As Adelaide MP Kate Ellis was labouring with finding the right words to tell her constituents and her party leader that she had made the decision to leave politics, Greens senator Larissa Waters was labouring in a very different way.
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Kate Ellis: Mums can be politicians
Young women can combine family and politics - that's the message of Labor MP Kate Ellis, even as she quits to spend more time with her family. Courtesy ABC 24.
The Queensland senator chose International Women's Day to announce that she had given birth to her second child.
"I'll be having a few more weeks off but will soon be back in Parliament with this little one in tow," Senator Waters wrote on her Facebook page.
"She is even more inspiration for continuing our work to address gender inequality and stem dangerous climate change. (And yes, if she's hungry, she will be breastfed in the Senate chamber.)"
For understandable reasons, the opposition did not announce Ellis's retirement yesterday on International Women's Day.
And yet it would have been an overwhelmingly apt way to make the point about so many of the issues that day tries to highlight - why so much of parenting still falls to women, why institutions are resistant to changing work patterns so both men and women can work as well as parent, why the gender pay gap is still such an entrenched problem and so on and so forth.
Parliament has done a bit to make life easier for the MPs who have young children. It now has a childcare centre. Standing orders have been changed so an MP with an infant or even a young child can bring them into the chamber if they need to.
And yet it remains the domain of men, particularly men who, if they have children, have partners who do the heavy lifting at home.
From time to time, men quit politics citing family as one of their reasons.
But, as Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese pointed out on Sky News on Thursday afternoon, "a whole lot of people use family reasons for standing down and, in some cases, they get very well-paid jobs weeks later".
"You can't do the drop-off if you're a federal MP, it's as simple as that," Albanese said.
"If you're in Canberra, it limits what you do."
Liberal MP Alex Hawke, himself the father of young children, tweeted to say more could get done in politics if Parliament sat for fewer weeks of the year.
Politics is a hard and unforgiving game.
Twenty weeks away from home is a big ask of anyone but it asks most of the partners and children left at home, who did not stand for election and must put up with the loneliness and separation that comes from being the family of a politician.
Ellis's decision to stand down as her son approaches school age will be interpreted in many ways - as another sign of how politics has failed to do enough to get more women into the game, of how many workplaces struggle to accept people with caring responsibilities that do not fit into traditional work patterns and, by a few, of why everything was better in the olden days.
The press conference Ellis gave to discuss her retirement demonstrated how fixated on women's choices, and particularly mothers, in politics we still are.
Many of the questions were framed as if this was a defeat, an admission that one can't be a mother and a politician and the discouraging message it might send to other women.
Ellis patiently rebuffed the questions and stressed how fortunate she has been to have a flexible job, that all parents have to make decisions that suit them and their families and that she hopes the time will come when such an announcement will not be seen as anything other than a personal decision.
(She remained smiling even when someone asked her if she was quitting politics for modelling.)
Politics needs more people with real-life experience and that means more parents in the same way it needs more people who have run small businesses, worked as plumbers and shelf-stackers, travelled, received welfare payments, moved to Australia from overseas, cared for ageing relatives, practised a faith other than Christianity and all the other things that contribute to the sum of human experience.
It's not people who should have to change to make their lives fit politics as we know it.
It's politics as we know it that should change.
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