Elizabeth Lee has an unenviable juggle on her hands. Photo: Genevieve Jacobs.
On Elizabeth Lee’s desk, in front of bookshelves with biographies of John Howard, Julia Gillard and Hilary Clinton, there’s also a tangle of baby toys.
It’s two weeks since the Liberals leader returned from maternity leave after the birth of her second baby, Ava, and she’s immersed in an unenviable balancing act: parent a toddler and newborn and, at the same time, win the 2024 ACT election.
Nobody’s sure which task is tougher, but it’s a challenge Ms Lee is happy to discuss, pushing aside any notion the reality of mothering makes her less capable or feasible as a leader.
“There’s always that eternal feeling of guilt in the back of your mind, that question of ‘am I doing her a disservice?’ But also, I’ve got a duty to the people of the ACT and it’s an important duty,” she says.
The concerns, the feeling of guilt and the second-guessing come up often in our conversation, but Ms Lee knows she’s in the same boat as most working parents. She’s going home every day to feed Ava at lunchtime, trusting her partner Nathan to co-parent effectively and relying on extended family on both sides to make it all work.
“I’m hoping that I’m a good role model for my girls and that they grow up seeing me do what I do and accepting that it’s a given that women are in high-profile positions or in public roles of leadership. And I hope that they’ll be proud of me on some of the issues that I have stood up for,” she says.
There’s also a sense of responsibility to the Korean migrant parents who arrived in Australia with almost no English and worked their hearts out for their children’s future.
Ms Lee, a lawyer and law lecturer by training, is the first Asian Australian to lead a political party. The Korean community was delighted when she was first elected to the Assembly and then became leader, but she’s not keen to be pigeonholed by her ethnicity either.
“When people elect representatives, I think a lot of members of the community want to see people who understand the various challenges and struggles that they also go through. I mean, it’s representative democracy, you know, you’re entrusting people to make decisions for and on behalf of you,” she says.
“And that’s why when for so long we had no genuine diversity, especially in federal politics, it was a problem. The people around that decision-making table only had one view of the world. I genuinely believe that it’s the robustness of the diverse voices around the table that make for better policy in the long run.”
Coming from a migrant background has sharpened her sense of what’s accessible and heightened her belief that alongside core Liberal values of individual freedom and personal responsibility, people deserve what they need to succeed.
Menzies’ forgotten people have always resonated with her and Ms Lee talks often about the people she believes are left behind by the Barr government.
But it would be naive to dismiss the mountainous size of the electoral challenge: two decades in opposition, a team of representatives who have never been in government, and some of the safest federal Labor seats in the country.
Ms Lee says the team, riven in the past by factional disputes, has fallen in behind her and her vision for an inclusive Canberra. She ticks off the list of life skills they bring, from small business to the community sector, teaching and media, and repeats John Howard’s line about a broad church of Liberal beliefs.
Her electoral priorities are as interesting for who and what doesn’t get mentioned: housing and healthcare are at the top of her list for the next 12 months, but there’s no mention of the laser-like focus on light rail the Liberals have had while Jeremy Hanson was acting leader.
“At the end of the day, let’s be brutally honest: if the Labor-Greens government are touting experience as their strength, then why do we have the worst emergency wait times in the hospital after 20-plus years?”
“Why are academic standards going backwards? Why is our debt position the way it is at the moment? Why do we have a housing affordability crisis?”
It’s a hard road ahead, and if Ms Lee does win the 2024 ACT election she’ll make history again by being the first woman elected to run an Australian jurisdiction while parenting two toddlers.
She thinks the fight matters for all sorts of reasons: women in leadership normalise caring responsibilities and show that parents need to step up equally. Everyday, messy real life is acknowledged and dealt with instead of being relegated to “women’s work” behind closed doors.
In the meantime, Ava has already been out on the campaign trail with Ms Lee and her daughter Mia. They’re greeted with warmth wherever they go, but it will be a long path ahead for their mother.
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