Queens of the Realm

Bugger the blokes; women are running Sydney. How many major metropolises can boast that the head of every tier of government is a woman? Last week the Queen’s first female representative in Australia, Governor General Quentin Bryce, swore in Julia Gillard as the nation’s first female Prime Minister. Just a half-year earlier, Kristina K Keneally, took a similar pledge to queen and country before the Governor of NSW, Marie Bashir, when she became the State’s first female Premier. Women well and truly are on top here in Sydney where Lord Mayor Clover Moore replaced Lucy Turnbull as the head of Australia’s largest global city.

Theoretically, we are all in better hands. Women wield power more compassionately and collaboratively than men, or so we learned at university. The upcoming Parliamentary vote in late August to legalise same sex adoption here in NSW is an interesting case study of how women lead. The Local Member and Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore, put up the Member’s Bill. A practising Catholic, like the State Premier, Moore persuaded Keneally to allow a conscience vote on the Bill. If adopted, the Bill would eliminate one of the last remaining vestiges of discrimination against gay couples with the glaring exception of a constitutional ban on gay marriages in Australia, which was passed into law with the support of both Liberal and Labor parties in 2004.  In defending her support for gay parental adoption, Keneally proclaimed, “my religious views do not play a part in the legislation that I as a leader of the Labor Party bring before the government… If I look at the gospel message it is one of acceptance, it is one of love … Jesus sat with the sinners and the saints and he was not a man of judgment but rather a man of love”. Keneally was quick to deny she had meant to imply gays were sinners.

No sooner had Julia Gillard become the nation’s first single female Prime Minister than she indicated she would only shack up with her hairdresser turned real estate agent boyfriend in the Canberra Motor Lodge Motel after she were popularly elected. The day after Rudd’s demise, a new facebook group with 1400 members called “Julia Gillard – Support Marriage Equality”, was formed. Maybe an unmarried woman would view the question of same sex marriage differently to her predecessor, a born-again Christian family man who staunchly defended the ALP’s constitutional ban on same sex marriage.  Maybe politics really will be different with a woman at the top.

Or maybe not… Those of us who witnessed Greater London when Margaret Thatcher was PM were long ago disabused of the notion that women wield power more compassionately and collaboratively than men. Power it would appear corrupts all genders equally. On a cold and clammy winter morning this weekend hundreds of concerned Sydneysiders gathered on the harbour at the site of the old Hungry Mile where the unemployed lined up during the Great Depression. Even with women in the top jobs on Macquarie Street and at Town Hall, it is still back door business as usual here in Sydney. Around the peninsula from the Opera House at Bennelong Point, the former docklands along Hickson Road have been renamed Barangaroo after Bennelong’s fiercely independent wife. As successive Labor governments in this town have done before, prime publicly owned real estate is being sold off through secret closed door deals, with a woman-led government secretly approving mega plans that breach all planning guidelines on the foreshore. Without open and transparent processes, a cash-starved government is selling off valuable public assets to its developer mates, who are the largest donors to the party. Not long before Nathan Rees was ousted as State Premier and was replaced with Kristina Keneally, he stood before a stunned party conference and proclaimed he would ban party donations from developers. Less than three months later, his successor approved a massive sell-off of prime foreshore land for $6 billion to Lend Lease, who has donated generously to the ALP.  Along with invaluable foreshore land, the Keneally government has granted Lend Lease approval for a monstrous development that juts 90 metres into the Harbour and towers 159 metres over the foreshore, more befitting of Hong Kong or New York than a liveable and humane harbour city.  Speaker after speaker at Saturday’s rally raised concerns that Lord Mayor Clover Moore also sits on the Barangaroo Development Authority board. A long-term opponent of overdevelopment in Sydney, Moore has refused to resign from the board, claiming she is better able to advocate for the interests of the City if she is in the back room also. Nowadays it would appear that governance in Sydney is fast becoming secret women’s business.