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Mums the only women for Coalition
By Adele Horin
March 4, 2006
Page 1 of 2 | Single page
IT WAS a throwaway line from the chameleon Peter Costello, and who knows if he meant it. Having assumed the posture last week of a right-wing anti-Muslim bigot, he shifted to moderate mode this week to champion the cause of women. "We must look at how to improve opportunities for women to create the most female-friendly environment in the world," the Treasurer told the National Press Club.
It is ironic Costello's remarks coincided with the release of a new report that showed Australia had slipped to its lowest-ever ranking in an international league table of women's representation in national parliaments.
Female representation in the House of Representatives is going backwards because the Coalition parties have failed to put forward women candidates. The Treasurer's concern about being "women-friendly" might start with his own party.
For all the indignation at Labor's preselection bunfights, for all the carry-on about its domination by the trade unions, the ALP still has a much better record than the Coalition in promoting women in its ranks. Women make up more than one-third of Labor's members in the House, compared with 20 per cent of the Liberal's. Similar maths apply to female representation in state parliaments. Labor does much better. The National do even worse than the Liberals.
Under the Howard/Costello Government, Australia has slid to 29th on the league table published by the Inter-Parliamentary Union to show the proportion of women MPs in lower houses of parliament. New Zealand is in 15th place, the place Australia occupied in 1999.
The number of women in the House fell in the 2004 election for the first time since 1980, and is now 24.7 per cent. We do better than Canada, Britain and the US but our track record is poorer than the Nordic countries (more than 45 per cent of MPs in Sweden are women), Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain, as well as countries such as Afghanistan, Rwanda and Burundi.
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http://www.shns.com/shns/g_index2.cfm?action=detail&pk=RAISEALARM-02-28-06
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Pay too much and you could raise the alarm
By BOB KERR
The Providence Journal
28-FEB-06
PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Walter Soehnge is a retired Texas schoolteacher who traveled north with his wife, Deana, saw summer change to fall in Rhode Island and decided this was a place to stay for a while.
So the Soehnges live in Scituate now and Walter sometimes has breakfast at the Gentleman Farmer in Scituate Village, where he has passed the test and become a regular despite an accent that is definitely not local.
And it was there, at his usual table last week, that he told me that he was "madder than a panther with kerosene on his tail."
He says things like that. Texas does leave its mark on a man.
What got him so upset might seem trivial to some people who have learned to accept small infringements on their freedom as just part of the way things are in this age of terror-fed paranoia. It's that "everything changed after 9/11" thing.
But not Walter.
"We're a product of the '60s," he said. "We believe government should be way away from us in that regard."
He was referring to the recent decision by him and his wife to be responsible, to do the kind of thing that just about anyone would say makes good, solid financial sense.
They paid down some debt. The balance on their JCPenney Platinum MasterCard had gotten to an unhealthy level. So they sent in a large payment, a check for $6,522.
And an alarm went off. A red flag went up. The Soehnges' behavior was found questionable.
And all they did was pay down their debt. They didn't call a suspected terrorist on their cell phone. They didn't try to sneak a machine gun through customs.
They just paid a hefty chunk of their credit card balance. And they learned how frighteningly wide the net of suspicion has been cast.
After sending in the check, they checked online to see if their account had been duly credited. They learned that the check had arrived, but the amount available for credit on their account hadn't changed.
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