Team Dutton duds women; snubs gender equality, bipartisanship and democracy
Actions speak louder than words if not nearly as often, while inactions can speak louder than both. The Liberals are paying lip service to a target of fifty percent women in ten years, after Morrison’s catastrophic election hot mess-dumpster-fire-trainwreck in 2022 triggered an independent review from Peta Credlin’s manbag, Brian Loughnane and jolly Jane Hume. Hume tells women that they just need to work harder. Sweat destroys glass ceilings.
Seventeen Liberal women were elected to the House of Representatives in 2013. Today the number is nine. Crumb-maiden, Hume loves a colourful image. “We should gut the chicken properly before we read the entrails – and there’ll be a lot of gutting.”
There will be. Yet any practical reform like quotas is Liberal heresy. Easier to scapegoat Scott Morrison. It’s Harpo Marx syndrome, as if ScoMo, a lightweight shonk, somehow, is not the product of a party in such decline that it could allow itself to be conned into electing him as leader. But the sole cause? You may as well try nailing a jelly to the wall.
Or try to get any policy detail out of Peter Dutton. After his flirtation with nuclear and his quick whirl with birthday girl, Gina Rinehart, Dutts cuts up ugly, this week, over Labor’s decision not to proceed with the dregs of Morrison’s mis-named religious freedom bill.
Labor wants to delete section 38 of The Sex Discrimination Act, 1984, forced on a Hawke government, which allows churches to discriminate lawfully and “against another person on the ground of … sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or relationship status or pregnancy” in relation to the provision of education or training.
But the PM is not about to get dragged into another culture war which lets the Opposition set the agenda. He will not proceed unless he can count on bipartisan support from the federal Coalition, some of whom are more concerned with which toilet we use than policy on equality, wages or cost of living. Peter Dutton goes bananas. It doesn’t help.
Culture wars, transphobia and hyper partisanship butter no parsnips. Junkyard’s dog in the manger politics won’t win power. Michelle Grattan calls the Coalition, a flightless bird because the Liberals lost their moderate wing. It’s a fair image but ignores the fact that so-called “moderates”, generally, lacked the bottle to rock ScoMo’s boat let alone cross the floor. Save Bridget Archer, now in Dutton’s, new, bijou, backbench purdah for her pains.
In fact, many Lib MPs seem to be in an induced coma, witness hapless Shadow Treasurer, Angus Taylor, afflicted by crippling avolition. As is his new assistant Luke Howarth, who may be a Duttonista in nodding for the camera in Question Time but does little else. A coma won’t help the Libs recover from their mugging by reality, 21 May 2022. Instead, it helps it turn hard right with a vengeance, as if, at last, it’s found true North.
Hume and Loughnane’s party vivisection finds that despite (or because of) His Divine Inspiration, the laying on of hands and frequent recourse to prayer, Holy ScoMo proved deaf to women’s concerns. If only Jen could have told him he had his head up his bum.
“Jenny has a way of clarifying things.” Indebted to his Stepford wife Jenny, for his epiphany into rape being bad for women, Morrison writes off most of the Liberals inner-metropolitan seats and ignored the Teals- after all, they are only women-in his rush to woo the blokes, outer suburban tradies in utes, he imagines might enjoy a return to the 1950s.
Grattan lets him have it. ‘“His arrogant, or ill-informed, assumption seems to have been the teals were just a bunch of irritating women, and that professional people – including and especially female voters – in traditional Liberal seats would buy the government’s insulting argument these candidates were “fakes”.’
Election review box ticked, the next Liberal initiative is a therapeutic group-hug around the “no quotas”, totem allowing The LNP to remain a former private schoolboys’ club. (As is Labor but barely fifty per cent and with fifty per cent women representation.) Jane Hume declares that the quote may work in corporations, but the Liberal Party is a different beast.
It is. Over seventy percent of Liberals and over 65 percent of Nationals attended private, mostly single-sex secondary schools. Barnaby Joyce, the world’s best advertisement for Sydney’s exclusive Riverview, after Old Boy, Tony Abbott. Attended also by loud, lusty, rugger-playing lads who are now almost twenty per cent of NSW’s supreme court judges.
It shows. The Liberal problem with men goes beyond excluding women from power. It has a problem with masculinity itself. As does junior partner, the shagged-out National Party now backed by Big Tobacco and roped into coalition to win power. Three years ago, The Greens’ membership (11,500) overtook the Nationals which continues its free-fall decline.
In Peter “The Protector” Dutton, the Coalition clings to an atavistic paternalism that is unwise, unjust and unsafe. It peddles a testosteronic, if not toxic, masculinity in the myth of the strong, “tough but fair” patriarchal leader, while men tighten their squirrel-grip on power in the scrum as preferred candidates in safe seats.
Just as forty-one per cent of us have been led to falsely believe “domestic violence” (DV) is equally perpetrated by men and women, ABS data reveals, DV is predominantly male violence against women. Yet we are expected to trust Dutton because he’s tough.
The truth is out there. “No Voice for You,” a bad parody of Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi, Dutton is a parody of fearless leadership in protecting a fair and just process in any sphere.
Unerringly, Dutts backs another dud, Nathan Conroy a callow, “small government” stud-muffin from Cork, now man-about Frankston, whose acting mayor is still at school. In Dunkley, the Libs believe a bloke will have more appeal than Jodie Belyea, a woman committed to empowering women; seeking power to achieve social justice? As Belyea is welcomed into parliament this week, Albo notes Labor now has more women representatives than men. But just how many of those are running the joint?
The Guardian Australia’s Amy Remeikis tallies up. “In Queensland, men were preselected for the safe seats of Fadden and Bowman and James McGrath won the Senate ticket battle over Amanda Stoker. Karen Andrews’ McPherson branch … will be deciding between four men for its next candidate. That will leave Angie Bell as the sole woman in the Liberals’ strongest state. Bell is also facing a fierce preselection challenge from men, which if successful would mean out of the 23 seats the LNP hold, Michelle Landry would be the only woman – and she sits in the Nationals party room.”
WA senator, the delightfully named and perfectly formed, Ben Small, will replace Nola Marino as Liberal candidate for Forrest and Dev, “Dave” Sharma is warming the senate seat vacated by low profile, party apparatchik promoted into parliament, Marise Payne.
The Liberals know they lost the last election, largely because they alienate women voters. Hume and Loughnane spell it out delicately behind the screen of perception. Morrison “was perceived” to have a tin ear on women’s issues. But Dutton has industrial deafness.
What better than a safe seat such as Cook, for example, for veteran family advocate commissioner, Gwen Cherne? No endorsement by its incumbent? Yeah. Nah. ScoMo fails Cherne, despite gushing earlier that “he’d love to see” a woman in his vacated seat. Pious piffle. In the end, he backs former McKinsey consultant, carpetbagger, Simon Kennedy.
No-one expects Morrison to keep his word. Just ask Emmanuel Macron.
“Actions define a man; words are a fart in the wind,” Mario Puzo reminds us, while Charlie Chaplin noted, “Words are cheap. The biggest thing you can say is elephant.”
Simon Kennedy, a blow-in who failed in Bennelong, confirms that a woman’s place is not in Liberal politics. Dutton promotes a type of chest-beating pseudo-masculinity. It’s all we need to protect us all. Listen as he derides Albo as “weak and woke”. His office is channeling Republican Nikki Haley. All week, Dutton works the word “weak” into his increasingly strident diatribes against the PM. Soon it will be “limp, weak and woke.”
Similarly, misled by the hairy-chested stereotype of muscular masculinity is former failed PM, macho-man, Tony Abbott, who as a student politician was witnessed throwing punches near the head of his opponent, Barbara Ramjan. Dutton’s soul brother, in his human wrecking-ball, approach to opposition went on to become a clueless PM. (Those punches never happened, Abbott contends, despite eye-witness accounts.)
Now climate-change-is-crap-Abbott’s a Victor Orban fanboy, a right-wing think tank crew member and token anti-woke bloke on the Murdoch’s Fox Corporation’s board. For Tony, women on boards conjures up ironing, not women on boards who run corporations.
The Libs also dump Anne Ruston to elevate Alex Antic, a poor man’s Cory Bernardi to number one spot on the SA senate ticket. It sends a message akin to Tony Abbott’s appointment of himself as Minister for Women or Philosopher Morrison’s IWD speech that equality is done and dusted but we can’t promote women at the expense of men. Listen? Meet their leaders? Women who protest can be grateful they are not being gunned down.
But as the SA senate choice shows, the reverse is perfectly OK. Antic, moreover, will be able to be Dutton’s muppet, saying things the Thug would love to say himself if he could.
“… the ‘gender card’ is nothing but a grievance narrative, constructed by the activist media and a disgruntled political class … we need the best person for the job regardless of race, gender or sexuality,” Antic says.
Ruston will almost certainly be re-elected from second place, but the die is cast.
Built in to the born to rule DNA of the Liberals and the self-righteous, sense of entitlement nurtured on the playing fields of Riverview and fostered by the oligarchs of our nation’s corporate media, is an inability to learn from their mistakes. Similarly with narcissistic personalities such as Morrison. Any review is pure theatre, a ritual which may help ease the pain of loss. Its actors may censure Scott Morrison, but he’ll continue to clap himself on the back. As he did in his farewell speech. As will acolytes and admirers such as Dutton.
“The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history,” is often attributed to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1770-1831 who did, indeed, say something a bit like that in the introduction to his Philosophy of History.
“But what experience and history teach is this, – that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it.”
We can never step into the same river twice. Hegel is warning readers of the madness of extrapolating lessons from a past which has irrevocably changed. But this should not cause us to forget our past. Peter Dutton can huff and puff all he likes but the reality is that women are not after a hairy-chested provider but equality, respect and recognition.
Similarly, Anthony Albanese is entitled to applaud Labor for having exceeded its fifty per cent quota of women representatives in parliament. But it’s slim consolation to all those women MPs who are excluded by gender from the levers of power.
The Liberal Party, with Peter Dutton in the wheelhouse, shows no real commitment to gender equality, bipartisanship, or democracy, preferring instead the wrecking ball that first advanced – then quickly undid another moral and political pygmy, Tony Abbott.
Abbott’s landslide victory only exposed his extensive limitations; he was unfit to govern. In net terms, his government was a disaster for his party. As was Morrison’s. Selecting male candidates for winnable seats will only accelerate the party’s steep decline.
The decline in the number of women elected to the House of Representatives, its reluctance to implement practical reforms such as quotas, ought to be a wake-up call for the Liberals, for whom History seems to have decided, “It’s Time.”
Of deeper concern, however, is the re-emergence of veneration for the strong man in politics, a fallacy once believed to have been consigned to the dustbin of history, is now enjoying a type of renaissance across the globe. George Santayana wrote,
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
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