Let Girls Be Girls

When I was making my career choices about thirty years ago, I went with my natural strengths, the things I was good at, the things I enjoy. In the 80s, the gender divide was more pronounced than it is now; had I wanted to study engineering, or do an apprenticeship as a builder or plumber, my life might've been harder, but even then, there was nothing but my own preferences and the community expectations of a small town.

This year, my beautiful step-daughter was accepted into university to study civil engineering. She worked hard at high school, got the marks she needed and was accepted into the course she'd been dreaming about for years. One of my closest friends from high school took longer to make her choice, but she's now a qualified and successful architect. There were no gender-related barriers to these careers for Steph and Su, no additional financial burden levied on students with vaginas. They met the entry requirements, and were accepted.

Yesterday, Queensland Premier Campbell Newman and Education Minister John Paul Langbroek announced a $10m scholarship programme to encourage women into careers more traditionally dominated by men. I'm usually in favour of projects to support minorities and break down social barriers, but in this case, I wasn't aware that there was a need.

I'm still not convinced. Women who want 'Hard-Hat' careers are already doing it, aren't they? Steph and Su are. The women in hi-viz and PPE who work at the manufacturing plant down the road are.

Premier Newman justified his scholarship:

"Female enrolments in the areas of engineering and architecture lagged well behind those of males, with 408 women enrolled in engineering in Queensland last year compared to 2,923 men."

Two years ago, The Guardian looked at this issue:

"Engineering is the subject with the smallest proportion of women, with fewer than one in seven students female. Peter Hicks, a member of the education and skills panel of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, is concerned. "We need to be very worried that ... these figure are low and not getting any better. In my 40 years of teaching electrical engineering at Manchester University women never made up more than 5% of my classes. The UK desperately needs engineers – we can't afford to lose what is effectively half of its talent."

Female Engineers - Their Own Perspective is a study by the Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, Loughborough University. Their study included an investigation of the reasons why women didn't choose engineering careers: eight reasons were identified but the expense of studying was not even one of the eight factors identified. 

Is a scholarship scheme the right approach, then? In fact, is the career/gender imbalance a problem at all? Stuart Nathan, Features Editor of The Engineer, sees a problem, but suggests the answer lies in communication. As far as I know, there are no actual barriers to women entering male-dominated career areas, the priesthood notwithstanding.  Logically, if women are under-represented, it must be because they are less inclined to take up positions in the Hard-Hat careers.

"The main argument for attracting women into engineering is an extremely simple one. A sector which draws only on one gender is exploiting half of its available talent pool. It’s ridiculous to imagine that the skills and talents needed to become an engineer are restricted to men, and many women are being denied the chance to use their abilities in a field which needs all the innovative people it can get."

The previous government had a communications programme to encourage women to consider these career areas:  the focus was in highlighting to women the benefits in considering these less traditional careers, and providing  information and resources about different career paths.

In any case, the Newman Government will make available up to 5000 scholarships for women in Queensland studying 'Hard Hat' careers in engineering, construction, architecture and agriculture.  Is this Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity, positive discrimination? Definitely.

And I'm left with a couple of questions:

Will the promise of a $20,000 scholarship change a woman's mind about her career course? If she was planning to study for a more 'feminine' career, say, Communications or Human Resources or Nursing, is that scholarship enough to move her choice to, say Architecture or Agronomy?

Secondly, what problem does this scholarship solve? If the scheme works, what does success look like? More female graduates? Great - but to what end? Less males in hard hats? What's the point?

Men and women can be equal, and can earn equally. Do we really need to have everything split 50/50 to prove a lack of bias? Men and women have different skill sets, different talents, different natural competencies. Shouldn't women be applauded for choosing the career that is right for them, not just encouraged to fill an artificial or irrelevant a quota.

If we're all free to contribute in the way best suited to us, isn't that the best measure of equality?

But the Queensland number is more than double the 5% quoted above, and unless there is an increase in the overall number of university and training places, there won't be an increase in the number of graduates, so this scholarship does not address the skills shortage at all.That's 3,331 engineering places in Queensland last year, and about 12% are held by women. Premier Newman's comment suggests that the proportion of women should be higher, despite Queensland's figures being in line with international statistics.

Pointing Fingers

Peter Beattie's friends, family, supporters and detractors are, according to Brisbane commentator Madonna King, flooding her inbox in response to her article in yesterday's Courier Mail.

Like so many Queenslanders, Ms King is looking for reasons for last week's enormous LNP victory over the Queensland Labor. I'm one of those, and I am nowhere close to knowing what happened last week. What I do know is that in attempting to apportion blame between two Premiers, Anna Bligh and Peter Beattie, is an oversimplification. To assume that all responsibility lay with the party leaders is to ignore the context in which we operate. 

Although some Labor supporters tried to convince themselves that miracles are possible, they were never going to win last week. They shouldn't have won on 2009 either. To understand Labor's appalling defeat, we have to look at the unlikely 2009 victory, and as Madonna did, peer even further back, but also closer to home. 

After compiling a pithy list of Labor crises during Beattie's years in power, Ms King writes

"Now he makes the point that he's been gone more than five years but many of the problems Bligh's government faced were of Beattie's making. And to sheet home the entire blame for the election loss to the woman he groomed to replace him is to skew history, and ignore the facts."

Madonna, you've ignored a few facts too, and I'll admit that I'm about to commit the same sin. There is a vast array of factors that contribute to a government being bollocksed in the polls.
 
But let's start with a little Root Cause Analysis. It's so much more useful than blame. 
The turning point that changed Anna Bligh from Labor Premier to Public Enemy was the Asset Sales decision, just a matter of weeks after winning the 2009 election.  Asset Sales had not been suggested during the campaign.  People hated the idea, and hated Premier Bligh and Treasurer Andrew Fraser for the decision. "See Queensland before its all sold off" read the bumper stickers. Voters felt betrayed, bitter, and the government's credibility was shredded.
 
So why move forward with such an unpopular decision? Doesn't really matter. There was a GFC that hit mining $ tourism hard, and we sold off some state owned assets to pay some bills.
Then there was the little matter of a credit rating being downgraded. More proof of a government unable to manage the economy? Read it for yourself. 

Yes, Premier Beattie should have spent more on state infrastructure. He didn't. Premier Bligh had to catch up. Really, does pointing the finger help?

And then there was Queensland Health. Just where does the buck stop? The DG? The Minister? The Premier? Doesn't matter: the ALP was in government when Jayant Patel was at Bundaberg Base Hospital. The Health Minister was Gordon Nuttall. Patel and Nuttall are both serving time.

The pain continued with the Queensland Health Payroll Debacle. Let me introduce you to an acronym many of you won't know: UAT. User Acceptance Testing. It's an incredibly important phase of IT project work, where the client tests the new developments against a comprehensive range of real-world scenarios to ensure the product is fit for purpose. UAT is often the Go/NoGo for taking the project live. Guess which step was missed in the Qld Health Payroll project. Yep: UAT. The system wasn't tested, or wasn't tested well enough. Why? My guess is that someone had a large bonus riding on a GoLive target date being met. This kind of disaster tends to reflect the culture of the organisation, yet throwing blame at the Premier misses the target and helps no-one.

To completely destroy what was left of the Qld Health morale and reputation, there was the incident where a middle manager alledgedly helped himself to a few million dollars. This was the result of a systemic failure to conduct background checks, and one alledgedly greedy criminal.

I don't think anyone is denying that Qld Health is experiencing a series of crises. Beattie's fault? Bligh's fault? Hard to say. It's a bigger question around the relationship between the government and the public service.
 
I'm not a fan of blame. I think it's wasted effort.
 
We can, and should, be looking at 'why' rather than 'who', and the ALP will be doing plenty of that. Some of the 'why' will involve the issues Madonna King listed in her article, and the ones I mentioned here. Many more are harder to pin down: the "it's time" factor, the continued movement of the ALP to the right, backwash from Federal Labor, differences between the ALP and their union base...it's a long list of complex issues.

Peter Beattie is not blameless. Neither is Anna Bligh, Tim Fraser or anyone else from Qld Labor. Yet in this, as in most circumstances, finding people to blame has no benefit beyond making the blamer feel superior.

Labor - Whatever That Means

It’s 2012, and I’m struggling to define the ALP, or even recognise it. For over a century, the ALP has been Australia’s party of the left; an inclusive party of workers, for workers. I’m not sure it can claim that description any more, although it is still marginally to the left of the Nationals and the Liberal Party.



Just two days ago, Queensland voted to change governments, from the ALP to the LNP, in a victory from which Labor may not emerge. Vanquished Premier Anna Bligh has removed herself from the game, forcing a by-election in South Brisbane. Defeated ALP members are thick on the ground, yet they aren’t volunteering to lead the handful or so Labor members that survived Saturday’s massacre. Both Andrew Fraser – expected to be the next leader – and Grace Grace have confirmed that they won’t contest.


It’s not just Queensland. The entire eastern seaboard has rejected their long-serving ALP Governments and replaced them with Liberal/National Party Coalition Governments, or in the case of Queensland, the LNP.


On the federal level, Julia Gillard just scraped back into power with the assistance of the independents and Greens. She is phenomenally unpopular, and as was the case with Anna Bligh in 2009, snuck back into power in part due to an Opposition that was perceived to be worse than the Labor alternative. The Federal term has just passed the half-way mark. If Labor is to recover, it must start now.

Labor was never going to win these elections, and one has to assume that under Julia Gillard, the Federal ALP will fall too. The inevitable Labor soul-searching at all levels will be deep and it will hurt.

Can the ALP redefine itself, rebuild, and sell its new message before the next Federal Election is due in the second half of 2013?

The question was posed on Twitter yesterday:

“What did we (the ALP) do wrong?”

Contrary to Tony Abbott’s beliefs, the Queensland election was not a referendum on the Carbon Tax or the Mining Resources Rent Tax. Exit polling indicates that this election was fought on state issues, with Cost of Living topping the list.

The first of the two big issues for the Bligh Government was the attention span. The LNP campaign theme ignored all of the issues and emphasised the length of time Labor had been in power. Anything over ten years, and the electorate will start thinking about change. The Bligh Government should have been defeated in 2009, and would’ve been, had the Opposition been able to mount a coherent campaign with a charismatic leader.

The second issue is the Bligh Government’s perceived mismanagement of the Queensland Economy. A great deal was made of Queensland’s downgraded credit rating, and Premier Bligh’s decision to sell state assets, coupled with impressive increases in electricity charges and car registration costs. Even though it was back in 2009 that the asset sales were announced, that decision is still a talking point. Queenslanders have never forgiven Ms Bligh for that.

I’m one of the few who would back Ms Bligh’s decision to sell those assets. Why? Because the Queensland economy is reliant on mining and tourism, and both took an enormous hit during the depth of the GFC. Would anyone care to guess where our credit rating would be had we not realised the additional funds from those asset sales?

There were other issues, of course: the ongoing issues with the Queensland Health payroll system made the department – and hence the government - look incompetent. Jayent Patel’s trial during this parliamentary term just added to the perception of a key department in crisis. The Gordon Nuttal trial and sentencing was another blow.

Finally, there was the intense negative campaigning from the ALP, direct at Campbell Newman and his family’s financial affairs. There were, and still are, some questions I’d like to see answered; those questions were both relevant and timely. But they were also personal, they were aggressive, they were negative, and Australians don’t like that style of campaigning.

It doesn’t matter how much time the ALP organisation spends contemplating its belly button, knowing what went wrong with the Queensland elections won’t help it win the Federal Election next year.


The first hurdle in rebuilding Labor is for Labor – by which I mean it’s members – to decide what it wants to be. Are the values that Labor built on a century ago still relevant? Should Labor reconnect with it’s Union roots, or is there a new vision? Given how far the ALP of the 21st Century is from its unionist / socialist roots, should it try to regain it’s base, or try to build a new one?


There’s an impressive gap between the ALP and the Greens, the two parties which are perceived as being left in today’s environment. Check out the Political Compass. In 2010, the ALP was considered to be Centre-Right, and the greens slightly left of centre. There’s an opportunity there, pretty close to the centre of the political map, and I suspect that if we were to examine the values of “old Labor”, it would fill that gap quite well.

The three major parties are now crowded together with little to differentiate between them. It’s worth considering that if the major parties could demonstrate genuine ideological and policy differences, they would be better placed to campaign without the personal mudslinging and negativity.

But for now, there’s no party to represent those of us who favour a conservative approach to economics, but a more progressive social agenda. The balance of power is tilting ever so slightly away from the Capitalist/Christian paradigm that defined the 20th century. Role models from Ghandi to the Dalai Lama to Nelson Mandela would be unrepresented in Canberra. That must be a consideration for anyone developing an ideology in this, the”Asian Century”.

If there is one ray of hope to come from Labor’s ensanguined result in Queensland, it’s this: their destiny is within their control. They must take this opportunity to become meaningful again.

Whatever that means.

The answers only take us half way.