Kate Ashmor

When Kate Ashmor was young, a family member advised her that the best way for her to channel her argumentative tendencies while earning a living was to become a lawyer. She took this advice and now Kate runs her own practice, Ashmor Legal. She has previously worked in a variety of government and corporate settings.

As well as running her own business Kate has a variety of community interests, applying the skills she has in her professional toolkit to leadership in not–for–profit and voluntary organisations. She is Chair of the board of Caulfield Park Bendigo Bank and has served on the boards of Alola Australia and Project Deborah. She is a Past Convenor of Victorian Women Lawyers (2010-2011) and a Past President of Australian Women Lawyers (2012-2013). She served as an elected Councillor in the City of Glen Eira from 2005-2008.

She combines all this with family life, but hastens to add that she doesn’t want to intimidate others with her level of activity. ‘I’ve always felt – and it’s difficult for non–Jewish people to understand this – that there is a motivation that comes from deep within,’ she says. ‘It is like a compass – something that gets me out of bed, and navigates me through tough times. It is an obligation to those who didn’t make it.’ She carries that obligation, ‘in the choice I have made in life to pack in as much as I can, in the types of things I’ve chosen to pack in and in the career risks I’ve chosen to take.’ By ‘packing it in’ she doesn’t assume or expect that others must do the same, but she does hope her example, and some lessons she has learned along the way, will inspire other women to take risks, take leadership opportunities and get involved.

Her view is that if we are going to address the structural issues that work against women, then we need voices that are influential who can stand up and speak. ‘There are a hell of a lot of these voices,’ she says, ‘but they are pushing through each day on a few hours’ sleep, trying to be a million things to a million people, working full time or running their own businesses with a child on their hip.’

Many of them are well educated, and that education creates opportunities. ‘The most powerful tool that a Jewish woman can have, she says, ‘is what is in their head, not what is on their fingers. Stuff just comes and goes. But the legacy you can leave by using your education is what’s important to me, as a Jewish woman. It can’t be taken away.’

Who knows what lies ahead for Kate Ashmor? She certainly won’t waste time moving onto it if the calling comes:

There are those who want to get involved to enjoy the status quo, there are those who want to change it to improve the lives of others. My adult life is to help advocate on behalf of others… I see myself as a problem solver and a change maker. I want my epitaph to be ‘I did the best I could’ ‘.

UPDATE: In September 2018, Kate Ashmor won preselection for the Liberal Party to contest the seat of Macnamara (prevously Melbourne Ports) at the next federal election.

Family and background

I was born in 1980 at Queen Victoria hospital in Melbourne, my mother and father’s first child and my father’s only child. My parents divorced when I was young; they separated when I was about 9 months old. My mother remarried when I was in primary school. I have one more sibling – a younger brother – from my mother’s second marriage.

My first home was in a block of flats in Elsternwick, where we lived until I was about six years old. When my mother remarried we moved to McKinnon. My mother and stepfather still live there.

My father was born in Israel and came here in the mid-1970s, flying in when Cyclone Tracey hit Darwin. He came to Australia via South Africa and Rhodesia, where his older brother had married a South African woman. My father was always a free spirit; he was very much an adventurer.

On a whim and out of curiosity – he had no English language – he decided to come to Australia. Through some contacts with the Hakoah Club in Sydney, and through the Jewish community there, he was taken under the wing of an elderly businessman. That is how his career in Australia started.

My mother was born in the USSR in 1947 and moved to Poland with her parents as a child. They lived in abject poverty, but she was always ambitious. She wanted to be a doctor, and she did became a nurse (a midwife). She later became a medical scientist. It is amazing how far, in one generation, this family has come. Education was the key.

In the 1960s my family made a decision to seek a better life. My grandfather was a printer of newspapers and he was offered a job in three places; Winnipeg, Israel or in Melbourne. They had other family who had gone to Israel so they knew about Israel. Winnipeg was considered too cold. So they decided to head to Melbourne and arrived in 1969-70. Mum was in her mid-20s by then and didn’t speak any English. When they arrived, Jewish Welfare put them up in accommodation in Milton Street, Elwood. They gave my grandparents a low interest loan which made it possible to buy an apartment in the area. They were so paranoid about debt – they paid off the $17,000 mortgage in one year!

My mother’s family lived a quintessential immigrant story. The job that brought my grandfather to Australia was to work on the Jewish News. He printed the Yiddish section on the newspaper. But the women in the family had an extraordinary work ethic, too. My mother worked as a nurse at Price Albert Hospital and my grandmother worked as a piece maker in a textile company in St Kilda. She was well known as a strong advocate for women on the factory floor.

In terms of religion, we weren’t a particularly observant family. Any observance was more cultural than religious. I don’t recall my grandparents attending synagogue or shul regularly. My grandfather only survived the Holocaust because he was drafted into the army – in Belorussia I think. He was the oldest of four siblings and while he was away they were all slaughtered. He was so resentful of God afterwards. How could God do this to his family? So on Yom Kippur, he would eat at the best restaurant he could afford as if it was a big up yours to God. It was only when he was very old that he came close to making peace.

My mother was first married at Temple Beth and she married my stepfather at Elwood Shul. We had no tradition of attending shul, although my step father had an influence on that score. He insisted that I attend Sunday school at Brighton Hebrew congregation which I did for about three years. But at the end of primary school I was quite rebellious and decided not to have a formal Bat Mitzvah. In some ways I regret that.

School and further education

I went to Gardenvale Primary School and then on to McKinnon Secondary College in years 7 and 8. I was a diligent student and took on leadership roles. Then Caulfield Grammar announced they would award scholarship to girls in Year 9. I was offered a 50% academic scholarship and 100% music scholarship. This was a game changer for my family.

It was like I was born to go to that school. I absolutely adored it! It was a steep learning curve; there were 120 boys and 15 girls in my Year 9 class. I suspect I get my thick skin from being there – in the trenches amongst the pubescent boys. I learned to be assertive and I learned to back myself. It was a school environment that suited me perfectly.

Caulfield Grammar was an Anglican school – it was quite inclusive and relaxed. I used to go to chapel and sing along to psalms and hymns from the Old Testament, but would keep quiet when it came to talking about Jesus. So, throughout the rest of my education I didn’t have much interaction with Judaism and most of my friends were not Jewish. I dabbled a bit in Betar in the early years of secondary school but it wasn’t for me.

I enjoyed drama and musical theatre. I treasure my memories of performing at Hamer Hall and other fabulous venues. I thought I might be a singing lawyer but my earliest memory was always about advocacy and being a voice. Lawyering was a perfect choice so I studied Law/Arts at Monash University. I now run my own practice.

What’s in a name? – The personal

My family surname was Asz (pronounced Ash). When mum married dad, it became Asz–Brumer. My name was Katy Brumer in primary school. But when I was fourteen I had a bit of a feminist awakening. It occurred to me that, even though my mother encouraged me to have a continuing relationship with him, I didn’t really have much to do with my father because he moved to Perth when I was about seven.

So it became important to me to have my mother’s surname as part of my name. I changed it to Ash–Brumer by deed pole and my father had to sign off on it. I change the ‘z’ to ‘h’ for pronunciation issues. At the same time, I changed my name to Kate because I thought Katy (my actual name) sounded as though I would be doomed for life to sounding as though I was ten years old. So I was Kate Ash–Brumer. Then when my mother divorced and remarried in 1987, I took on her new husband’s surname – Ash–Wurzel.

So – how did it become Ashmor? It involves the story of how my husband and I met. We did this originally when I was two and a half on a trip to Israel with my father and he was about four! His parents and my father were lifelong friends in Israel and played together on the floor of their house. We had no contact again until I was eighteen and returned to Israel with my Dad. Two weeks into the trip I met my husband, and within a further week – that was it. No one was more surprised than me! I was independent and fierce and the last thing on my mind was getting married to a good Jewish boy! That was twenty years ago.

It turned out that my husband had a hyphenated surname as well. Mor–Haim. We made a decision to both change our surnames via deed pole – to Ashmor – and there was no ‘e’. We did that 15 years ago. We are the only Ashmors on the electoral roll! My husband’s parents were not initially accepting of it but in time they were.

It was an important act of legacy and identity. I was never going to take my husband’s name, nor would he expect it. I am not a chattel. But it was also about encapsulating my family history in a name.

The name Asz would have died with grandfather when he died. I’m not a religious person – that’s not what Judaism is for me. But the history and the culture is important to retain. I felt like it was part of my legacy and my way of connecting with the Holocaust as a family story, not just world history. And now my children will carry that part of my people’s story with them. It was important to me as a Jew that they didn’t all perish in vain. My name change was a very small token to prove that they live on.

What’s in a name? – The political

I love history and I love stories, and as I’ve said, history is wrapped up in names. I went to Monash University, and it did make me wonder about the man it was named for. Who was John Monash and what was his legacy, as an Australian Jewish man? Now that I know what an extraordinary man he was, I’ve been advocating that he should be better recognised by the Australian Electoral Committee by having a Federal electorate named in his honour. This campaign honours him, as an educated, intelligent, Jewish man who saw the world differently, and who thought brains and not brawn needed to be deployed to win the war. He has been recognised but not enough. He needs national permanent recognition from our body politic and he should be studied more widely. Why isn’t his name up there in lights? It is only ever spoken in anger and frustration by people stuck on the freeway!

But I also hope that recognition of Monash through the electoral process will, tangentially, highlight the absence of Jewish women in federal politics. There are six Jewish men in Canberra at the moment but there has never been a female Jewish member of the Federal House of Representatives! Jews were on the first fleet; we have female Jewish judges, governors, captains of industry. We’ve had women politicians at a state level, although Marsha Thomson will be retiring end of this year. There have been many Jewish councillors and mayors, including myself on Glen Eira Council. But where are the Jewish women in Canberra? Federal politics is a persistent ceiling for Jewish women’s leadership.

And this worries me, because through the work I’ve done with women in the community, I can see women’s voices need to be heard on a range of matters in parliament. For example, I feel that the low number of mothers of the middle class in parliament, and in government and cabinet, means that there are serious systemic issues in Australia that are not being addressed. The biggest one – the elephant in the room overshadowed by paid parental leave at the moment – is childcare.

We need to get these educated women back to work, if they want to work. Since the feminist revolution of the 1960s, women have attended university in droves. These women are highly educated and they are dropping out of the workforce in disturbing numbers when they have children. These are women who want to work, they are trained to work. But because child care isn’t tax deductable they can’t work, or prefer not to, because it doesn’t make sense to their families financially.

These are women who are not wealthy, but they are not struggling either. They are an untapped body of expertise and they are tax payers. But they are lost to the economy as nation builders. Losing educated women from the workforce has a revenue impact. There are a lot of HECS indebted workers who will never pay back, so that revenue is lost to the economy!

I don’t understand why child care isn’t tax deductible, if it can be demonstrated that the revenue gains outweigh the costs. The productivity commission can do the analysis. But where are the voices in our national parliament advocating for that?

Feminism, politics, gender and identity

I grew up a feminist. My mother’s politics are very left wing. They were about social justice and equality of opportunity. Her prism is qualified by her own experience in Warsaw, and I was inspired by her. I was inspired by my grandmother in the clothing factory, and by the courage of my mother who was abandoned by her husband. As a single mother she refused to take welfare. She was too proud to do so, unlike my father who was happy to do so and did. The greatest lesson I learned from her was that you are never to be dependent upon anyone, including the government. You are responsible for yourself. That is an ethos that I try to instil and it is the foundation of everything to me.

I’m also deeply influenced by my stepfather’s experience as a small business owner, and the impact on him of the recession in the 1990s. Adversity is a very powerful motivator. I was so angry when I was twelve or so, listening to Paul Keating talking about the recession we had to have. Looking at how it was impacting upon my family’s life at the time, it didn’t seem right or fair. Those years were very formative. They taught me resilience and independence and I don’t think the generation since have had a similar experience – they haven’t lived in economically adverse times like those. I learned how to adapt to changing economic circumstances.

So my politics are more conservative than my mother’s. I’m about the power of the individual and the strength of the family, and the importance of self–sufficiency, although I am passionate about advocating for those in need. I’m probably what people would describe as economically conservative and socially progressive.

I have no doubt that my upbringing has made me tough. I have a cloak of resilience, strength and self–confidence. I can’t recall doubting myself! I’ve never experienced prejudice or sexual harassment, but I don’t deny it is prevalent. Perhaps my Teflon coating means I have escaped it!

Plunging into leadership

You need to be open to opportunities. You never know which moment is going to be the magical moment. For me a moment that changed my trajectory was meeting Rysia Rosen – who is the immediate past president of the National Council of Jewish Women in Australia. She’s been Victorian president and has served on many boards. I met her when my first daughter was a couple of months old. I’d arranged to attend a political function in the middle of winter; it was cold and miserable, and I didn’t want to go but my husband insisted. He had come home early especially to make sure I could go and didn’t want that to be a waste of time. So I went and I found the only other Jewish woman in the room!

I was on full paid maternity leave from the public service and bored out of my brain with nothing to do but look after the baby. Rysia invited me for a coffee. There was something about her that was familiar – maybe the Polish accent that reminded me of my grandmother. So I followed it up. We met soon afterwards and she said she was looking for young people to join the board at the Caulfield Park Bendigo Bank. She asked if she could introduce me to Sam Parasol OAM, and the rest is history. But if it wasn’t for my decision to go out when I didn’t want to, it would never have happened! It’s such an important part of my story!

I recommend women step out of their comfort zone and connect with people. You need to make meaningful connections; it’s the quality of connections that matters, not the quantity. Try to make two or three connections and always follow up. Even if you don’t hear back – always follow up. That strategy helped me to establish my business and it has helped me since then.

I’ve been fortunate to have opportunities to contribute to organisations and boards. I saw volunteering at the Bendigo Bank board as a ‘bigger bang for my buck’. I would be a bee pollinating a lot of flowers! I found enormous personal satisfaction and it was a great business experience. And we make a real difference to people in our local community! A small amount of money can make a huge difference. A very small grant from us can pay for an electricity bill for an organisation for a year. It can also help to attract other donors. Our logo can give organisations credibility in the eyes of others.

I chair a board of eleven with only two women on the board. We are involved in decision-making across a range of issues. I would really encourage women who are interested in getting into boards to get into community banks. Even if it is unpaid, get your foot in the door.

Do women bring something different to leadership than men? I’m not sure, but I know each individual does. They bring their own background, toolkit and life experiences. Women do appear to be more collaborative and inclusive, but there are always exceptions.

In the end I think diversity in general is more important than numerical equality. Diversity in life experience, business experience, values; although you want everyone to share common values, because that binds everyone together. We all need to be there for a similar reason. At the Bendigo Bank a passion for the local community is what binds all the directors together. We are all invested locally – we love the community and want to help build capacity for organisations in it.

Whatever a women’s ambition may be, especially within the Jewish community, be aware that you can’t always rely your parents’ connections and/or the people you went to school with. Things can change very quickly. The business world is evolving and so are opportunities. So the best thing you can do to put yourself in a position of success is to be resilient. You also have back yourself. Take risks. Have a go. Don’t think ‘what if?’ I had a great job at the public service but I couldn’t bear the thought of sitting their thinking, ‘what if I’d established my own business?’ So I listened to the voice telling me I had to try something new. Because in the end, I’m just an average person who wants to make a difference.

Kate Ashmor was interviewed by Dr Nikki Henningham on 10 January 2018 for the She Speaks project. PHOTO: Leigh Henningham