Strangers! Non-Members in the Parliamentary Chamber

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Strangers! Non-Members in the Parliamentary Chamber

Government report

By: Ian Holland

Date: April 15, 2003

Source: Holland, Ian. Strangers! Non-Members in the Parliamentary Chamber. Current Issues Brief no. 25 2002–03, April 15, 2003.

About the Author: Dr. Ian Holland earned the Richard Baker Senate Prize for 2005 for excellence in writing regarding the Australian Senate.

INTRODUCTION

Humans, as mammals, produce young who are completely dependent on human breast milk for survival. Until the invention of artificial baby milk in the 1860s in Switzerland, the only safe method for feeding infants was breastfeeding. While cow's milk, goat's milk, and other substitutes had been used to feed infants, artificial baby milk—commonly called "formula"—provided the closest nutritional approximation to breast milk.

Historically, infants received breast milk from their biological mothers or from substitute nurses, such as hired "wet nurses" who breastfed the babies of upper class women in Europe, or African slave women in the American antebellum South who served as wet nurses for the children of owners on plantations. Breast milk is nutritionally complete, containing a balance of fats, proteins, amino acids, and vitamins and minerals. The composition of breast milk changes to meet the baby's needs; at times the milk has less fat and more water, and as the baby ages the milk's balance of nutrients alters to meet the child's developmental requirements.

Before artificial baby milk was widely available in the West, and currently in areas where it is not available, the need to breastfeed infants was and is clear. Babies who do not receive breast milk or a nutritionally complete formula face nutritional deficiencies, growth problems, greater levels of illness, lower immunity, and the risk of death is high. In parts of the world where the water supply is contaminated, breast milk provides babies and toddlers with a filtered liquid that facilitates growth and development; the mother's body acts as a filtration system.

By the early 1900s, in the United States, the use of artificial baby milk became the preferred feeding mode for infants in upper class, and later middle class, families. The "scientific management" movement, which equated scientific methods and approaches with progress, embraced artificial baby milk as a better infant feeding method, largely because the amount consumed could be measured, and the nutritional content was testable. Breastfeeding fell out of fashion.

During the Baby Boom in the United States, breastfeeding rates at birth dropped to eighteen percent in 1956, the lowest point recorded. By 1973, the rate rose to twenty-five percent, and, in 2000, it was approximately sixty percent. The increase in breastfeeding comes, in part, from public health campaigns that point to studies linking artificial baby milk to higher rates of diabetes, childhood illness, and lower IQ scores in children.

As breastfeeding rates rose in the United States and other developed countries, the debate over breast-feeding in public surged as a topic of interest. In the 1980s, stories described women who were asked to nurse in a bathroom, who were asked to leave public establishments because they were breastfeeding, or who were denied breaks to use breast milk pumps while at work to pump and store breast milk for future feedings. State and federal legislation in the United States, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand granted varying degrees of protection for public breastfeeding and workplace breastfeeding rights.

In 2003, Kirstie Marshall, an Australian Member of Parliament, breastfed her eleven-day-old daughter on the floor of the parliament chamber. She was asked to leave by the Sergent-at-Arms. The incident sparked an international debate on public breastfeeding.

PRIMARY SOURCE

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

On 26 February 2003, newly-elected Victorian MLA Kirstie Marshall rushed into Question Time in Parliament with her 11 day-old baby. Seated in the chamber, she was breastfeeding the child when the Serjeant-at-Arms approached her and apparently asked her to leave, because she was breaching standing orders by having the baby (a 'stranger') in the chamber.

The rules governing 'strangers' (non-members within the parliament) have distant origins, and have changed considerably over the last two centuries. Parliaments around Australia and overseas generally have standing orders which control access of non-members to areas of the parliament reserved for members when parliament is sitting. The question raised by the incident involving Kirstie Marshall is whether those rules are keeping pace with the changing nature of work in the parliamentary environment.

The central issues are that parliament is:

a working environment, and it needs rules that ensure that it functions effectively, and
a democratically elected body, and it needs rules that ensure its members can participate fully if their citizens have chosen them to be there.

If parliaments continue to become increasingly representative of the demographic profile of the populations of their countries and regions, if they are to continue to operate as what are effectively 'live-in' organisations when sitting, and if they are going to maintain procedural rules requiring, for example, the immediate presence of members on a division, then the appropriate accommodation of children in general, and breastfed babies in particular, will need to be considered by the chambers.

A survey of standing orders and parliamentary practice around jurisdictions reveals some divergence between the orders and actual practice. There is also a surprising degree of variation in the standing orders themselves.

How might a situation such as that faced by Kirstie Marshall and the Victorian Parliament be dealt with? The main point to recognise is that a chamber can suspend standing orders should it so wish. There is nothing to stop a parliament from passing a motion along the lines, for example, that 'so much of standing orders be suspended as would prevent a member from bringing their infant into the chamber'. Suspensions of standing orders designed to admit strangers have been implemented before, such as in Victoria in 2002 when the orders were suspended to allow several people to address the chamber on two different occasions.

Houses can also pass resolutions (not specifically suspending standing orders) that would then overrule something otherwise provided in the standing orders. Finally, it is possible to amend the standing orders. This was the approach taken in the Australian Capital Territory's Assembly in March 2003.

The means available to admit strangers without amending standing orders vary from place to place. In Canada, it would be possible for a stranger to stay as long as the House's attention was not drawn to their presence, and they were not being disorderly. In Western Australia, they could be brought into the chamber with the Speaker's approval. This would also be the case in New Zealand: in addition, in New Zealand the Speaker is granted the power to make more general rules, such as one regarding breastfeeding babies. In Queensland, it would appear that, if a member were to draw attention to a stranger in the chamber, the stranger could stay if a motion that strangers be required to withdraw failed.

Ultimately, the important issue will not be whether infants or children should ever be in the parliamentary chamber. Whether chambers learn to accept, for example, breastfeeding of babies may be seen as a key indicator of the extent to which parliament recognises that parenting is something MPs have a right to do. But the main issue will be whether parliaments are going to become more 'family-friendly' workplaces generally. Are they going to have hours of operation, facilities, procedures and a workplace culture that accepts that any person elected by citizens should not face further barriers to being able to represent those citizens effectively in the parliament?

INTRODUCTION

STRANGERS!

In the British Parliament the custom is that a member desiring that the chamber go into closed or secret session declares 'I spy strangers!'. The Speaker then puts, without debate, the question 'that strangers do withdraw'.

The rules governing 'strangers' have distant origins, and have changed considerably over the last two centuries. They reflect practice prior to the 19th century that there be no public access to the deliberations of parliament, an idea we would find quite alien now. Public access to proceedings of the House of Commons was introduced in 1845, and by the twentieth century, the practice of going into secret session was very unusual, taking place only during wartime. Chambers may still go into closed session, but Australia's House of Representatives has not gone into secret session since the Second World War, when on three occasions in 1940 and 1941 it ordered strangers to withdraw. This meant clearing the public galleries, and would have applied to Senators as well, had the House not also passed a motion inviting them to stay. The 'strangers'; motion did not however cover officers of the parliament (for example, clerks and the Hansard reporting staff). For the Second World War secret sessions, a separate motion was passed requiring the Parliamentary Reporting Staff also to withdraw. The staff of the parliamentary chamber, however, are normally not regarded as 'strangers'.

While 'strangers' are now admitted to public galleries of parliaments essentially all the time, the floor of the chambers is another matter.

POLICING THE CHAMBER

Parliaments around Australia and overseas generally have standing orders which control access of non-mem-bers to areas of the parliament reserved for members when parliament is sitting. This primarily means the floor of the chamber, though there are often areas of that floor where non-members routinely visit, such as the adviser's boxes in the House of Representatives.

Access to the floor of the chamber is jealously guarded by parliaments. The preoccupation with keeping strangers out has its roots in British democracy of the seventeenth century and earlier, when the relationship between the power of the monarch and the power of the parliament was hotly contested. At that time, the chamber was a refuge for members being persecuted by King Charles I, who, alone amongst the British monarchs, deigned to enter the floor of the chamber in pursuit of his critics.

Such dramatic clashes between legislative and executive power are no longer an issue, and the integrity of the parliamentary chamber may seem assured. The operations of parliament have changed considerably over the centuries since the confrontation with King Charles, and so has parliament's membership. The rules, however, have changed little.

The question raised by the incident involving Kirstie Marshall is whether those rules are keeping pace with the changing nature of work in the parliamentary environment. In particular, do the strangers' rules reflect outdated and unnecessary restrictions on members' children that reflect a time when the membership of parliament was unlikely to be caring for young children….

SIGNIFICANCE

The initial reaction to the removal of Kirstie Marshall from the parliament chamber led to public statements of support from breastfeeding proponents for the right to breastfeed in public. The Australian Breastfeeding Association supported Ms. Marshall's decision to breastfeed in her workplace, and called for breastfeeding-friendly changes in Parliament rules concerning "strangers" in Parliament.

Opponents of Ms. Marshall's decision to breastfeed in Parliament stated that she failed to be respectful of parliamentary rules, and that the environment was unsuitable for an infant. In video clips of Ms. Marshall's time in the chamber breastfeeding, her entire shoulder and top of her breast is exposed, a position that many opponents outside of Australia found to be too revealing, though in Australia there was little commentary on the exposure.

The sexualization of breasts in Western society is an issue that breastfeeding proponents claim is at the heart of opponents' arguments. According to breast-feeding advocates, a naked breast in one context is a sexual object; a naked lactating breast, used as a nutritional source for a baby, is not. Breastfeeding advocates claim that it is the perception and cultural assumptions of those offended by public breastfeeding that need to change. As breastfeeding increasingly becomes a public health issue, with government campaigns promoting higher breastfeeding rates, breast-feeding advocates argue that public breastfeeding needs to be encouraged to support better public health for children and mothers.

Unlike other breastfeeding in public incidents, such as a 2001 incident in San Mateo, California, in which a nursing mother was asked to leave, or a 2005 incident in Fort Collins, Colorado, in which a nursing mother was ticketed for indecent exposure while breastfeeding under towels and two umbrellas, Kirstie Marshall's story involves both public breast-feeding and workplace breastfeeding rights. While Parliament's rule prohibiting strangers from the chamber's floor was written at a time when no Member of Parliament could imagine a nursing mother attending a session, Kirstie Marshall's choice to breastfeed in public and at work opened a critical issue that inspired international discussion on the issue.