President Christine Kangaloo has pushed back against critics who question the impartiality of her Senate appointments and continue to scrutinise her political past, suggesting that gender bias underlies some of the commentary.
Speaking yesterday at the opening of the Arthur Lok Jack Global School of Business’ Women in Leadership Conference, President Kangaloo addressed recent public criticism over her constitutional role and her background in partisan politics.
“For the last 63 years, ever since independence, commentators have invariably referred to the senators appointed by me in accordance with the Constitution as independent senators. Yet suddenly, for the first time in our history, they now refer to them as the President’s senators,” she said.
She described her previous experience as a Member of Parliament and Cabinet Minister as an invaluable training ground for her current office but said male political commentators had used her “long dead and buried political career” as a hammer to beat both her and her family.
“No amount of facts seem to matter to them,” she said. “It makes no difference that I had given up active politics for a full seven years before I was elected President.
“It makes no difference that, unlike a former distinguished president who just so happened to be male, I did not move from being a cabinet minister one day directly to being president next.
“It makes no difference that, in any event, our Constitution specifically contemplates a sitting member of Parliament becoming president.”
President Kangaloo continued:
“I have sometimes allowed myself to wonder whether the difference in my case is that I am one of only two women to have been President, and whether the reason that the only other former politician to have become president was spared the attacks that have been visited upon me is that he was male.”
She asked that she be judged solely on the merit of her performance as Head of State.
