When federal parliament resumes this week, it will be the most diverse in Australia’s history.
But it still comes nowhere close to reflecting the population it represents.
The biggest gains have been made in the proportion of women representatives, now making up 38% of the House of Representatives and 57% of the Senate – a record for both chambers.
There will be 58 women taking their seats in the lower chamber, including 19 new female MPs. Six of those first-term women MPs are Labor members, bringing their House representation to 35, while the Liberal party lost four women, meaning just nine women will fill their benches.
But in a nation where women hold the slim majority over men in terms of the population, the House still has some work to do to catch up.
While millennials may be overtaking baby boomers as the largest generation, Australia’s leadership is still in the hands of people much older than the national median of 38. Anthony Albanese just scrapes in as a baby boomer at 59 years old, while Peter Dutton represents Gen X at 51.
Despite the influx of new MPs from diverse backgrounds, Australia still lags many similar multicultural countries in terms of representation.
Though 23% of Australians claim a non-European ancestry, just 6.6% – or 15 out of the 227 MPs – have overseas non-European backgrounds. Only 4.4% of MPs in the parliament have Asian heritage, compared with 18% of the Australian population at large.
In a presentation to the Australian National University Gender & Cultural Diversity in Politics workshop, Osmond Chiu, a research fellow at Per Capita, said Australia remains at the back of the pack when it comes to diversity within its federal parliament.
“Our most diverse parliament ever still has a long way to go to truly reflect multicultural Australia,” he said.
“Australia still continues to lag far behind similar countries like Canada and New Zealand. Even the United Kingdom is way ahead of us despite being much less culturally diverse. It is a systemic problem that we need to address.”
Australia remains far behind the Ontario parliament, where 23.4% of MPs come from a a non-European background (the figure in the general population is 29.3%), or the London assembly, where 32% of members come from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds (compared with 40.6% of the population).
“In comparable countries, major parties on both the left and right take the problem of underrepresentation seriously,” said Chiu, who is also a member of New South Wales Labor’s policy forum.
“They have programs specifically tailored for culturally diverse talent, they actively recruit and promote diverse candidates and ensure formal representation within party structures. They see it as necessary for their electoral prospects. In Australia, it is still an afterthought or placed in the too-hard basket.”
When it comes to the major parties, Labor has more diversity within its ranks than the Coalition – because of the women who were preselected. Chiu says 9.9% of female MPs in the incoming parliament have overseas non-European backgrounds, compared with 5.7% in the last parliament. Just under 15% of Labor’s women MPs have overseas non-European backgrounds, more than double the 6.5% in the 46th parliament. There are no women within the Coalition with an overseas non-European heritage.
There has also been a redress of the lack of Indigenous representation in the parliament. A record number of First Nations people will take their place in the parliament. Eight Indigenous senators will be sitting in the upper house, and three Indigenous MPs will sit in the House of Representatives. That brings the total Indigenous representation in the parliament to 4.8%, higher than the Indigenous Australian population of 3.3% recorded in the last census.
Again, Labor’s ranks are more diverse than the Coalition, with Indigenous members making up 5.9% of the caucus. With two senators, Indigenous members make up 1.25% of the Coalition.
Chiu said solutions aren’t easy, but they aren’t impossible.
“There is no silver bullet but implementing the Jenkins review’s recommendations would be a start,” he said.
“It recommended publishing diversity data about MPs and implementing a 10-year strategy to increase diversity in politics. Normalising data collection will also make it easier to address questions about targets and quotas.”
