Perth Voice Interactive

CHANGE is slow, the thanks are few, and the enemies are vicious, but looking back on her time in parliament former Labor state MP for Perth Diana Warnock says there were far more ups than downs.

In parliament from 1993 to 2001, Ms Warnock had gotten into politics because she’d experienced the sexism of the 60s and “found my people” at university among other activists. 

“We wanted to change the world for the better.”

Being a Labor opposition member during the Liberal Court government’s era made for a particularly steep hill to push any policy up.  

Her farewell speech from parliament in November 2000 cited some issues of unfinished business, and many remain current talking points in her electorate today.

We caught up with Ms Warnock to chat about five of the biggest issues in Perth and politics at the time, and to get her take on where we’re at today. 

Homelessness:

Ms Warnock said in her valedictory speech in 2000: “We still have a big problem with housing the homeless, and there is not nearly enough affordable housing for lower income people in the inner city.”

It remains an ever-present issue.

Ms Warnock tells us she’s occasionally nudged current homelessness minister John Carey about the situation, but she acknowledges he’s got an extremely difficult job trying to get new projects delivered given the ongoing construction materials and labour supply shortage rippling out of the pandemic.

“It’s a portfolio I wouldn’t want in a thousand years,” she says. “You just can’t build houses out of thin air.” 

Ms Warnock says it’s a problem built up over decades.

“Governments of both colours have, over the years, sold off social housing, which I think has been a mistake,” she tells us.

“Nobody should have got rid of all that state housing.”

Gay rights:

Despite efforts from state Labor party members to remove lingering pieces of anti-gay legislation in 1996, many of those laws allowing discrimination remained on the books when Ms Warnock retired from parliament. 

“People should not be able to discriminate against others because of their sexuality any more than they should be able to discriminate because of a person’s race, sex, age or disability,” she said in her 2000 valedictory speech. 

“These changes will have to wait for a more sympathetic government, and I hope that will be soon.”

The laws would be unpicked in stages over the next few terms of government, with major anti-discrimination bills passed in 2002 through to the 2018 expungement of criminal records for historical same-sex relations.

Ms Warnock had many supporters in the gay community, and she backed her successor John Hyde to take the seat of Perth and become WA’s first openly gay MP. 

And while the changes hadn’t been effected during her time in parliament, she recalls one rare moment of thanks in particular when a long-time gay supporter Les came up to thank her for her efforts from the cross bench. 

“The work sometimes is so exhausting and annoying and you can get very grumpy about it when things don’t change,” Ms Warnock tells us.

But “the tiny rewards, like Les saying thank you just out of the blue, it’s worth it.” 

Women’s rights:

Ms Warnock had long been interested in women’s rights, and allowing women to access safe and legal abortion had been one of her earliest causes.

She had a rare opportunity as an opposition MP to take the lead steering WA’s abortion reforms through parliament via a conscience vote. 

“I was asked by the leader of the house, Colin Barnett – who I like, by the way – he asked me: This is a free vote, none of ours want to take it on. Do you want it?

“I said ‘Do I want to do it? For thirty years I’ve wanted it!’”

The pro-choice bill was passed in 1998, with great controversy in the leadup and afterwards. 

“This is where I got quite a lot of those enemies,” Ms Warnock says. “They used to wait outside parliament at night, and yell out ‘murderer’, ‘exterminator’ et cetera.”

Still, she says, having the opportunity to steer those reforms through parliament, from opposition, “was one of the best things that ever happened to me”.

Ms Warnock says she occasionally looks at womens’ rights taking a backwards step in places like the United States.

She says Australia’s compulsory voting system likely makes us more resistant to those kind of backwards steps, which can be pushed by a smaller number of passionate voters in a place with voluntary voting like America.

“I thank my lucky stars every day of the week, and I thank my Irish great grandmother, for her part in coming out to Australia rather than America.” 

Relationships with the public:

As a figurehead of the abortion reform movement, Ms Warnock had some pretty fiery and sometimes threatening encounters with members of the public wanting to keep abortion illegal. 

Her husband Bill Warnock, who died in 2001 shortly after she left parliament, was “my bodyguard” in those encounters, as well as being a driver, adviser, co-campaigner and companion.

When she left parliament Ms Warnock lamented the difficult relationship politicians had with some members of the public, which she felt came from a misunderstanding of a politician’s duties: “I believe that it is because most people do not understand very much about the nature of the work we do that perhaps people have so little respect for members of Parliament – a fact that I regret a great deal and that I would like very much to see changed.”

While the in-person aggression was trying, Ms Warnock tells us she doesn’t envy modern public figures who are subject to endless vitriol on social media. 

“I have felt that the arrival of social media has made the job extraordinarily more difficult, because of the way that people will talk about other people – vilely, frankly. The social media behaviour now is so bad that I feel sorry for most politicians, even the ones on the other side.”

On lessons from history:

As a “nerd” in school who found her people among other swots in university, a firm knowledge of history underlies much of Ms Warnock’s ethos, and her path as an activist and then politician had been inspired by figures who’d brought about progress.

She tells us during her time in parliament her “heroes for the century” were “Nelson Mandela and Simone de Beauvoir,” the French philosopher and feminist, “and my man of the millennium was William Shakespeare,” whose work greatly influenced language and culture. 

A medallion on her keychain carries a cameo of a complicated runner up: Napoleon Bonaparte, a figure remembered for his social justice reforms punctuating his tyrannical power-grabs. 

“He was a terrific public servant,” Ms Warnock says, with his Le Code Napoleon reforming the monarchic legal system and still underpinning the justice systems in many countries today. 

She recalls when a young journalist once asked her who Simone de Beauvoir was, and Ms Warnock told her of de Beauvoir’s groundbreaking feminist texts written during the 40s, 50s and 60s. 

The journalist said “well, I wasn’t around.”

Ms Warnock’s reply: “I said ‘my dear, I wasn’t around in 1066, you know, but I know what happened’.

“I felt dreadful later. Well, for five minutes.”

While history highlights stories of the rapid reformers who came along at the right time to overthrow a monarchy or to unsettle a dazed post-war patriarchy, the more common lesson from the past reflects Ms Warnock’s own modern experience.

More often, she says, “change is gradual” and sometimes you’re not around anymore when it happens. 

“But if you just keep going, it’s worth it.”

by DAVID BELL