Two scenes this week offered a stark reminder of just how prescient Australia’s problem with women can still be.
Within hours of Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil and Immigration Minister Andrew Giles announcing the government’s response to a review that found the migration system was being exploited by organised criminals for human trafficking, Liberal leader Peter Dutton wasn’t holding back.
Sure, the ministers (note the plural) had gone after his legacy as home affairs minister but he only had eyes for one of them.
“She is a very angry person,” Dutton told reporters.
“Always very angry and very aggressive, and the negativity coming out of Clare O’Neil today and the overstated position that she has taken frankly is all about trying to provide cover for a bad prime minister.”
The comments all but called O’Neil hysterical. Giles later compared Dutton to former US president Donald Trump, a man who’s made a brand out of calling women (be it political opponents or journalists) nasty.
Robust debate is always going to be part of the political discourse. Arguably, it’s the contest of ideas that helps shape effective public policy. But all too often, and arguably increasingly so during the lead-up to the Voice referendum, it’s becoming more toxic and bitterly personal by the day.
For decades, being a woman in the public eye has made you fodder for sexist attacks. For a country that loves to cut down tall poppies, there are some that take great delight in coming for women who dare lift their head about the parapet.
Being a woman and Indigenous seems to supercharge that thirst.
You need only look to mentions of independent senator Lidia Thorpe or Coalition frontbencher Jacinta Nampijinpa Price or Labor’s Linda Burney and Malarndirri McCarthy on social media to see the vile racist and misogynistic hate being hurled at them on the hour.
Thorpe crossed a threshold today and was done with what she’s been seeing, which today included having been tagged in a video in which a neo-Nazi in a balaclava references her by name before burning the Aboriginal flag and performing a Nazi salute.
She alleged that the prime minister and Australian Federal Police were not doing enough to protect her from the far right.
It’s too simple to say it’s just men who are hurling the abuse — but they’re by far the loudest contributors and the toll is being felt by Australians across the country.
Broken political discourse
The Voice referendum and its debate haven’t divided the nation anew, though many are keen to say they have.
What it’s done has brought to a head the discourse that has often simmered away below the surface. It seems some people feel the Voice debate has legitimised them to say out loud what they might have just previously thought.
And it’s too easy to say this is a matter for conservative or far-right men.
Think back to how people respond to Nampijinpa Price offering her opinion. The reaction is never as heated as it might be for fellow No campaigner Warren Mundine.
Going back further, Bridget McKenzie’s handling of a grants program attracted far more heat than the scandals her male colleagues oversaw at the time.
Or how a Labor politician might think it’s OK to call a female colleague “a naughty little girl” or a witness call a female politician “ma’am” but her male colleagues “senator”. Labor, it is worth remembering, might be a majority-female party in Canberra, but three of its four leaders are men.
Our politics is tribal. It means Australians often feel they can justify what people on their side say, while attacking those opposite doing much the same thing.
It’s little wonder we are so divided, which brings us back to the Voice.
Talkback caller Peter told ABC Radio Melbourne this week that he just wanted to do what Indigenous people wanted when it came to voting in the referendum.
“I’m concerned that the Indigenous people are divided,” he told Raf Epstein.
“The main thing I would want to see is them all on the same side.”
Granted that approach seems to be working for Chinese President Xi Jinping, but imagine federal elections if we all had to be on the same side to elect a government. Safe to say, it’s a government that would never be formed.
Source: ABC News