Former prime minister John Howard at the National Press Club in Canberra, Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2016. Picture: AAP Image/Mick Tsikas

FORMER Prime Minister John Howard threw an apparently sexist cat among the Twitter pigeons today. Speaking at the National Press Club in Canberra, Howard was asked about the poor representation of women in the 45th parliament.

He said: “I’m not sure you will ever have a 50-50 thing because it is a fact of society that … there (are) still women playing a significantly greater part of fulfilling the caring role in our communities, which inevitably place some limits on their capacity … It is not a terrible thing to say, it just happens to be the truth.”

It was a “face palm” moment.

What’s perturbing about the comments isn’t that Howard thinks women still play a greater caring role than men. They do.

Or that he thinks caring duties are a greater burden on women’s time than men’s. They are.

What’s perturbing is that Howard neither imagines nor desires this to change.

In a representative democracy, women deserve the opportunity to vote for people whose experiences and values reflect their own. And that includes women who hold conservative views.

In accepting the current political reality as unalterable, Howard fails to acknowledge the benefits that would flow from achieving 50/50 representation. Instead of questioning why we’ve concocted a democratic and social system where women can’t participate fully in the first place, he seemed to shrug his shoulders and say “meh”.

In Government, Howard took a similar approach. See, for example, the woeful levels of funding for childcare when he left office in 2007 and the absence of a legislated paid parental leave scheme.

For Howard, the barriers to women’s equal participation weren’t challenges to be overcome. They were realities that the progressive types should stop whinging about and learn to accept.

In his comments today, Howard labelled the unequal split of caring duties between men and women a ‘fact of society’. According to his worldview, a uterus is apparently a prerequisite for compassion.

The comment is insulting to women, for sure. But it’s also insulting to men.

Survey after survey tells us that Australian dads wish they could spend more time at home caring for their children. But even the most flexible of workplaces are still structured on the assumption that women are the ones looking after kids.

When I had my son last year, the only question about my maternity leave was how long I might need off work. Whereas when my husband decided to go part time a few months later, his request was broadly met with surprise. Our country’s attitude towards men who do the majority of care (and women who don’t) is one of suspicion and disbelief.

Howard’s comments also take an extremely narrow view of ‘caring’. The role and valuation of care in this country isn’t — and shouldn’t be — only about the children we give birth to. We need more men caring for family members with disabilities, for elderly relatives and working in the paid caring professions, which remain overwhelmingly dominated by women. This would make for a more balanced, more caring and more compassionate Australia.

Some will argue that Howard’s comments mean little.

After all he is no longer Prime Minister of Australia, no longer in the nation’s parliament. And yes, he is a product of his time; a man born in 1939 when the role of women as primary carers and home markers went largely unquestioned.

But his comments do matter.

As Australia’s longest serving living Prime Minister, Howard remains a highly influential figure in the Liberal Party. His word is near-gospel among members of that movement. That’s why he was speaking at the National Press Club in the first place and why so many in the nation’s media tuned into listen.

Nor are Howard’s views confined to men of his generation. Former Prime Minister, Tony Abbott who was born 18 years later in 1957 thinks “it would be folly to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation”. And despite current Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s insistence that women “hold up half the sky”, they certainly don’t when it comes to Coalition preselections.

There are now just 13 Coalition women in the 150 strong House of Representatives. At the last election there were several safe Coalition seats where retiring women were replaced with male candidates. Women make up less than 20 per cent of the Coalition party room.

This is not a problem of attitudes held by generations past.

This is a problem of the now.

Jamila Rizvi is a writer, presenter and news.com.au columnist. You can follow her on Facebook and Twitter.