventing our nation through participatory politics, which actually makes us better. I just think that’s really important.
Richard Fidler:
Like you said, you’ve stepped down after two terms. Helen Haines, another independent was elected to the seat with your strong support. Do you nonetheless miss it? This stuff is happening in the news all the time. Do you really wish you could step into the chamber and give them a piece of your mind, Cathy?
Cathy McGowan:
I do listen to Question Time. My friends go, “Oh, you have to be kidding.” Usually it’s on in the background. No, I don’t miss it. I’m really pleased to now be on the next stage of my life. I totally am delighted that Helen Haines is in there. She’s even better on policy than I am, and she’s really strategic and she’s got a great team.
It feels like she’s standing on the shoulders, if you want. Now, at my time is about actually encouraging more regional independence to stand for politics. If I could just share this one statistic with you, Richard. In Indi in 2013, we knew that 1/4 voters had to change their vote for me to get 25,000 votes to be enough to be in the preference list. That’s out of 100,000 people. We needed 25,000 votes, which is 1/4.
I absolutely know that if 1/4 people who live in the regions changed their vote, we could be in a different space. It’s possible if we had quality candidates running both in the Senate and in the House of Reps. That’s my mission now, is to actually go out and talk around the regions and in the cities and say, “1/4 votes could change,” and we actually could have a different public perception of who we are as a nation. We actually could get involved and engaged in a really wonderful country that we could be.
I don’t think we’ve anywhere nearly reached our potential. I want us to.
Couldn’t agree more Cathy
