While Margaret Reynolds AC was at the University of Queensland in 1982, she wrote an essay answering the question: “Who runs Australia — the elected representatives or the bureaucrats?”
As someone interested in politics, Reynolds answered it was the politicians.
And then she was elected.
“I thought: ‘Oh, whoops’,” said Reynolds, who has been appointed as a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) at this year’s Australia Day honours.
“I had to deal with the bureaucracy.”
Reynolds was a federal Labor senator from 1983 to 1999. She was local government minister from 1987 to 1990 and minister assisting the prime minister on the status of women from 1988 to 1990.
Reynolds has enormous respect for the knowledge of seasoned public servants.
“There are wonderful people in all bureaucracies,” she said. “I was particularly lucky with the people I met in the federal bureaucracy.
“Most of them I got on very well with and found very capable and experienced in understanding policy and policy developments.
“But there’s always a tension between the bureaucracy and the elected members because bureaucrats go on forever. That’s their career.”
Reynolds said it was a challenge to navigate a balance between a public servant’s familiarity with their portfolio and a politician’s desire for reform.
“It’s important that a minister respects the bureaucratic advice they get, but they also have a responsibility to advocate the new policy framework that each government has,” Reynolds said.
Balance is key as the public service begins its reforms under the new government.
“The bureaucracy needs some refreshing and opportunity for different ideas to prevail,” she said.
“But, certainly, political parties also need to refresh the way they choose their representatives and the priorities they seek in their policies.”
On receiving an AC, the former politician said she felt honoured to be recognised for a lifetime’s work as an activist and advocate.
Reynolds has been working in advocacy for women, First Nations people, people with disability and prisoners before, in her own words, it was “fashionable to do so”.
What drew her to activism was two events. The first was teaching children with disabilities in 1960s Tasmania.
Teaching in an old mental asylum was a wake-up call for Reynolds, who described it as a “draconian environment”.
“That was my first contact with a world I didn’t know, and seeing how people’s lives, especially the children, were controlled by a bureaucracy and public policy,” she explained.
The second event was conscription during the Vietnam War.
In the 1960s, the government set up a “lottery system” to select those who would fight. Dates were drawn from a barrel: 20-year-old men whose birthday fell on that day were signed up for service, pending medical and security checks.
“They could be conscientious objectors but there were problems for many of them in doing that,” Reynolds said.
“A lot of them did go, a lot of them died in the conflict. Of course, a number of others had a great deal of mental and physical damage.”
It was “incomprehensible” to Reynolds that a government could decide to do this.
“It really alerted me to the power of government,” she said. “That’s when I started to get interested in how governments are formed.”
Reynolds said her activism changed once she became an elected official.
“You have to work within the structure of the Parliament, your political party and the community that has elected you,” Reynolds said.
“I’ve always been an activist or an advocate at heart.”
One of just two senior women ministers, Reynolds believes she was the first female official to inspect the damage from a cyclone that hit North Queensland.
“That was an important landmark; that a woman could actually be included in that early inspection because there was some resistance to taking me,” Reynolds said.
“Similarly, I was on the spot when the Newcastle earthquake occurred.”
Nowadays, Reynolds said she is focused on her role as national president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).
The group is concerned about the possibility of war in the Indo-Pacific region.
Reynolds said just as Australia had followed the United States into the Vietnam War, she has concerns about the AUKUS agreement.
“We don’t know much about what we’ve been signed up to,” she said.
“[WILPF is] about women speaking up and saying we want a say in how Australia is run and how Australians are protected.
“All this talk of how much money has to be spent on weaponry is not particularly appealing to many women and, particularly, young people.”
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