Ms. Represented: Aug 3

One hundred years after Australia elected its very first female parliamentarian.

Annabel Crabb presents the final episode of Ms Represented.

Chapter 4 – The Numbers Game
We begin in the false dawn of the mid-90s, when the emergence of female leadership favourites like the Liberals’ Bronwyn Bishop (first woman elected to the Senate from NSW) and Labor’s Carmen Lawrence (first female Premier) and Democrats leader Cheryl Kernot set up some huge expectations. We hear from all three, a quarter of a century on. What does falling off a pedestal feel like?

Something else happened in the mid-90s… Australia’s major parties both agreed they needed more women in parliament, but they settled on different ways of going about it.

Labor enforced gender quotas, and the Liberal Party decided to go a different way, as is widely known. But Annabel discovers something unexpected in the Liberal Party’s historical ledger… revered founding father Robert Menzies actually invented gender quotas!

We look at where the parties are now. And what happened when – more than a century after women won the right to run for Parliament in Australia – we finally got a female PM.

8pm Tuesday on ABC.