SYDNEYSIDE WITH JANET PARR Australia’s own Margaret climbing political ladder

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 34008, 24 November 1975, Page 6

SYDNEYSIDE WITH JANET PARR Australia’s own Margaret climbing political ladder

Anyone watching what is going on in Canberra just now could be thinking that perhaps Australia has its own Margaret with a foot well up the kind of ladder that took Britain’s Margaret Thatcher to the top job in a major political party.

There are plenty of similarities besides the first names. Senator Margaret Guilfoyle is, at the moment. Minister for Education in Australia’s Liberal-Country Party coalition caretaker Government. Mrs Thatcher held Britain’s education portfolio in a Conservative Government.

The ages are almost the same. Senator Guilfoyle is 49, Mrs Thatcher 50. Mrs Thatcher is an economist. Senator Guilfoyle an ; accountant. You could say both have a good head for (figures — very’ useful in Parliamentarv debate. Both are married and have children. Both have a lively interest in what goes on around them apart from their own specialties, and seem to take a keen interest in presenting a trim well-groomed front to the world, although Senator Guilfoyle never seems to have been the kind of “hatty” person that Mrs Thatcher was. But the differences are striking too. Mrs Thatcher did have some rather remarkable political women preceding her in the British corridors of power. Senator Margaret Georgina Constance Guilfoyle, Irish born but living in Australia since she was three years old. a Liberal from Victoria, is the first woman to gain a seat in the inner Cabinet in 75 years of Federal government. She has got into the inner circle a great deal more quickly than Mrs Thatcher did. for she was first elected to the Senate in 1971. And one could say she has made possibly more friends on the way. She has in fact gained considerable respect from both political parties since she was elected, and picked up a wider circle of appreciation when a short trial of televising Federal Parliament allowed viewers to add faces and forms to voices alreadv familiar through regular radio broadcasts. And she has always known her own mind about where

she could do ;_ie best work. At her first party room meetiag she was offered a place on the Health and Welfare Committee. She got on the Public Accounts Committee when she said she would be more at home with finance and accounts. Nevertheless welfare and social problems have always interested her and she has been ahead of popular thinking on some issues. As long ago as July 'last year for instance during a Senate debate she urged the claims of single fathers supporting children to some form of assistance similar to that given to single supporting mothers, something which has only recently been given wider consideration.

She belongs to a number of professional finance- and accountancy bodies outside Parliament. Inside Parliament she has served on the Joint Parliamentarv Prices Committee and the Finance and Government Operations Standing Committee. ’ If the Liberals had not lost the 1972 and 1974 elections Senator Guilfoyle might have had Cabinet rank earlier. She began Shadow Minister for the Media in 1974 later becoming Shadow Minister for Education. Earlier this year when Mr Fraser (the present caretaker Prime Minister) or Mr Lynch (the Deputy Leader and present caretaker Treasurer) seemed likely to oust Mr Snedden as leader of the Parliamentarv Liberal Party —and Mr Fraser did eventually take over the leadership—there was some apparently well-founded speculation that Senator Guilfoyle might also be promoted as a contender for party leadership. She has her supporters, who had no doubt been inspired by Mrs Thatcher’s success in the British Conservative Partv. One of them is the Queenslander, Mr Killen, present caretaker Defence Minister, with whom she is said to be closely associated politically. And she

has strong support from her party’ in her own state of Victoria. Writing at that time TMarch 1975) one political (corresponden t com m ented that “in last May’s election (1974) it was widely speculated that Mrs Guilfoyle had serious reservations about threatened Opposition moves to reject supply.” By a curious twist it was the rejection of supply, the cutting off of Government money by the Senate’s refusal to pass the 1975 Budget Bills, that started the chain of events that transformed the Liberal-Country Party

- Opposition into the present : Government and put Senator Guilfoyle into the Educa- ■ tion Ministry. I Obviously in her few weeks I of office in a caretaker Govi ernment her opportunities to • leave much of a mark will I be severely limited if they ; exist at all. ; She has to keep her own seat in the Senate as part ;of a Liberal or Liberali Country Party coalition vic- : tory—and no-one is too ■ happy about predicting how : things will go into the eleci tion on December 13—to get I back into the Cabinet hier- ’ archy again.