Queensland election 2017 opinion: ‘Decision’ does women no favours

FEMALE leaders get criticised for being too consultative, but this time Annastacia Palaszczuk has tried too hard to be decisive, writes Kylie Lang.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk

FEMALE leaders have to stop listening and start acting.

That was the trouble with Anna Bligh, former Queensland premier Peter Beattie told me about his successor at a cocktail party in Los Angeles in 2009.

She was too consultative. Like that’s a bad thing.

Mr Beattie, then Queensland’s Trade Commissioner to North and South America, was chatting to me and another Courier-Mail journalist at a soiree at Chateau Marmont.

We were there to mark the inaugural Sydney to LA flight of V Australia. So was Richard Branson, naturally enough, and a bevy of stars including Rose Byrne and Marcia Hines, and enough French champagne to banish Pauline Hanson’s “battler bus” to Boganville.

But it was Mr Beattie’s comments that have stuck with me, all these years later.

Being consultative can be confused with being a ditherer. Especially if you’re a woman.

Yet that’s how most women like to work — whether we’re running boardrooms, households, school fetes or football teams.

We consult, we ask questions, we listen.

Canvassing for opinions and feedback isn’t necessarily a sign of weakness, or undue deliberation.

It’s about getting the bigger picture to make an informed decision.

Female leaders’ warm and fuzzy approach can be seen as a negative. Picture: Darren England/AAP

Collaboration is precisely how we women create the village that it takes to raise a child, how we bind families together in the most challenging of circumstances, and how we work behind the scenes, in less fanciful feathers than the male in our species, to get the job done.

That said, it beggars belief that Labor’s sitting premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has made what she describes as a “captain’s call” with such little foresight.

It seems as if she was desperate to be seen as strong, saying, “Cabinet has not met ... I made the decision, I am the Premier of this state, I make decisions. I’ve been sick and tired of people saying you don’t make decisions. I have made a decision. I make decisions every single day.”

Sadly for Ms Palaszczuk, this particular decision — defying the Integrity Commissioner and vetoing the $1 billion Adani rail loan — has backfired.

It has not taken into account the best interests of stakeholders, including the hopeful band of Queensland workers or potential overseas investors sought to keep the state moving.

Rather, it demonstrates the worst type of decision-making — pandering to special interest groups, namely the unions and the greens, at the expense of the wellbeing of the majority.

Listening more broadly and then acting with conviction is surely the key to great leadership, regardless of gender.

Originally published as Queensland election 2017 opinion: ‘Decision’ does women no favours