Abstract
Scrutiny regimes in some Australian parliaments require consideration of human rights impacts of proposed legislation, but routinely ignore gendered impacts of legislation, particularly those relating to alcohol and other drugs. Where women's voices are heard, they are often only listened to according to stereotypes. Drawing on Anne Summers’ work on stereotypes of Australian women, an analysis of reports and hearing transcripts from major parliamentary inquiries into drug law reform, and in-depth interviews with those involved in parliamentary human rights scrutiny, we argue that parliamentary scrutiny regimes perpetuate paternalistic accounts of women to be pitied or punished: the ‘mournful mother’ whose child is affected by alcohol or other drugs and needs to be heard, and the ‘damaged damsel’ who is themselves affected by alcohol or other drugs and needs to be protected. This raises the question: are women listened to during parliamentary scrutiny processes or simply talked about in stereotypical ways?
Introduction
Scrutiny regimes in some Australian parliaments require consideration of the human rights impacts of proposed legislation. This is the case in the Australian Capital Territory, Victoria, the Commonwealth, and Queensland. In these parliaments, proposed legislation is subject to scrutiny by parliamentary committees that are empowered to consider the impact of the legislation on human rights. As we have argued elsewhere (Seear and Mulcahy, 2022b), these parliamentary human rights scrutiny processes routinely ignore gendered impacts of legislation, particularly in relation to alcohol and other drugs. Our earlier research found that human rights processes had no ‘regard to the potential role of gender, including specific masculinities, in the production of problems such as family violence, sexual violence and other public safety concerns’ in the context of alcohol and other drugs legislation (Seear and Mulcahy, 2022b: 273). In this work, we have argued that alcohol and other drugs are regulated without regard to gender and specific masculinities, and that this has important implications for women, especially when substances are straightforwardly treated as the origin of social problems like violence and regulated accordingly. In this paper, we reverse the focus and consider how specific femininities are invoked, mobilised, and enacted by those involved in parliamentary human rights scrutiny processes concerning alcohol and other drugs legislation.
Our approach is informed by two bodies of research. First, we consider Anne Summers’ ([1975] 2016) classic work on stereotypes of Australian women as ‘damned whores and God's police’. Second, we consider contemporary critical cultural legal scholarship on listening (Ahmed, 2021; Lalor, 2020; Mulcahy, 2019; Ramshaw, 2023). We explore the listening practices of parliamentary human rights scrutiny committees and the parliamentarians that sit on them and how these listening practices both are affected by and perpetuate gendered stereotypes, which in turn influence not only who is heard but how they are heard and responded to. We argue that women are principally listened to according to gendered stereotypes. Our method draws from both analysis of reports and hearing transcripts of major parliamentary inquiries into drug law reform, and in-depth interviews with those involved in parliamentary human rights scrutiny processes.
We further argue that, through their listening practices, parliamentary scrutiny regimes perpetuate – and occasionally disrupt – paternalistic accounts of women to be pitied or punished: the ‘mournful mother’ whose child is affected by alcohol or other drugs and needs to be heard, or the ‘damaged damsel’ who is themselves affected by alcohol or other drugs and needs to be protected. In the conclusion, we argue for new ways for parliamentary scrutiny regimes to listen to and incorporate the voices of women with lived experience of alcohol and other drugs, to generate richer understandings of the gendered impacts of legislation concerning alcohol and other drugs.
Theoretical Background
In analysing how specific femininities are mobilised in parliamentary human rights scrutiny processes concerning alcohol and other drugs legislation, we first consider Anne Summers’ work on stereotypes of Australian women. In Damned Whores and God's Police ([1975] 2016: 103), Summers argues that, since colonisation, women's function in society is as follows: embodied in two stereotypes. They have been both descriptive and prescriptive, at the one time both adumbrating a function for women and exhorting them to conform to it, and also maintaining that they actually represented what women were. Each is a sex-role stereotype that exaggerates the characteristics of the basic dualistic notion that women are either good or evil: this judgment is based on whether or not women conform to the wife/mother roles prescribed by the bourgeois family.
In what follows, we build on Summers’ work to argue that parliamentary human rights scrutiny concerning alcohol and other drugs legislation replicates these dualistic stereotypes. We combine Summers’ work on stereotypes of women with critical cultural legal scholarship on listening to argue that women who do not ascribe to or comply with dominant stereotypes are less likely to be heard in parliamentary scrutiny contexts. In earlier work, the first author argued for the need for ‘those within legal performances to develop attunement practices and a mode of embodied listening’ (Mulcahy, 2019: 196) – deep listening that requires listening both to what is being said and its context (Mulcahy, 2019: 197). This also requires the listener to be sensitised to their response to what is being said and to the broader social and cultural context within which such discourse unfolds, and how this response manifests bodily. Bodily reactions, such as the way in which ‘we stretch forward to listen, furrow our brows to comprehend, sometimes cup our hands around our ears to block out extraneous sounds’ (Mulcahy cited in Ramshaw, 2023: 101), signal to the speaker that they are being heard. Listening is thus not passive, nor is it automatic. Whilst the connection between listening and gender may not be readily apparent, it is explored further in other work on this topic.
Kay Lalor, in her study of ‘listening as a diplomatic tool’ (Lalor, 2020: 303), notes that some political actors have limited capacity to listen to new or challenging issues concerning gender, and that silence is often a response (Lalor, 2020: 310). Yet claims to be listening can also be used to signal righteousness on the part of the listener (Lalor, 2020: 317). As such, there is a great investment in being seen to listen. Here, Lalor draws from the work of Sara Ahmed, noting that: Listening opens up wider ethical questions of power relations of communication. Sara Ahmed argues that ‘to hear, or to give the other a hearing, is to be moved by the other, such that one ceases to inhabit the same place.’ For Ahmed, hearing is movement: to listen is to be prepared to change our orientation to the world, to face our discomfort with what we hear and to be repositioned as embodied, knowing subjects (Lalor 2020, 304, citing Ahmed, 2000: 155).
That said, the idea of listening to women has now become mainstreamed, particularly with the rise of the #MeToo movement and the slogan ‘believe women’. However, there is considerably less attention to how to listen (Ailwood et al., 2023). In this regard, we suggest that it is necessary to understand and acknowledge the prevailing gender norms in society and in parliaments that restrain women from being heard, particularly in the context of alcohol and other drug use – which is the focus of this paper. In the next sections, we explore these issues in more depth.
Method
To examine these issues, we focus on two key sources. First, we analyse hearing transcripts from a major parliamentary inquiry into drug law reform in the Australian Capital Territory in 2021, a jurisdiction that has a parliamentary human rights scrutiny regime. We examine the transcripts from the first day of hearings, which was dedicated to parents of children affected by drugs, to consider how mothers are heard during this process. Second, we draw from 30 in-depth interviews we conducted with those involved in parliamentary human rights scrutiny, including parliamentarians, their staff, and parliamentary staff and advisors with experience in this process. These interviews and the analysis are part of a larger, Australian Research Council-funded research project that considers human rights in the context of alcohol and other drug laws. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and then deidentified, with the interviewees assigned different first names to protect their anonymity. In doing so, we recognise that pseudonymity can serve to erase people from their own stories, which is particularly challenging for feminist research (Gordon, 2019), but we also recognise the radical dimensions of anonymity in that it allows political actors to speak more frankly than they would normally otherwise. The research was approved by our university ethics committee.
Gender emerged as an important concern in both the interviews and the parliamentary scrutiny instruments we examined, alongside questions of motherhood and childhood, protection and care, and the purported effects that alcohol and other drugs have not only on the person who uses them or is affected by their use but that person's wider family. In reading and watching this material, we were particularly struck by the role that mothers and children played in shaping ideas around drug use, and the political salience of the mother and the child in instigating ideas about the need to protect and provide care for those affected by alcohol and other drug use. In the material, we found that alcohol and other drug use was not seen as an individual issue but something that had profound ramifications for social networks, most predominantly families. Within the material, there was mourning and grief on the part of mothers whose children had been adversely affected – sometimes killed – due to alcohol and other drug use, and an interrelated sense that women – particularly young women – were damaged by alcohol and other drug use; and these two themes shaped how alcohol and other drugs were perceived by our interviewees. In what follows, we consider examples from the material that replicate and challenge the stereotypes of the ‘mournful mother’ and the ‘damaged damsel’, suggesting that the kind of stereotypes of Australian women that Summers first identified nearly half a century ago still have salience today. We conclude with a consideration of new ways for parliamentary scrutiny regimes to listen to and incorporate the voices of women with lived experience of alcohol and other drug use in ways that do not perpetuate gendered stereotypes but rather generate richer understandings of the gendered impacts of legislation concerning alcohol and other drugs and the diversity of women's experiences with alcohol and other drug consumption.
‘The Mournful Mother’
The first stereotype we consider is that of the ‘mournful mother’ whose child is affected by alcohol or other drugs use and needs to be heard. Summers notes that women have often been mobilised in prohibitionist efforts due to ‘the effect of alcohol on the home […] “the family”’ and children (Summers, [1975] 2016: 544), dating from the temperance movements in early twentieth-century Australia (Summers, [1975] 2016: 488, 542–544). In earlier work, we argued that parents and families of those who are affected by drug use are often powerful actants in legislative debates concerning alcohol and other drugs in that they ‘work to humanise the legal process’ (Mulcahy and Seear, 2022a: 242). Their views are often given great weight by legislators. We gave the example of Canberran mother Alison Ryan, whose daughter, Amy, was killed in a traffic accident that involved a drug driver and was instrumental to the passage of roadside drug testing laws in the Australian Capital Territory; in a similar way that Rosie Batty, whose son Luke was killed in a family violence incident, was instrumental to family violence reforms in Victoria (Wheildon et al., 2022). In our earlier research, we noted that, during the passage of these laws, Ms Ryan acted ‘as a proxy [for her daughter] during the [parliamentary] debate, listening in her place’, whilst noting that ‘there is no presence of people who use drugs within the debate; no person speaking or listening for them’ (Mulcahy and Seear, 2022a: 247). Two things need to be said here. First, Ms Ryan as the mother of a dead daughter was ‘mutely sitting in the public gallery, having words imputed to her’ (Mulcahy and Seear, 2022a: 259). She was not heard during the debate because she could not speak, though legislators frequently speculated on what she might have to say. Second, people who use drugs were not heard from nor spoken for in the debate. In this section, we consider these two points in the context of mothers speaking – or being spoken about – in parliamentary processes.
To underscore the way in which parents (especially mothers) feature in debates about drug law, the Australian Capital Territory Parliament's Select Committee on the Drugs of Dependence (Personal Use) Amendment Bill 2021 dedicated its first day of hearings to parents or, as the Committee Chair described, ‘individuals whose families have experienced the effects of the use of drugs of dependence’. The witnesses were invited to give an opening statement, followed by questions from the Committee members. One mother spoke, together with her partner, about her experiences with her son Todd, who used drugs: Yes, he has human rights. For God's sake, I do not want to take them away, but we have human rights. He walked out in front of a car. The young girl hit him. She will suffer with that for the rest of her life. He tried to hang himself. A young pregnant woman found him, and they had to cut him down. Those people's human rights have been affected. I feel guilty as a mother. There are parents that were there; honestly, I felt so sad for some of the mothers, as their sons actually keep them hostage. They fully control them – smoking marijuana in the house and things like that. I will not put up with that with Todd. At one stage he got a bit antsy, but they are my rules. Sometimes they know enough to know that there are rules, and he does not do that at home, and that is why he does not come and stay. There were mothers there – and [another mother] Mary can tell you the same thing – who were hostage to their children because they are scared of them.
Here, we see the mother assert her control over her son and her home but simultaneously feel guilt for her son's behaviour. She laments that whilst her son has human rights, the human rights of her and her partner and others affected by her son's drug use are not acknowledged. The parliamentarians on the Committee affirm their listening, reassuring her: ‘We are obviously very sorry about and sympathetic to your circumstances’; ‘We are very sorry to hear your story’; ‘We are very sympathetic about your circumstances, of course’. These words exhibit recognition, validation, and being heard. Yet, as Justine Lloyd (2009: 479) points out, ‘injunctions to listen perpetuate structures that allow privilege and power to be naturalised’. In this situation, the power of the listener comes from their ability to perform the therapeutic act of listening to the pain and frustration of the speaker. Yet, it is a form of managerial listening that is focussed on performing listening skills rather than substantively understanding and engaging with the arguments being put; it is not careful listening, which requires ‘an active and open-ended disposition to revise and reconstitute social relations’ based on what is heard (Lloyd, 2009: 485). As such, it is questionable whether what is heard affects the decisions parliamentarians ultimately make.
If we turn now from spoken communication to expressive communication, we can see in the video of the hearing,
2
which accompanies the written transcript, that it is difficult to assess physical or non-verbal displays of listening as the camera focuses on the speaker and not the listener. We also note that, as researchers watching on afterwards, we cannot capture the affective experience of being in the room. Nevertheless, it is noticeable that the parliamentarians speak in softer, more conversational tones to the parents giving evidence, even sympathetically (to the degree to which that can be detected through tone alone). Their questions are delivered at a quieter volume and a slower pace with silent space given after each response as if to allow for more to be said, and the politicians’ minor gestures include open palms as if to invite the parents to speak up. These actions create an atmosphere of intimacy in the otherwise stark committee room, in which the parliamentarians sit at tables across and at a distance from the witnesses (Mulcahy and Seear, 2022b: 295–296). As we have noted elsewhere: Being seated at the table does not guarantee any particular outcome, [but] it does help make parliamentarians more accountable to those whom they were elected to represent if only because they take the time to sit and listen to witnesses. It is, in other words, a listening practice that theoretically opens parliamentarians up to action (Mulcahy and Seear, 2022b: 296, referencing Lalor, 2020).
Mothers have also played a role in guiding reforms that loosen criminal restrictions on drug use. Groups like Families and Friends for Drug Law Reform have steered drug law reform away from a law enforcement approach to a health and social justice approach. Another mother at the parliamentary inquiry spoke in favour of drug decriminalisation considering the experience of her son dying of an overdose: My son, knowing that I was an upstanding citizen who never was in trouble with police and went to church every Sunday, thought how could he have come to me with this problem that he was using heroin, especially? Very difficult. And why was that? Because we have instilled in people that if anyone takes these drugs, the people that take them are bad, their families are bad. How was he going to come to me and say, ‘Mum, I am in trouble with heroin’? He just could not do it. I think having these drugs illegal has divided families like this, but if we can bring them together and say, ‘Okay, mum thinks like this because she has been brought up with this prohibition thing that people that use drugs are bad, but here is a child over here that sees all his mates using drugs and whatever and also sees it as easing some pain they might have’, that would be a good thing. We have got to bring those thoughts together somehow, to understand each other. We have got to start understanding people, not criminalising them.
On this, the mother is a powerful figure in debates on drug law reform or any social policy reform. Summers ([1975] 2016: 528) describes how the figure of the mother has assumed a ‘semi-heroic status […] almost sacred’. Parliamentarians recognised the power of mothers to progress drug law reform efforts. In the context of reforms to allow pill testing, one of our interviewees, Kate, told us: The best person I ever saw in terms of pill testing was a mother who had lost her adult son at a festival to drug use, and she could articulate it in a way that nobody else could and so the medical professionals, you know, all those people, we could all put a particular angle on it but it was her and I often worked with parents, because I just found that they were the ones who could articulate it in an entirely different way, especially if they had lost a child.
Whilst the mothers’ testimony may not have been as influential, many of the parliamentarians we interviewed told stories based on personal experience of mothers in their lives, which demonstrates the importance of relatability. Christopher spoke of his grandmother and her relationship with his grandfather who was a chronic alcoholic. In his telling, he reflects on how his grandmother would always serve his grandfather dinner after a night of drinking, but also never encouraged him to take action to address his drinking. Whilst the grandmother performs the maternal role of caring through cooking – noting that women are often ‘expected to maintain the home front’ (Summers, [1975] 2016: 535) – a question is raised about whether she cared enough to address her husband's drinking: My grandfather was a chronic alcoholic and, you know, he used to sit down the end of the bar of the flat where my grandma lived, and I used to be able to see him from the veranda. He sat in the same spot in the same hotel every payday, and we’d have to encourage him to come home and then when he came home, he always came with, I don’t know, I forget how many tallies and a bottle of sherry, which he then demolished at home before he went to bed […] We lived in an era back then when people didn’t really try to understand why someone wouldn’t feel the need to do that every, you know, every payday. I’m not saying that there aren’t people who still do that, but I think, you know, as time has gone on, we perhaps care for each other a little bit more, and therefore, you know, if we had a member of our family that was doing that, we would, you know, a wife or a spouse or partner would be saying, ‘You need to get a grip because this is not conducive to a happy life.’ […] Grandma used to get upset with him, but there was always food on the table for him […] he always had his plate of soup waiting for him and his, you know, meat and three veg. You know, it wasn’t like, you know, if you come home like that, you’re never going to get fed […] but now, you know, if you come home late and you’re full, your partner might say to you, ‘Well, your food's in the oven’, or ‘Hope you’re getting a pizza on the way home.’ I picture my mum. You know, my mum is the person I cared for, for a long time, who had substance abuse and, you know, perhaps I don’t know if it's a unique experience but it's mine. The substance to which she became addicted which turned her into an entirely different person was a socially acceptable drug she was prescribed by her doctor on an almost weekly basis. You know, I saw a person put on a huge amount of weight, have interpersonal relationships break down, lose their job.
He went on to explain that his mother, of her own volition, moved away from prescription medications to cannabis and as a result was ‘able to moderate their own weight, get back into the workforce, start to become an active parent, reconnect with those that they’d lost’. Here, health, employability, connectedness and being ‘an active parent’ are depicted as valuable qualities that drugs both inhibit (in the case of pharmaceutical drugs) or aid (in the case of cannabis). Whilst drug use is depicted as a problem, it is also depicted as a solution for becoming a mother who is ‘active’ and cares for her child. Here, it is not the mother that is mournful but the son who is mourning the changes in his mother and who himself assumes the caring role during her period of addiction to prescription medications. What we suggest here is that personal experiences, interconnected to stereotypes, shape how stories are heard. In the conclusion, we further examine how personal experience often grounds listening practices, but here we to turn to our second stereotype.
‘The Damaged Damsel’
The second stereotype we consider is that of the ‘damaged damsel’ who is themselves affected by alcohol or other drugs use and needs to be protected. We have seen elements of this in the examples of mothers that did not conform to stereotypes and themselves used drugs, and here we shall explore this further. We note at the outset, however, that women who use drugs are rarely granted a voice in these legislative processes. As with all outsiders, these women are often silenced or spoken for in ways that are themselves influenced by gender and drug-related stereotypes and so are often not listened to or heard on issues that affect them.
We interviewed Joseph, who told a story of a young man he knew who was killed by a woman driving under the influence of drugs: He got killed when a woman was driving a car high on ice. They were only kids, and she was about ten years older, never held a licence […] That was [some years ago] and we were hoping that […] because she’d done all the right things, that she was going to really rehabilitate. I mean, she’d done all the right things, followed the courses, so she's out on parole. I get rung up in July, she breached her parole, she's back in there, two years non-parole, she’ll ultimately have done close on five in prison, but it's a real shame, because she was doing all the right rehab things. Actually, with the drugs, you know, it's such a horrible, difficult thing to get off.
However, our interviewees were not only concerned about women who used drugs, but women who were exposed to others who use drugs. The use of drugs was seen to pose risks to women's safety, justifying legislative responses that would protect them from such risks. Fabian described the need to protect women from family violence at the hands of those who have been consuming alcohol: There's a strong family violence angle and the availability of, you know, increasing the availability of alcohol for people who have been drinking, to be able to ring up and order more, is not conducive to functional family life and to calm and it puts women who are experiencing family violence at greater risk. So, there's a recent op-ed in The Age by a victim survivor of family violence talking about, you know, when the alcohol delivery, the tipple company arrives, that she and the kids would hide and by a certain time, they would feel the need to call the police or do whatever they had to do.
Sometimes legislative interventions to deal with alcohol and other drug use were seen to have a negative impact on intimate relationships between men and women. In one example, Imogen described the scenario of a hypothetical man who has an alcohol ignition immobiliser installed in their car and the impact that this has on his relationship with his wife: If someone proposed, for example, we’re going to make everybody who goes 100 kilometres over the speed limit subject to alcohol ignition immobiliser on their car whether they’ve been drinking or not. You might go, that sounds reasonable, but I suppose if you’re the alcoholic guy who is trying to keep your job to feed your family sort of thing and trying to fight your addiction at the same time, that could be the final straw that tips you over into, now, you’re unemployed or your boss goes, ‘Well, why have you got an alcohol ignition immobiliser thing on your car?’ You know, and then it might be something you’re trying to hide. Your wife might not know you’re a drinker. She's going, ‘What the hell's that?’
If we reflect more broadly, many of the parliamentarians that we spoke to told stories about women and drugs. As Kim Scheppele (1989: 2075) observes, ‘to make sense of the law and to organise experience, people often tell stories. And these stories are telling’. In this sense, these stories tell of the ways in which parliamentary actors conceive women and drugs; what is being told often accords with the stereotyped views of women. These patterns of storytelling, and the ways in which the stories are shaped by gender stereotypes, reveal the absence of listening to women who use drugs. Drugs are continually depicted as having a negative physical impact on women – holding, restraining or hitting – but very little regard is had to potentially positive impacts, perhaps because women who use drugs are not given a voice in these accounts.
During our interviews, we also questioned parliamentarians as to whether, during deliberations and decision-making, they have a picture in mind of the person who uses drugs and is subject to legislative interventions of the kinds discussed above. The response of Anne was particularly revelatory: The person I picture is a person who is, you know, misunderstood, passed over, forgotten, you know, voiceless, yeah, and it's man or woman like it doesn’t have to be either gender, it depends on the bill. I mean, obviously if we are talking about, I don’t know, the safe exclusion zones or you know it might be sexual assault bills that we are speaking on then obviously you know in my head the person is generally female, but I guess it is that kind of voiceless person.
We argue, however, that it is not really listening if a person is not granted a voice or if the listener is overwriting what is heard with what is expected to be heard. In all these accounts, the absence of the actual voices of women who use drugs is stark. It seems there is limited opportunity to speak up or speak out during these legislative processes and that the pre-determined nature of political processes limits speaking outside of one's lane, such that women who use drugs are not speaking but are spoken for. In the conclusion, we explore the idea of giving voice and listening to the unheard.
Reflections
In earlier research, we found that, in the context of parliamentary human rights scrutiny of alcohol and other drug-related legislation, ‘safety, risk and harm is conceptualised in a gender-neutral way, without regard to the potential role of gender, including specific masculinities, in the production of problems such as family violence, sexual violence and other public safety concerns’ (Seear and Mulcahy, 2022b: 273). This has led to approaches whereby drugs are regulated in a gender-neutral way that may disproportionately affect women. Upon closer examination, however, we have found instances of specific femininities being invoked and reproduced by those involved in these parliamentary human rights scrutiny processes, ones that accord to – and sometimes discord with – two predominant stereotypes: the mournful mother and the damaged damsel. What this suggests is that purportedly ‘gender-neutral’ laws are undergirded by stereotypes about women and alcohol and other drug use, and that these stereotypes are baked into the law-making process. These stereotypes have such cogency and salience that non-adherence to them creates discordance. Furthermore, we have noted examples of both male and female lawmakers engaging in these stereotypes. Further research could explore methods of gender-sensitive/-responsive law-making (Graycar and Morgan, 2005; Mousmouti, 2022; Vijeyarasa, 2019), particularly in relation to alcohol and other drug laws which are purportedly gender neutral, and in the context of human rights scrutiny (Johnson, 2022; Mowbray, 2021 3 ). In short, this would involve bringing a more consciously gendered lens to law-making (Seear and Mulcahy, 2022a), noting critiques that suggest that ‘law continues to appear systemically deaf to the calls of untold numbers of women for justice’ (Russell, 2016: 296).
It is important to acknowledge that gendered stereotypes are not the only factors that inflect scrutiny of laws concerning alcohol and other drugs. Further research could explore the ways in which racial stereotypes also impact purportedly race-neutral alcohol and other drug laws, including restricting the consumption of liquor and other drugs that disproportionately impact Aboriginal people, and whether laws could be crafted in more culturally sensitive manners. Interestingly, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, that scrutinises proposed Commonwealth laws for their impact on human rights, now has three Aboriginal women amongst its members: Senators Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Jana Stewart and Lidia Thorpe. However, Sarah Maddison (2010: 665) has suggested that ‘while parliamentary representation is important in a symbolic sense, without structural transformation it will never be an adequate vehicle for representing Indigenous needs and concerns in the postcolonial State’. These are, after all, colonial processes, inherited from British parliament. Further research could explore culturally sensitive listening practices (De Souza and Dreher, 2021; Dreher, 2009), particularly in the context of the failed referendum to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice that was opposed by two of the three Aboriginal women cited above and that has led to an enforced silencing of Aboriginal voices. Similarly, further research could also examine the way in which heteronormativity impacts alcohol and other drug laws, for example, in laws regulating sexual consent and alcohol and other drug consumption, and how LGBTIQA + advocates are listened to therein. This work is important because, as Kristie Dotson (2011: 251) points out, ‘practices of silencing that result from an audience's failure to communicatively reciprocate in a linguistic exchange with respect to offering testimony’ can amount to ‘epistemic violence’ against oppressed groups in society.
Part of the response may be to provide more opportunities for parliamentary scrutiny committees to hear evidence from affected communities, including through open inquiries, or giving audience as a way of creating room for more diverse voices to be heard. We note that this is happening at a time when women are speaking up through powerful ‘testamentary performances’ (Watt, 2016), and being heard (Ailwood, 2020), with major investigations into gendered harms often connected to alcohol consumption occurring in the national parliament (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2021; Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2021), most notably in the case of Brittany Higgins. Nevertheless, as we have written elsewhere, this has often ‘led to proposed policies that would police [women's] behaviour under the guise of protection, whilst simultaneously ignoring the gendered dimension of these harms’ (Seear and Mulcahy, 2022a: 360). And still, the stereotypes of women persist. Whilst we might strive to challenge these stereotypes, it is also important that we acknowledge their enduring potency and power. As Summers ([1975] 2016: 1) notes, ‘We have changed a lot. But we have not changed enough’. Whilst women's role in society has changed markedly over the past half century, Summers ([1975] 2016: 9) argues that ‘we are ready for women to do more, so long as they first of all fulfil their primary role’, with this role being added to or modernised rather than redefined or abandoned altogether. She concludes that ‘we have not overcome the dualism […] We still differentiate between “good” and “bad” women’ (Summers, [1975] 2016: 10). The stereotypes endure.
There is also ample evidence that parliamentarians rely on lived experience to inform their views, particularly in the context of drug policy (valentine et al., 2020). But this also raises issues. One issue is, as kylie valentine et al. (2020: 194, emphasis in original) caution, that ‘policy and other public discourses have strong traditions of valuing and recognising particular types of biographical narratives of people who use drugs, which follow an arc of decline and redemption’. Another issue is that parliaments are male-dominated, and as such may reflect masculine approaches to social issues. In short, parliamentarians bring their own lived experience to the listening encounter and may struggle to listen to and critically engage with narratives of drug use that disrupt gendered stereotypes of drug use, if these narratives are presented. In other research, we’ve pointed to practices whereby ‘the lived experiences and narratives of people who use drugs is [sic] elided in favour of the narrative of the victim of a person who uses drugs’ and, as a result, ‘there is no presence of people who use drugs within the debate; no person speaking or listening for them’ (Mulcahy and Seear, 2022a: 347). So often, lived experience is unable to be brought to the listening table. A further issue is that parliamentarians are elected to represent communities that often have a diversity of views on social issues. One of our interviewees, Charles, acknowledged that ‘I have a responsibility as a legislator to not allow my own lived experience to have undue influence over my politics and over my policy […] because I represent more than me’. In specific relation to drugs: There is a diversity of experience of those who use drugs, a diversity of experience of those who are impacted by others who use drugs within our community, both in a direct way like parents, carers, and family members, but in an indirect way like people who have been the victim of violent crime or burglary and have deduced that they are more susceptible to be a victim because the perpetrator was somebody under the influence of a substance […] No one experience is more valid than the other.
Throughout this paper, we have discussed the listening practices of parliamentary human rights scrutiny committees and the parliamentarians therein. Given the many voices involved in parliamentary debates, however, and the inherent challenges of hearing and listening, the question remains: what might an ideal form of listening entail? Ramshaw (2023: 131) argues that what is significant is ‘the desire to hear as opposed to the hearing itself’. We advocate here for a ‘polyrhythmic’ form of listening that embraces different – sometimes sharply contrasting – voices being heard simultaneously through the parliamentary human rights scrutiny process, one which ‘moves away from sonic certitude’, towards a kind of listening that embraces uncertainty and unconditionality on the part of the listener (Arthur, Kalule and Kanngieser 2023: 156).
What we have seen, however, is parliamentarians are motivated by political interests and influenced by gender stereotypes. A key example of this, as Diana reminded us, was the listening to former Australian Human Rights Commission President Gillian Triggs during Senate hearings, which was politicised but also deeply gendered. 4 Her appearances as a witness before parliamentary committees are an example of a form of conditional listening with an orientation towards suspicion or disbelief, akin to the paranoid reading practice (Sedgwick, 2003) and highlight the politics of public witnessing. On the other end of the spectrum is a managerial listening, familiar to political consultation processes (Lloyd, 2009), whereby the listening is performed just to give the impression of being heard.
Ramshaw (2023: 132) instead advocates for an ‘ever-open listening’ that considers different voices in a spirit of generosity. To this, we would also add that we need to attend to where this listening occurs. Not all people are able to attend and speak before parliamentary committees, and increasingly people are finding voices in different platforms, such as social media, that offer a challenge to institutional listening spaces. Notably, the Select Committee on the Drugs of Dependence (Personal Use) Amendment Bill 2021 spent a day listening to parents of people who use drugs rather than people who use drugs and are themselves the victim-survivors of a criminal approach to illicit drug use, who may themselves face barriers to speaking out given the criminalisation of illicit drug use. In terms of listening, it also requires tuning into the non-verbal – the music that plays in breaks during parliamentary committee hearings, the sonic soundscape of the committee room, and visual evidence presented to the committee – as well as practising understanding on the part of the listener. However, as Krista Ratcliffe (1999: 205) reminds us, ‘understanding means more than simply listening for a speaker/writer's intent. It also means more than simply listening for our own self-interested intent […] Instead, understanding means listening to discourse not for intent but with intent’.
What does it take to listen or be heard? The kind of listening that we are calling for is ‘an emergent process’ through which these voices are gradually heard and responded to (Ramshaw 2023: 132). It is also hard work and requires courage on the part of those listening to open their ears to those which they would not normally listen to and who are not normally heard. It also requires courage on the part of the speaker to make their voice heard. It requires preparation, hospitality – demonstrating generosity, reciprocity and ‘withness’ (Samuels, 2021) as opposed to paranoia (Stauffer 2015: 104–105) or hungry and extractive listening (Robinson 2020) – and listening out – being attentive, listening out to voices harder to hear and practising an openness to changing one's mind. It further requires the listener to suspend any inclination to pity or punish, noting that punitive alcohol and other drugs legislation can often come from a place of pity and not punishment, or to impute stereotypes to what is heard. It demands just listening and compels the listener to change their thinking and listening beyond stereotypes and transform their ways of hearing others.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
This paper was written on the lands of the Wadawurrung and Wurundjeri peoples and an early version was presented at the Women, Listening and Law Symposium on the lands of the Dharawal peoples. We acknowledge the constructive feedback received at the symposium that has aided the further development of this paper. We also acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this was crafted and the ways in which their practice of dadirri or deep listening inform our approach to listening practices. We in addition acknowledge and thank those who shared their stories with us as part of this research.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed that the Australian Research Council provided financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
