By CASEY NEILL
“I WOULD do my job for free – don’t tell anyone!”
“Career-wise, find the thing that you love the most and do it really well and eventually someone will pay you to do it,” MP Tanya Plibersek urged about 30 young, female leaders at Killester College in Springvale on Friday 22 April.
“I literally cannot imagine a more satisfying line of work.”
The Deputy Opposition Leader and Foreign Affairs spokeswoman with Hotham MP Clare O’Neil she hosted a roundtable also involving girls from Haileybury and the Westall Secondary, Sacred Heart Girls’, Keysborough and Heatherton Christian colleges.
Ms O’Neil said the Australian Parliament ranked 44th in the world for female representation.
Ms Plibersek that during her 16 years in Parliament she’d seen numbers “heading in the right direction”.
“As a group, we make better decisions as a parliament when we more accurately reflect our community,” she said.
She said that when she was first elected, two or three women standing together in a hallway would attract comments from men like ‘planning to take over the place, are you?’.
She assured the young women before her that this was changing.
“You don’t have to be the only woman representing all women,” she said.
“I hope that it means that for your generation, it will be absolutely unremarkable for women to be elected in equal numbers to Federal Parliament.”
Killester year 12 leader Kieu-Minh asked Ms Plibersek if it was difficult to maintain her personal values when making decisions within a political party.
“No,” was the very direct answer.
She explained that she just accepted that her ideas might not become reality overnight.
“It should never stop you from being idealistic, from having a clear goal, from really thinking about the best possible outcome,” she said.
Another Killester year 12 leader, Nina, said that “everyone wants everything faster” and asked Ms Plibersek if she felt pressure to meet those demands.
“You put yourself under pressure so you can show that political engagement is worth it,” Ms Plibersek said.
But she explained that delivering real and lasting change took longer and warned against falling for a short-term fix.
Reducing the gender pay gap was another discussion topic.
