The Supreme Court of Western Australia is the scene for the next chapter in one of the most disgusting cases of inequality imaginable in an ostensibly civil, democratic society.
Brittany Higgins is again forced to relive the night she was raped as her doubting former boss, Linda Reynolds cries crocodile tears over her ‘damaged reputation’, putting her house on the line to potentially tap into the $2.3 million payout Ms Higgins received from the government when she left her job.
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Centrelink clients were given the option to have essential payments taken from their accounts, ensuring rents, power and other essentials were paid. The Centrepay debit system was designed to reduce the threat of homelessness for some of our most vulnerable citizens. The Gillard Government ordered a review into the system and that was presented to the government just prior to the 2013 election, and found that the system was being exploited by some ‘unscrupulous operators’, essential businesses such as power suppliers and communications providers. The report was buried although some minor changes were made in 2015, according to reporting in The Guardian today.
I wondered what equality may look like. Not just in this power play but both from a historic perspective, before it turned to a striving to be better than every one else, to be richer, more powerful than the next person, or even other groups of people who are somehow different, and how it may look in Australia today. The signs of inequality abound, but what can we strive for? What can we hope for?
One time, long ago, all people were equal. At least that is what some paleoanthropologists claim as a result of their studies of ancient peoples:The interpretation of ancient cave and rock art and the study of ancient burial site.
Men and women were considered equal, the raising of children a shared, communal activity. That sense of community is still evident in the few remaining indigenous groups as found in the Amazon, in parts of Papua New Guinea and among First Nations Australians and other regions where tribal communities of indigenous peoples still exist.
The change which so altered the relationship between men and women was the transition from hunter/gatherer to dependency on agriculture for survival, and with it the rise of religion. From a nomadic life, following through the seasons the natural cycles and the movement of flora and fauna to a sedentary, settled lifestyle where the seasonal variable and the uncertainties of weather made life less certain, instead of following the food, it was waiting to see the harvest of sowed crops. And that involved hard work, clearing the land, tilling the soil, sowing, protecting the growing crops from birds and bugs which could destroy it, harvesting and storing the bounty, building permanent homes, and so forth. Life became tough.
The dependency on the vagaries of nature caused the creation of gods. The halcyon days of the Garden of Eden became part of the legend of a supreme God, a creator God, and when ‘the woman’ disobeyed the commands of that mythological being, she caused the expulsion from Eden and so was blamed for the hard lives which followed. From being created equal, as described in Genesis 1 verse 27, “So God created mankind in his own image… male and female He created them” to her being blamed and cursed in Genesis 3, verse 18 ”I will make your pains in childbearing very severe, with painful labour you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you.”
The woman, the wife is subservient to the man. Slave-like. In many ancient languages, the word for woman and slave were closely related. In Chinese for example, nu can mean slave, concubine or woman.
The same story appears in one form or another in Greek mythology, in ancient Babylonian stories and in many other places at about the same time, some 2,500 years ago.
Along with the move to agriculture came the ownership of land. Communal plots became family plots and the man controlled the work to be done. Along with the development of a form of governance, at first a ‘religious’ leadership, which taught the myths which controlled the production of foods and their distribution in the form of tithes and with the increase in population and the growing accumulation of wealth came threats from nearby communities and the beginnings of a form of nation building which morphed into the need for greater overarching control and the need for a defence force of some kind or other and rulers, kings, pharaohs, emperors.
Each power structure required administrators, means of controlling the economies of the various jurisdictions, a taxation system and a means of keeping populations under control, and in expanding territories, armies which needed feeding and clothing. The time of ancient imperialism has been well studied and one of the most descriptive comes from the mythology surrounding the establishment of the Land of Israel described in the earliest books of the Bible, as God gives instruction to the Israelites to destroy all who stand in their way of occupying the land He promised to Abraham. That was a shortly after the Ten Commandments had been presented to them. Oh and a couple of those commandments, don’t kill, don’t steal. It’s great to be of God’s People. The laws only apply to them, you cannot kill them or steal from them, but anyone else is fair game.
The discovery of ‘The New World” was a mistake by Christopher Columbus, He wasn’t in India, as he had hoped, but on an island in the Caribbean which he claimed as ‘new lands’ for the King and Queen of Spain in the name of the almighty God who had guided him there. Soon the new settlers managed to kill off the indigenous people by infecting them with smallpox as the European plantation farmers began growing all sorts of good things like sugar, tobacco, coffee, cocoa and so forth, but finding labour was not easy so establishing a market for farm and plantation labourers, slaves from tropical Africa.
Equality under colonialism was for the white land owners. Not the slaves, and not the women. Women were as much owned, were chattels throughout the Christian period, carrying the curse of Eve, subservient to their husbands. Even daughters were owned by their fathers until marriage when the ownership transferred to the husband. Rape was not a crime against the victim of the rape, the woman, it was a crime against the owner of the woman. The rapist had ‘devalued’ the man’s property. Rape as a weapon of war recognises that ‘devaluing’, as was explained during the Croatian/Serbian conflict of 30 years ago. Muslim women were raped so they could not be married as virgins, be undesirable as brides or be rejected by their husbands.
I guess the question is will there ever be equality, a governance which recognises the innate humanity in all of us, where the needs of life are distributed in an equitable way, where the powerful are not exploitative.
It seems the rich and powerful today are no different than those of by gone times. Could it be that they see themselves as gods, like the pharaohs of ancient times? That the rules do not apply to them, rules like actually paying fair wages, paying taxes.
In my lifetime there have been many changes which have sought to redress some of the inequalities, the women’s liberation movement building on the earlier gains of the suffragettes, the ability for women to control their fertility, equal pay for equal work to address the income disparity between men and women, the post war reconstruction boom which saw for the first time in history economic gains for workers allowing for greater access to home ownership. Recognition of difference, racial, religious, sexual definitions, becoming a more humane society.
And how quickly that is being reversed.
We see a Senator accusing a former employee of defamation, taking the employee to the highest court in the state, we see powerful corporations stealing from their most vulnerable clients, we see the divide between the richest and the rest of the population grow exponentially.
We see women who have been sexually assaulted cross examined in courts while the accused remains mute, all their lawyer needs to do is produce doubt that the rape was actually rape. The accused is not asked to defend himself, the victim is further victimised, the trauma amplified, and in the case of Ms Higgins, repeatedly in court case after court case. The victim is vilified repeatedly. (The opening statement from the Senator’s lawyer included the term ‘fairy tale’, an implication that the rape is a fantasy used by the victim for whatever reason.) The senator repeating her doubt that the rape occurred, accusing Ms Higgins of concocting a story, a vengeful act to undermine the senator’s reputation.
We see a refusal to engage in Truth Telling, a refusal to understand the impact of colonisation of the First Nations people, a refusal to accept that colonisation was in fact the theft of their lands, the brutal genocidal acts as power to take the land was resisted, that the refusal to accept the culture and language deprived the first nations people of their identities, effectively dehumanising them. We brought them ‘our religion’, they should be grateful for that.
We see pressure on wages, a ‘cost of living crisis’ where workers are dehumanised, valued only as contributors to company profits, paid effectively subsistence wages, needing to return to work just for survival while corporate employers devise ways to steal from their workers, forced unpaid overtime for example, as in one transport company putting office staff on salary but demanding ‘reasonable overtime’ as staff who leave are not replaced and the remaining staff compelled to work longer hours to complete the allotted tasks. Modern slavery perhaps? Yes, people are paid, return home at the end of their shift but return to do it all again merely to survive.
We see political parties endorsing candidates who seek to reverse the rights women have attained, the wife’s place is in the home looking after the kids, she is to be the chattel of the husband. Daughters are owned by fathers to be transferred to husbands on the wedding day. (And the only way to ensure that we get the ‘right’ government is to deny women the vote. They may dare to vote differently than instructed!)
Can we go back to that?
We see politicians, religious leaders and the most powerful, and the wealthiest people on the planet try to wind the clock back, trying to restore the power lost or gain more than has ever been achieved.
It seems in the long view of history, history is repeating itself as no lessons are learned.
Surely we can do better than that!
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