Sex, Lies and Question Time by Kate Ellis review – an insider account of 'sleaze and innuendo' in Canberra

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“I had only been a politician for a few weeks when I was approached in a Canberra bar and told, ‘The only thing anyone really wants to know about you, Kate, is how many blokes you had to fuck to get into this parliament.’”

So goes the arresting opening line of a chapter in former Labor MP Kate Ellis’s book, arriving in bookstores this weekend with the sort of timing publicists dream of – a compendium of the shameful treatment of women in parliament released at a time when we can speak of nothing but.

The question was posed to the then 27-year-old Ellis just after she arrived in Canberra in 2004 by a man who was the at the time a Liberal staffer, but who then went on to become a senior MP. He interrupted her mid-conversation at the pub. She writes: “I had won a marginal seat in an election when my party was largely annihilated. But, sure, if that’s how he thinks elections work. I had never spoken to him before and subsequently tried to limit our interactions over the next decade.”

It was, Ellis writes, “the kind of run-of-the-mill sleaze and innuendo which is so common it is almost unremarkable in the culture of federal politics”.

With the wild tide of revelations that have been relentlessly coming at us like a set of breakers in the last few weeks, all this is unremarkable no more. And the fact that this exchange had come to be seen as “run-of-the-mill” is cause for a reckoning within the pages of Sex, Lies and Question Time, Ellis’s “insider account” of her 15 years in parliament.

“I often wonder, if we had been more forthright in calling the culture out earlier, would the appalling misogynistic attacks on Julia Gillard still have occurred?” Ellis asks. “Could we have stopped things before they exploded so dramatically? Of course we will never know – but we should do all we can to stop this behaviour now.”

Sex, Lies and Question Time surveys some familiar ground through the big picture gender inequality lens – looking back at the history of women in politics, the ongoing focus on female appearance and family status, the online abuse, the public slut-shaming that saw court cases upend the lives of Sarah Hanson-Young and Emma Husar.

Ellis interviews a number of her former fellow parliamentarians who are frank and generous – Julia Gillard, Tanya Plibersek, Penny Wong, Linda Burney, Julie Bishop, Sussan Ley, Sarah Hanson-Young, Pauline Hanson – and there are stories that could be from any number of workplaces: of men talking over women in meetings, of men repeating the ideas that female colleagues came up with and being congratulated for them, deals done and influence piqued in the pub after hours or at networking golf games, the double standards that see men characterised as fiery and passionate and women framed as irrational.

There’s the much-discussed issue of the policing of and talk about image – we know, for example, more than we ever wanted to know about the fit of Julia Gillard’s jackets. But there are other incremental insults: Ellis being told by a Labor party elder to go to a particular hairdresser in Adelaide that catered to conservative older ladies to have her long hair cut short, and that she should wear glasses despite having perfect vision. Julie Bishop tells Ellis that, on becoming aged care minister, she was told to change her look to suit the portfolio, “less Armani, more cardigans” (“I laughed until I realised they were serious”).