How the Personal Became Political by Michelle Arrow Angela Woollacott

Author:Michelle Arrow, Angela Woollacott [Michelle Arrow, Angela Woollacott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367472528
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 49812144
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

Establishing the Royal Commission on Human Relationships

The Royal Commission on Human Relationships emerged from a divisive parliamentary debate on abortion in 1973. Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam had promised to introduce an abortion law reform bill in the ACT after his election in December 1972, but the bill quickly divided the all-male parliament along intersecting religious and party lines, and it was easily defeated. Outside parliament, right to life protesters clashed with women’s groups who had established a ‘women’s embassy’ on the lawn to protest their exclusion from the debate (Arrow 2017, 14–16). While an initial attempt to break the parliamentary stalemate with a Royal Commission into abortion was rejected, a later resolution to hold a Royal Commission into ‘the family, social, educational, legal and sexual aspects of male and female relationships’, with particular attention to the concept of ‘responsible parenthood’ was passed with bipartisan support on 13 September 1973 (Evatt, Deveson, and Arnott 1977, Vol 1: ix). Sue Wills, who was active in both the women’s and gay movements, told me in a 2012 interview that many feminists saw the Commission as a ‘consolation prize’ for the failure of the abortion law reform to pass, though it soon presented a broad spectrum of activists with opportunities to raise a range of issues, including the treatment of gays and lesbians, education reform, understandings of parenthood, access to childcare and sexual offences (Arrow 2014, 33–4). The Commission began its work in 1974, gathering evidence through a combination of public hearings, written submissions, phone-ins, and a program of commissioned research. The commissioners—Justice Elizabeth Evatt, journalist Anne Deveson and Anglican Archbishop Felix Arnott—were tasked with investigating Australian intimate life in the 1970s, with a particular focus on the problems created by family dysfunction, violence, poverty, and poor education. While they took evidence from experts in a range of fields and conducted a program of sociological research (Evatt, Arnott, and Deveson 1976, 17–19), they were also determined to give ‘ordinary’ people a platform upon which to speak to the Commission’s terms of reference. Indeed, after attending the Commission’s opening session, one journalist reportedly described it as ‘the hearing with thirteen million stories’ (Evatt, Arnott, and Deveson 1976, 9). The Commission’s publicity material invited community participation with pamphlets asking Australians to tell the Commission ‘what do you think?’ (Evatt, Arnott, and Deveson 1976, 39) They created multiple opportunities for ordinary people to speak frankly about their intimate lives: people could give written or oral testimony in formal or informal settings. In return, the Commission received hundreds of submissions and testimonies about private experiences of motherhood, fatherhood, sex education, homosexuality, disability, rape, child abuse, and violence in the home.

The Royal Commission’s terms of reference did not explicitly address domestic violence, and Commissioner Deveson recalled later that they had not intended to research it, even though Evatt flagged the possibility—somewhat obliquely—in her opening statement when she asked ‘how far do we need to change our attitudes towards the roles and relationships of men and women in our

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