Independent candidates for the federal seat of Higgins, Bronwyn Bock and Lucy Bradlow, have put forward the idea that they will run together at the next election, with the idea that, if elected, they will job-share the parliamentary role, a week on and a week off.
Their suggestion caused instantaneous abuse to reign down upon them—what a stupid idea! they aren’t serious people!—and I must admit I was one of those whose first reaction was to dismiss the plan. My concern was that I didn’t see how it could be legal, or constitutional, a view backed up by comments from constitutional expert, Professor (Emerita) Ann Twomey, who said on ABC Radio:
It does not sound like something that is in the least bit feasible at the moment…neither legally nor constitutionally valid…with many problems. There's nothing in the Constitution or in the legislation that permits more than one person to be elected for an electorate on a job-share basis or even to try and elect two candidates to pretend to be one member of parliament.
Nonetheless, the candidates have their own legal advice from another constitutional scholar, Professor of Law, Kim Rubenstein, who told the same radio program that “In my view they actually lawfully can [job share the position], and in fact, as a matter of the principles of the Sex Discrimination Act and the Fair Work Act, there'd be an argument to say it's unlawful not to allow them to do it.”
Clearly, we need clarification—and there is a longer discussion in this piece at The Conversation—but let’s try and work out what is going on here and see if there is anything other than meaningless novelty in their plan.
I have often made the case that there’s an organic, bottom-up reorganisation of Australian politics happening at the moment as communities use the tools of Australia democracy to reshape the way we do politics. The move of voters away from the major parties; the rise of community independents; the almost-guaranteed balance-of-power in the Senate resting with crossbench; the increasing acceptance amongst voters of that a minority government wouldn’t mean that the sky would fall in; all this suggests that the public mindset is shifting away from the idea that ours is, or even should be, a two-party system.
As the mindset changes, though, the institutional structures that support and define the old dispensation remain in place and so people are forced to improvise, as I’ve just described.
Such improvisation speaks to the frustration people feel with traditional political practice, particularly with how the legacy parties have run the country and the way in which party politicians relate to we-the-people. It speaks to the difficulties to get reform onto the agenda and the need, therefore, to tease at the superstructure from way out on the periphery.
But such tinkering speaks to deeper concerns that we should also take into account and take seriously.
As knowledge of Bruce Lehrman’s rape of Brittany Higgins became known—only recently proved in a court of law—attention focussed on what a toxic workplace Parliament House can be. In an under-appreciated piece in The Mandarin a few months back, Bernard Keane set out the ways in which “No other employer in Australia is less accountable, more subsidised and more secretive than political parties in relation to the electoral, advisory and media staff they employ.”
Political parties know perfectly well which of their MPs, ministers and shadow ministers are good bosses, and which are not. People talk. They know who the bullies are, who are the gropers, the drunks. Chiefs of staff will be employed to manage them, if they can. The rest of the staff will be expected to take one for the team and put up with it, with a vague assurance that they’ll be looked after.
I have spoken with a number of people within these job categories who have suffered from the relentless workhours imposed on them, along with the sort failures of office leadership that Keane describes, and the pressure people are under is something that needs to be taken more seriously. Indeed, one huge weakness with the independent model is precisely this, that the candidates assume enormous workloads when they come into parliament and there are few systems in place to help them manage things. Anthony Albanese actively exacerbated the situation when, as one of his first acts in government, he slashed the staffing allowances for members of the crossbench.12
These are genuine workplace concerns and so it is within this context that we should consider the desirability of MPs job sharing, rather than dismiss it as some loony idea that has come out of nowhere. It hasn’t come of nowhere! It is a reaction to problems deep within the body politic.
More broadly, we are going through a technological revolution that is, once again, changing the political economy of work, and job sharing is a legitimate response to that. The rise of platform work, job precarity, hustle culture and the 24-7 workplace occur at a time when other technologies (I include so-called AI in this) are reducing workloads, or changing job descriptions, or eliminating entry-level jobs altogether, and we are responding to all this with right-to-disconnect laws, the four-day week, as well as work-from-home options and job sharing.
Just as we invented the weekend to cope with an earlier era of technological change, we are inching towards solutions to suit our current needs.
All of this is further tied to the fact that from the early eighties, Australia, like other western nations, adopted an economic system that marketised, privatised, and individualised the way we run our country and our governments and our workplaces. Australia handled this transition better than most—with Labor, at least initially, putting in place a workable social safety net—but those measures were always a type of admission about the damage they knew the neoliberal economic dispensation would do to the social fabric. Concentrations of wealth have undermined social solidarity, and everything from Maga in the United States to the rise of Neo-Nazism and Christian Nationalism in all parts of the world are part of a populist response to the problems these policies have created.3
In an irreducibly diverse society like ours, the only way to avoid the sort of social seam-tearing that is happening at scale in the United States and elsewhere is to address economic inequality while also attaching our sense of unity to a respect for our diversity; and then rebuilding our political institutions so that they enable that diversity to express itself within the parliament itself.
Lucy Bradlow, one of the candidates pushing the job-sharing idea, has said that dismissing it is "an old-fashioned way of looking at power", and I agree with her.
"I think the world is changing,” she has said, “and if you can't adapt, you're going to end up with the same group of people taking up leadership positions. We see people successfully job sharing in private and public sectors at leadership levels. Why can't it work in parliament?”
And I certainly agree with her when she says that “Australians are ready to challenge the status quo;” less so when she adds, “and [job sharing] is the next step in that journey.”
Maybe not the next step, but it is a perfectly valid idea to pursue. The organic transformation of our politics that I have tried to describe in my most recent book and in the articles I write here is something of a hit-and-miss process, but it is one in which we should let a thousand flowers bloom and then pick the ones that best suit our needs.
We need to reshape power in Australia through structural and institutional reforms that allow us to think with the entirety of our social brain and that provide our representatives with a workplace that is functional and not toxic. Job sharing MPs may well be part of that of that reform.4
Cathy McGowan, with her usual foresight and aplomb, managed to find an independent successor in Indi, and I hope the other independents who won seats in 2019 and 2022 have their eye on a similar transition plan.
It is also worth noting here something Jo Dyer pointed out in her article about the Lehrmann/Channel 10 case:
Whilst Lee criticised the “insufficiently scrutinised and factually misconceived” approach of The Project, it was only after Brittany’s story went public that the systemic issues relating to employment conditions and employee support in Parliament House were tackled. Without her decision to talk to Samantha Maiden and The Project, there would be no Set the Standard report, no Parliamentary Workplace Support Service and no implementation of the 55 recommendations from the Respect@Work report.
It’s a terrific article, and worth reading the whole thing.
It is worth reading Rundle’s piece on why Albanese’s “social cohesion” approach is misguided. He says in part:
Social life is equally cooperation, conflict and competition, and any notion of a “rest point” is an illusion. We bring to social life differing interests, imperatives and moral codes, and that is all the more so in a multi-origin — rather than multicultural — society.
So it is particularly unwise to use an umbrella term such as “social cohesion” to cover both robust debate and public political action on the one hand, and violence on the other. The only way to manage a multi-origin society is to instil respect for this division.
Just by-the-by, I happen to be reading the memoir by former Conservative MP, Rory Stewart, and you can’t help but be overwhelmed by the dysfunction of Westminster that he describes, conditions I am sure are replicated in our system (review forthcoming):
Hadn’t Churchill said that ‘MP’ were the proudest letters that anyone could carry after their name? And wasn’t being an MP necessary for our democracy? And as my mother liked to say, if good people didn’t go into politics … But inwardly, I was reeling from the reality of the world I had entered.
Stewart, Rory. Politics On the Edge (p. 123). Random House. Kindle Edition.
Thanks for this, Tim. The arrogance of so many "this will never work!"
It's well past time we considered alternatives. The narrative of MP's "burnt out" (with broken-down marriages/ excessive drinking/ missing kid's milestones) surely opens the way for a new paradigm. I also believe it could be a way to include retirees/those with disability/ students/ single mums and dads/ carers/ etc. etc.
Making our democracy more representative.
There are many options for renewed citizen democracy - especially as our workplaces are transformed by WFH as you point out.
Thank you for taking this seriously.
Wendy Harmer
This is a great piece, Tim, and reminds me of one from Katharine Murphy who had similar obversations as yours (https://meanjin.com.au/essays/political-life/). Funnily enough, she's now employed on Albo's staff - I wonder how she's going? Whenever I'm amongst chit-chat about politicians' income I keep tight-lipped because I'm one of those weirdos who thinks they earn too little. You couldn't pay me enough to take on the life of a federal MP, let alone a cabinet member.
I don't think we should ever excuse how politicians treat their staffers, but I think it's pretty clear that this working culture is totally pervasive in our politics, from top-to-bottom. Most importantly, it keeps away normal, well-adjusted citizens who could only handle the insane demands of political life with a job-sharing scheme! It was totally shameless of Albo to cut down on staff allowances, as if giving those popular indepdents a harder time is going to somehow win votes. Utterly petulant nonesense.
I felt a bit lost in terms of how this problem can be delivered to an unsympathetic electorate, but your writing on the independents has convinced me that we already are, at least indrectly. I hope that, as their vote-share grows, we start to see a healthier political culture that entices the best of us.