WA Speaker Michelle Roberts reflects on becoming first female police minister in valedictory address

One of WA’s boldest Police Ministers — later dubbed The Queen by senior coppers — was initially hesitant to take on the role, telling the then-Labor leader: “just give them a bloke”. Michelle Roberts, the State’s first female police minister and first-and-only female Speaker, has called time on a parliamentary career that began in 1994. A powerful figure on the party’s right, Ms Roberts said when she first entered Parliament she was only the 18th woman to be elected. “The pace of change was incredibly slow, so it is simply amazing for me now to see a majority of women serving in this chamber,” the Midland MP said in her valedictory speech on Tuesday. Ms Roberts said she was “taken aback” when, during Liberal premier Richard Court’s time in power, then-opposition leader Geoff Gallop asked her to take on the police and emergency services portfolio. “I told him that the last opposition spokesperson had lost his seat and that there were a lot of negatives, like having to talk about crime, drugs, guns, other weapons, police corruption, prostitution, speeding fines, drink driving and so forth — something that I subsequently spent most of my career talking about,” she said. “Finally, I said to him, ‘You know they’ll be expecting a bloke; why don’t you just give them a bloke?’” Ms Roberts said she was not concerned that she was not “up for a blokey portfolio” — having shadowed in planning and transport — but that policing was “very different”. “No woman had ever done the police portfolio in opposition or government anywhere in Australia. It is also not a portfolio that wins you the most support with your Labor Party members,” she said. Ms Roberts said she was convinced by Dr Gallop, who would go on to win the 2001 and 2005 elections. However, she hit resistance from “the command team of the day”. “(They) thought they would see me gone quite quickly. How wrong were they? The rest, as they say, is history,” she said. “It is probably the portfolio that most defines my career and where I have been able to make some ground-breaking and lasting differences. “With a total of over nine years as police minister, I served in that role longer than any other minister has.” Her achievements in the early years of the Gallop Labor Government included compulsory photos and signatures on driver’s licences, banning mobile phone use while driving, double demerits on long weekends and dropping the default speed on roads from 60 to 50km/h. “It is hard to imagine now that all these things became law only in 2001,” she said. Police received occupational health and safety coverage as well as tasers as a non-lethal alternative weapon during her tenure, and the State led the nation with the first anti-hoon laws. “We introduced automatic number plate recognition and purchased the first 100 recognition cameras,” Ms Roberts said. “This technology has solved thousands of crimes right around Australia but is now probably best known for locating Cleo Smith in Carnarvon a couple of years ago.” Ms Roberts said the Government passed the first legislation for taking DNA and established the first police DNA database, linking it to the national database. “We introduced the first sex offender register in Western Australia, and we entered all of those who had offended against children into a national database,” she said. Even from opposition, Ms Roberts’ achievements continued — securing an amendment that guaranteed women the right to breastfeed in public. Ms Roberts again served as Police Minister under Mark McGowan, where the State introduced stab-proof ballistic vests and bodyworn cameras for police. She said her chief of staff Rachel Sackville-Minchin was the “main constant” in her life as a minister. “I know that some senior police who loved giving everyone a nickname referred to me as ‘the Queen’ and Rachel as ‘Princess Pushy’, but persistence is a quality to be admired, and without our persistence nowhere near as much would have been achieved,” Ms Roberts said. The veteran minister was made speaker after Labor’s resounding pandemic election win in 2021. Labor has preselected lawyer Steve Catania as its new candidate for Midland, with Ms Roberts retiring as the longest serving female parliamentarian in WA. Former minister Margaret Quirk drew repeated laughs from the chamber during her valedictory, correcting various errors in her ChatGPT biography and observing of her Wikipedia page, which wraps up in 2013, “it is disappointing to think I could have been luxuriating on a banana lounge somewhere exotic for the past 10 years”. Thornlie MP Chris Tallentire and Swan Hills MP Jessica Shaw also gave valedictory addresses.