sworn in as a Senator in September 1991. She was, at the time, the youngest female senator in Australian history (a distinction which later passed to Natasha Stott Despoja). Sowada was assigned the role of spokesperson on industrial relations, and she controversially backed the Hawke government's move to enshrine the right to strike in legislation. While this stand earned her much praise from the trade union movement – in September, she became the first female politician and first Democrat to address the biennial congress of the Australian Council of Trade Unions – it also sparked a major clash with party founder Don Chipp, who threatened to resign from the party because of the direction the party was taking with Sowada in charge of industrial relations. When Coulter officially took over as leader in October, Sowada lost the industrial relations portfolio. Soon after, she crossed the floor to vote with the opposition Liberal Party against a move to ban political advertising during elections. In 1992, Sowada helped to set up a mentoring program for the intellectually disabled in Sydney, and was assigned the services of then student politician Stott Despoja as a staffer. In June that year, Sowada accused her party of neglecting its traditional focus on social issues to concentrate on environmental issues under Coulter, a noted environmentalist. She was active in the education debate, which had taken centre stage owing to the draconian tertiary-education reforms initiated by former Hawke education minister, John Dawkins. Sowada faced her first and only electoral test at the 1993 election. After a month-long count, she was defeated by the National Party's Sandy Macdonald. She blamed party leader Coulter for the swing against the Democrats, which saw her lose her seat and called for him to be replaced by Cheryl Kernot. Constitutional Convention In 1997, Sowada made a brief return to political life when she was nominated to become an Australian Republican Movement delegate to the 1998 Constitutional Convention on whether Australia should become a republic. She became a prominent spokesperson for the Australian Republican Movement during the convention, vigorously opposing direct election of the president and supporting the movement's sometimes-controversial leader, Malcolm Turnbull. After the Convention put forward a republic model to be voted upon at the 1999 referendum, Sowada was appointed to a three-person committee directing the official "Yes" campaign, along with Liberal Party figure Andrew Robb and Peter Barron, a Labor Party