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Last Updated: November 1, 2009
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Interview with PROF. MARGARET THORNTON

2,500 words

...those of us who are committed have to keep on talking,
even when we feel there is no-one listening.
We have to critique what is happening and somehow resist being drawn into
the vortex of the market that wants to drown us.

I think there is a complete disjunction between my early years and what I did subsequently. I grew up in the country in Tasmania and I don't really recall much focus on social justice, although I think the idea of community was important - people looked after each other.

I joined the Tasmanian diaspora, as many young people do. I went to Sydney to do (what was then called) the Leaving Certificate, at night, then to Sydney University. I was interested in doing Arts/Law but I did Arts as the scholarship people said that Law was not appropriate for a woman.

At that stage, in the sixties, I didn't have the confidence to do it. It wasn't until I had children and was influenced by the women's movement that I started a law degree. When I completed it and was thinking about what to do, it was rather a shock to be told that I was the best qualified but the wrong sex, so I became an academic, which allowed me to critique the system.

I did activist things as well. At one stage in the early 1980's, I remember I belonged simultaneously to organisations called WAM, WAC and WITI - which sound rather aggressive. WAM was Women at Macquarie, WAC was the Women's Advisory Council to the Premier and WITI was Women in Tertiary Institutions. I was founder of the Feminist Legal Action Group (FLAG), where we wanted to use the law to run test cases and things like that. We made submissions and lobbied for changes to laws affecting women.

For example, we sponsored the first research on women convicted of the murder of their husbands after years of domestic violence. This work was instrumental in having the law on provocation changed in New South Wales. Subsequently, I went on television with Helen Coonan to talk about FLAG's work. Helen said that FLAG would love to hear from women with problems in family law, etc. The next thing we were inundated with letters from all around Australia. It was just impossible. We virtually sank under the weight of that.

I came to Melbourne in 1990 to take up a Chair in the Department of Legal Studies at La Trobe University, continuing to work on similar issues. There was a strong group of feminist scholars at Latrobe University and a particular emphasis on social justice. I felt happy about working there. I did a book on anti-discrimination legislation in Australia called The Liberal Promise (Oxford University Press 1990), then a study on women in the legal profession called Dissonance and Distrust (Oxford University Press 1996).

There is still enormous suspicion and antipathy towards women in authority. Only last week when we had a woman appointed to the High Court (only the second), the front-page and lead-story headline in The Australian was

'WOMAN "OF MERIT" JOINS HIGH COURT' (21 Sept 2005)

Once again, we see the suspicion about women in authority: that you can't quite trust them, that they are somehow not going to be as good or as meritorious, that they have been appointed only because of their sex.

Working as a professor I have been interested in this question of the gender of authority. If you adopt a more collaborative style as a woman, there is a suspicion that you are weak, but on the other hand, if you act like the stereotypical male manager who orders people about, that is inappropriate too. You are a 'balls-breaker'.

Authority is an ongoing dilemma for feminists. I think in the present climate we are seeing a reversion back to more authoritarian styles of leadership, which seems to fit in with neo-liberalism. The social liberalism of the 1970's and 1980's did begin to tolerate women in positions of authority, and, of course, there was a commitment to equal opportunity, and it was more open, despite the sexism.

Today, we never hear of 'femocrats' (feminists in the bureaucracy), a significant Australian innovation. Now, with the focus upon employers and what is good for business, we see that the type of leadership style is much more authoritarian - someone who can 'kick heads', order people around rather than consult and if they refuse to co-operate sack them. The idea of leadership now actually suggests someone who can sack people. To make people do more with less is seen to be somehow good.

This brings me to a particular interest of mine in terms of work and how we see it in the context of the change from social liberalism to neo-liberalism and how that is impacting upon women. The focus is on
- what is good for business,
- what is going to make money within a global environment,
- how we are going to make Australia more competitive,
- maximising profits, - producing New Knowledge workers for the good of the organisation and for the good of the nation state.

The concepts of social justice, equity and equal opportunity have fallen off the agenda altogether. We find there is now a focus on a rather weak concept of 'diversity'. The phrase used in organisations (public and private) is 'managing diversity'. This is what managers do to try and make the workplace better for them, to make workers more productive to try to get more out of them.

It is interesting looking at the websites, which I have recently been doing. There is all this rhetoric about how wonderful employers are in terms of diversity, but then there is this little bit saying how many workers have been - well, they don't say sacked or retrenched, but 'downsized'. The Reserve Bank was interesting, as one example. There were pages of the rhetoric about diversity and all the things they were doing in terms of work/life balance, equity, justice, and so on, and then there was a tiny mention of the fact that the number of employees had been reduced by 50% over the last decade, but no mention of how 'diversity' was maintained as a result.

I suggest this language of diversity has actually stifled the language of social justice, of equity and equality. There is no longer space for words like inequality or discrimination. They are seen to be too negative. You have to present this very positive view of an organisation through what might be termed the 'jolly discourse of diversity'.

Organisations now have a great list of dimensions of identity that they extol. As well as sex, age, race, etc, they include a extras like: life experience and educational background. My favourite is 'personality'. Can you imagine an employer considering a person's personality that falls outside the norm as being a 'plus' in terms of workplace diversity? The history of inequality, exclusion and discrimination is lost in this morass. It seems to me that diversity has become an absurdity as a workplace norm.

I am generally interested in the workplace and the sort of rhetoric that prevails to disguise gender inequality.

Another current favourite is 'flexibility'. This is one of the words we find our Prime Minister using to justify the present workplace reforms. It is dressed up to appear as though it operated in the interests of women, but it is the flexibility of the employer's need that is privileged. It means that a woman might live out in the Dandenongs and spend two hours travelling to work for an hour or two, say at Myers at lunchtime, then an hour or two travelling home. She is home in time to pick up the children from school.

This is seen to be evidence of an employer's commitment to the 'work/life balance'. In fact, of course, what is happening through this rhetoric of 'flexibility' is the move to casual work - employees are paid only when they are needed.

The phrase 'precarious work' has been used by commentators and critics to capture this phenomenon. There is no security of employment, no holiday pay or other conditions associated with full-time work, and the person can be sacked at will. In the United States at the moment, under federal law, there is only one guaranteed condition - a minimum wage, presently of $5.15 an hour. Otherwise there are no protections whatsoever and employees can be sacked at will.

That is the situation our government wishes to emulate in Australia - by doing away with the union movement and doing away with protections.

It might also be noted how moral conservatism is invoked to justify casual work for women. The point is a tricky one, as flexible work does indeed suit women with caring responsibilities. However, the conservative argument has no interest in what is just for women in terms of the conditions of work, but what is best for 'the family' - understood in traditional 2-parent terms with a full-time male worker and an ancillary female carer.

By 'choosing' casual work, she still cares for him and the children. Rather than being confined behind the white picket fence, 1950s style, women can usefully serve the economy in times of high demand in accordance with the 'reserve army' thesis.

They also support the economy through increased consumerism. Neoconservative morality is strongly influenced by the religious right.

The intersection between politics and a particular kind of Christian fundamentalism has been borrowed from the United States by the Howard Government, and is clearly explicated by Marion Maddox in God under Howard. This morality is also shaping debates around feminist concerns, such as abortion and access to IVF, in addition to the entire social agenda.

As a feminist, it is discouraging to find the things we worked on for so long have mostly been unravelled. They seem to be simply disappearing overnight. The people who were the products of free education at university, who have been the beneficiaries of some of the programs that were fought for, have nevertheless been silent as these changes have been effected. Some have been not just complicit, but have played an active role - such as our politicians.

I am completing a study on universities at the moment, looking on the impact of the corporatisation of universities, focussing particularly on my own discipline - law. It is quite extraordinary, from a number of perspectives.

First we see problems in terms of access - quasi-privatisation where significant fees are being paid for so-called government funded places. Universities can also offer up to 35% of places that are full-fee paying. You can be paying up to $100,000.00 for an education. When you compare that with the free tertiary education introduced by the Whitlam government just 30 years ago, it is quite shocking.

There is also the impact on the way knowledge is being constructed and what sort of knowledge can currently be produced within universities and purveyed to students.

Universities are not receiving adequate funds to do the job of being a university. They are forced to sell things to make money. What can they commodify? Their only product is education so they sell private places to domestic students and overseas students, and sell courses offshore. As a result, we see the move away from the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, a concern with objectivity, neutrality and so on, to whether the knowledge has 'use value', that is, whether it can be commodified.

So, education, like everything else in our society at the moment, is supposed to have 'use value' within the market. Social justice is not seen to be valuable. Who is going to sponsor it? A big corporation is not going to spend money funding a Chair or donating money, as universities are forced to kow-tow to big business to attract money. The sort of courses that are seen to be valuable are courses like business and management.

The shift away from social justice has meant that about 25 courses in my own university discipline have gone. Feminist scholarship has gone; criminology courses such as 'Crime and Sex' and 'Aborigines and the Law', have all gone. The focus now is all on courses such as 'How to Facilitate Business'.

This is what we find all over Australia and, indeed, overseas to some extent, including the UK and Canada, although I think the shifts there are not as dramatic as in Australia. There still is the idea of the autonomy of the university as a very significant force for the transmission of the culture of a society and the protection of the notion of social goods.

Here we see our politicians have been happy to jettison these very important public goods. It is having an enormous impact on the character of our society. It is already having an impact on what is taught in schools to young people where values are shaped. They are being brought up to believe that all that is important is the market and for them to be consumers - to buy things to assist the economy and to work to produce things for consumption, instead of learning to be citizens who are part of a polity and concerned about the good of society.

I think there has been a dramatic shift in thinking about the notion of collective good. Coming back to my point about the way social justice has disappeared, some of the phrases that appear in the corporate documents on the web are things like 'productive diversity' (a wonderful oxymoron). Everything has to have a monetary value attached to it and if you are not prepared to accept that, you are not fit to be working and should somehow disappear. You are not a worthwhile member of society.

The market has become what one commentator called 'the meta-narrative of our times'. It has taken over everywhere, it infuses everything and impacts on everything that we do. If something doesn't have 'use value' in the market, it is of no use.

The pressures for individuals to survive in the workplace has increased. Surveillance occurs everywhere, including universities, where you are supposed to enter into a contract with a supervisor that you are going to be 'productive'. The idea that one has to produce measurable 'outcomes' or 'outputs' is something that has infected the entire workplace - regardless of how ludicrous this is when applied to work such as teaching or caring for others. It means that if people don't satisfy the productivity requirements, they face redundancy.

The system operates to allow very little reflexivity about what is happening. Most people are racing from job to job, struggling to survive, struggling to be 'productive'. There is no time to think, or time to meet. There has been a contraction of civil society - the places where you met to talk about issues that were outside the market and outside government.

The Marxist idea is that things have to go right down before they start to come up again. Maybe things will have to become even more extreme so that there will be some sort of revolution. As it is, most people have been extraordinarily complacent. There have been a few signs of life, of course. I think it is interesting in New Zealand, for example, where there was an extreme form of neo-liberalism, that there was a strong reaction against it. There is also the anti-globalisation movement.

But these movements are really minor when we consider the extent of the power that is exercised by nation-states, by the multinationals and by the superpowers, in particular, which continue to be concerned - or obsessed - with attracting business and making profits. The view is that women have somehow made it because there are a few judges and a few managers, a few women in universities and so on. This is a simplistic notion of progressivism - that things are always getting better. This is the liberal story. It is, of course, a myth.

I think those of us who are committed have to keep on talking, even when we feel there is no-one listening. We have to critique what is happening and somehow resist being drawn into the vortex of the market that wants to drown us.