Sam Mostyn is a breath of fresh air … and highly capable too

The critics of Sam Mostyn have been predictable in their derision.

Pass the smelling salts. Hand me that fan.

Albo’s backed a woman as the next governor-general, someone who’s worked for Labor and advocated for the voice. I fear for the nation. Who knows what Sam Mostyn will do to the Constitution, let alone what she might say at the opening of the Boorowa Show. Why didn’t the Prime Minister settle for a retired general? What’s wrong with another military man in that “cushy job” in Yarralumla? Couldn’t he have asked Peter Cosgrove to have another run around the ceremonial paddock?

The critics of Mostyn have been predictable in their derision; she backed the voice, she talked about Invasion Day, she’s big on addressing climate change; she got all her jobs in the past 35 years because she’s a woman.

One wonders what they would have said if Anthony Albanese had backed former Labor leader Kim Beazley? That he couldn’t represent Liberal voters; that he only got those other jobs ambassador to the US and governor of Western Australia because he was a (Labor) man?

Would Advance have attacked the appointment of Ken Wyatt because he backed the voice? Would it have dared to argue he only got the gig because he’s Indigenous and thus could not really represent the rest of us?

Yes, Mostyn is a woman, and yes, she happily notes she got at least four jobs thanks to quotas or targets – the AFL Commission (2005); the boards of Transurban (2010), Virgin (2010) and Mirvac (2015).

She’s relaxed, too, about her 1989 job with Justice Michael Kirby, who had a policy of hiring one male and one female associate/tipstaff each year, telling me in a 2021 interview: “I became an associate because Michael had a purposeful approach to ensuring (gender balance). I think that is a quota he set himself and I was a beneficiary. It taught me that you could do these things in a quite dynamic and deliberate way.”

It was refreshing, astonishing even, after years of female leaders pussy-footing their way around the “merit versus quota” argument to hear Mostyn say we needed a circuit-breaker to address unconscious bias. Astonishing, too, because Mostyn was until then not noted for such public statements. But, newly elected as president of Chief Executive Women, she had clearly decided not to waste the pulpit. Mostyn went on to become a well-informed and effective advocate for issues such as paid parental leave and continued CEW’s transition from a networking group to one advocating for women at all levels. She was smart enough, too, not to waste the opportunities presented by a new Labor government, and as chair of the Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce has exercised influence and led change.

Which is to say that while Mostyn is clearly committed, she’s also careful, even cautious at times, and above all strategic.

Her critics seem to have missed the point that here is a woman who has not messed up in her many and varied jobs and positions over decades. Observed from a distance, Mostyn presents as someone who knows how to read the room, who “knows when to hold them, knows when to fold them”.

In other words, Mostyn – the daughter of an army officer who has demonstrated the sort of discipline some of our recent G-Gs might have advocated – seems unlikely to mess up this new gig.

Born in 1965 – the beginning of the end of the Menzies era – Mostyn came to adulthood in a world where women nevertheless had to be strategic to succeed. Technically equal after equal pay was granted in 1969, her generation of women had heaps of crevasses to avoid if they wanted a shot at real power.

But here she is, and here we are.

It’s 2024, not 1965, and in so many ways, we are not the people we once were.

Mostyn has not been a card-carrying feminist of the Germaine Greer variety, nor has she been in any sense a political radical – despite the attempts to label her an activist.

But she represents the transformation of the nation – a well-educated woman who had been out there in the world of work (and of men) all her adult life. And what broad experience of Australian life she has had. Not for Mostyn the somewhat narrower experience of the army, or the High Court, or even Parliament House. All those jobs are important and fine but for many Australians – male and female – Mostyn seems much more like one of our tribe.

We won’t agree with everything she says or does but we sense in her someone who will not squander the opportunity to give some interesting (and careful) speeches that might make us think, someone who might just help us in our transition to a modern Australia where a variety of views and experiences are to be embraced, not feared.