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. â€â€śHis 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 â€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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18 comments
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Geoff Andrews
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Andrew Smith
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Cool Pete
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David Tyler
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Terence Mills
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David Tyler
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Terence Mills
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GL
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Canguro
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Roswell
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David Tyler
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Terence Mills
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Terence Mills
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Clakka
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JulianP
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David Tyler
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paul walter
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Clakka
Return to home pageIt would seem reasonable to have equal numbers of males & females in the House of Representatives and the Senate, mirroring the composition of our population.
Suppose there are 150 seats in the lower house.
Reduce that number to 75 by combining pairs of neighbouring current electorates and each new electorate elects one woman and one man. Each elector has two votes: one for the male candidates and one for the female candidates. The electorate might return a Labor male and a Liberal female.
Good article, like elsewhere, the Libs and Nats started going off piste with the ascension of Howard & retro 1950s culture targeting silent gens & boomers, import of US GOP trained pollsters, re-weaponised fossil fueled Atlas-Koch ‘free market’ think tanks and Murdoch led RW media cartel protection & PR for the LNP.
Like elsewhere, any party can complain, but if they follow others’ ideology, strategy and tactics then they cannot complain i.e. bypassing genuine constituents and branch members for ‘stacking’ by committed Christians, following patriarchal authority, orders and policies, then many educated and other women started kicking back on gender, climate science, equity etc.; anathema to the LNP’s DNA hence Indies, Teals etc. emerged; well done….
Example is Victoria, formerly the Libs ‘jewel in the crown’ but since the time of Howard, inc. the infamous Kennett Peacock mobile phone call on Howard, Labor have prevailed at state level, Mormons etc. were being parachuted into branches, IPA provides policies, NewsCorp PR and promoted Freedom Rallies, Frydenberg gaslit Victorians, as does Dutton continually etc. the Teals et al. peel off…. then the Libs become angry, state level still fighting.
Not unrelated to the chaos in most conservative parties across the Anglosphere, that’s what eventually happens when you ‘follow orders’, declining demographics and ideology?
I don’t like Fiona Scott, but Tone the Botty’s comment about her having sex appeal was something that I would have expected from Zoo Weekly, not a supposedly serious political leader. Tone the Botty was a horrendous leader.
Andrew, thank you. I wonder about the LNP advisory team, now that CT has had a bit of a revamp. If the same mob is behind Liberal SA’s lurch to the right, then they are seriously out of touch with reality. And the formula is obsolete. But once the old fear and loathing stops working for you – and your brazen lying is exposed – and anyone can see that Labor is currently taking the spurious “better economic manger trophy” – you’d need a Bex, a cuppa and a good lie down. Funniest moment this week in the theatre of absurd that is Liberal tactics was Dutton trying to pick a fight over Albo’s offer of bipartisanship on the dreaded section 38.
It really is quite incredible that the Liberal Party would pre-select a man to contest Morrison’s old the seat of Cook and that the man they select, Simon Kennedy, is the same man they pre-selected to contest the seat of Bennelong (John Howard’s old seat) following the retirement of John Alexander : Kennedy managed to lose Bennelong to Labor in 2022.
It shows that the Liberal party’s old boys club is still up and running for this man to be given another opportunity at a safe Liberal seat having already shown that he wasn’t up to it in Bennelong.
I’m not sure if there are any good female Teals standing in Cook but if there are I can see the seat slipping away from the Liberals, as it should.
Terence -Simon HAC says there are no approaches from any Teal candidate. Apart from gender, I doubt very much if the Liberals need another (McKinsey) consultant, but he certainly won’t be the robust independent that they need. I would question real life experience? Kennedy is a former partner at McKinsey and co-founded the consulting giant’s Australian public sector arm.
Two years ago, The Guardian made the following remarks: For the moderates, this is a second unexpected defeat in a preselection conducted under the new Warringah rules, designed to give branch members a bigger say.
“It raises questions about whether the membership of the Liberal party is more conservative than the party’s NSW leadership.
As one of the founding members of the public sector consulting division at McKinsey, Kennedy has worked closely with Charlie Taylor, who is the party’s federal treasurer and brother of the energy minister, Angus Taylor, who was also at McKinsey prior to entering politics.
According to those present at Kennedy’s presentation to selectors, Kennedy claimed credit for advising on the design of the $89bn jobkeeper program while at McKinsey.”
David Tyler
According to those present at Kennedy’s presentation to selectors, Kennedy claimed credit for advising on the design of the $89bn jobkeeper program while at McKinsey.”
Good grief that’s nothing to be proud of as the scheme omitted the requirement for companies to actually pay back Jobkeeper if the didn’t suffer any downturn during Covid : Companies including Harvey Norman, Cochlear, Mirvac, SEEK and Blackmores all voluntarily returned hundreds of millions of dollars in JobKeeper subsidies to the tax office after posting healthy profits during and after the pandemic.
But not Qantas who according to data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed that Qantas Group was the largest recipient of the JobKeeper scheme, claiming $160.5m in FY2020 and a further $695.5m in FY2021. Yet they still laid off thousands of workers and refused to repay any of the Jobkeeper largesse.
I think Cook might be better served by a drover’s dog !
Princess Timmy “The Smug” Wilson is making an attempt at trying to take back the seat he lost to Zoe Daniels. He obvioulsy hasn’t been able to survive in the world outside the pig trough. Der Spud the Macho is really loading up on men in the Libs.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/24/tim-wilson-wins-liberals-preselection-in-goldstein-to-set-up-rematch-against-teal-zoe-daniel
GL, looking forward to another meltdown by the princess after his next defeat. Scrunched in foetal position, bawling his eyes out. Zoe Daniels outshines this posturing poseur by ten thousand lumens. In the 2022 election he had a -12.3% swing against him cf, her positive of +34.5%. Dutton’s really scraping the bottom of the barrel, isn’t he? Not to ignore his faux commitment to women, given Wilson ran against two female contenders.
Victorian Liberals endorsed his candidacy, stating, “Tim has been driven to run for Goldstein at the next federal election by his deeply principled commitment to integrity in public service and his belief that the Goldstein community is worth fighting for.” Har de har de harr… more BS and spin.
Tim Wilson and Eric Abetz: two buffoons I never thought I’d ever see in the political landscape again.
Holy crap.
Roswell, Herr Erich Abetz is a former SS-Oberst-GruppenfĂĽhrer of the Tasmanian Liberal Party and once held power in a vice-like grip. Trust me. Be very interesting to see how he proceeds. His categorical denial that he is after Rockliff’s job indicates that he will depose the former, hapless premier whenever the opportunity presents itself. Probably after the next Liberal defection. Give them six months.
As Abbott Government’s Senate leader, Abetz, accused the ALP and unions of spewing forth “venom and hatred” at royal commissioner Dyson Heydon because he uncovered union scandals.
That’s stood the test of time well.
In the federal seat of Goldstein the Liberals had the opportunity of selecting one of two women to go up against the incumbent Zoe Daniel who took the seat as an Independent and who, incidentally, is doing a much better job of representing the Goldstein electorate than failed candidate Tim Wilson.
They had Colleen Harkin and Stephanie Hunt both it seems worthy female candidates. But what did the Liberal Party do ? Well, of course, they dusted off Tim Wilson to give him another run. He didn’t even win a majority of votes in the first round of voting, which meant a second vote was required for him to claim the win – Oh dear !
Zoe Daniel must be quietly pleased I would suggest.
All it needs now is for Peter Dutton to announce a nuclear reactor for Goldstein to lock the Liberals out for a decade.
Go for it, Pete. You are the ALP’s greatest asset !
Meanwhile in Kooyong the Liberals are relying on name recognition and the dynasty effect by pre-selecting Amelia Hamer, the 31-year-old Oxford-educated grand-niece of former Victorian premier Sir Rupert “Dick” Hamer. She will be up against teal Monique Ryan.
The dynasty thingy did not work out so well for Georgina Downer, in fact a family dynasty is not really a plus in Australian
politics, it smacks of entitlement.
Private Schools, whether espousing secularity or not, are hotbeds of socio-cultural differentiation. All but an minority involve themselves in selective biases and didacticism, rather than providing only a framework for learning.
As for notions that they provide a ‘better’ education, is another ruse in the practice of ruses. In the main, they operate a discriminatory process controlled by its stream of alumni and their obtaining of management, principals and teachers who suit their selective biases and who demonstrate a suitable strain of didacticism.
To ensure that they thrive, the cost of entry is prohibitive to all except the well heeled, or those prepared to go into hock to have their precious progeny inducted into the club. Of course, they will offer lip-service to egalitarianism by offering scholarships (albeit one must not dig too deep into the criteria for offer and acceptance).
So, what is on offer? A serious application to streams of top-down authoritarianism, crime and punishment, genderism, religiosity, otherness, socio-cultural habitation, cities land and agriculture, creative accounting, the economics of all of the above, politics language and rhetoric, leadership / rights and coercion. What more could one want as a framework for adulthood? Should one be interested in frog spawn or nematodes, no need as it will come in time through obsession with genitalia. And as for rocket science that will be acquired on the job.
Such gifts are rare and expensive, and with donor philanthropists a dying breed, it’s apparently only right, for history’s sake that the government dips into the community’s kitty to help maintain the tradition. Otherwise the illogical and unfathomable would be rendered to dust via the great entropy.
One ought not imagine where we’d be without it [the mantra of FRWNJs and the contemporary LNP]
@Terence Mills March 25, 2024 at 9:37 am
TM, re Georgina Downer, thank the Universe for small mercies – and protection from very strange persons.
Clakka, there is also the inestimable boon of being part of the old-boy or old-girl network, the social cachet of a “prestigious” – another word for prohibitively expensive – private school. It played no small part in the rise without trace of Abbott and Joyce. Tim Wilson. A trio whose bill for damages, especially in the invention of the carbon “tax” and its contribution to global heating, we are still all paying. As Brandis’ muppet on the HRC, Wilson has yet to atone for the damage he helped the Liberals do to Gillian Triggs’ reputation. All she was doing was calling for compassion and humanity for children in indefinite, offshore detention.
Reactionaries and reactionary mentality.
Beginning middle and end for these cranks.
Yes, DT. Indeed.
Undoubtedly the list could go on and on, even within their own ranks, as illuminated by such stories as the ‘Big Swinging Dicks’ club.
That you mention Brandis. How could one forget his convenient strangulation of common logic and parliamentary responsibility, and provision of a divisive free speech passport with his sweeping promulgation:
“People have a right to be bigots …. In this country people have rights to say things that other people find offensive or bigoted.”
Even if noblesse oblige was a dubious shadow-play, the guile of the likes Brandis et al in the Oz parliament thoroughly put paid to it, and was a harbinger of the corrosive rot of hostile misinformation and disinformation imported from the USA and practiced in the main by the feckless and unimaginative right-wingers in the Oz parliaments and the majority of the mainstream media.
It has created a mire of ‘private school’ hubris and sense of entitlement exercised by a learned brutality in competition at any cost. A complete anathema to politics by compromise for the greater good.
So much for freedom of speech as a right, per the American ‘Bill of Rights’, now become an over-arching mechanism and a euphemism for absolutism and ‘cancel’ culture, delay and strangulation of logic and law-making and the resort to the hocus-pokus of religion in the US. By it, their pendulum seems to swing from righteousness to reason at such a pace that they are constantly losing their way, and their minds.
With the fourth estate in mainstream media utterly subverted, what is left that can assist us with navigating the nuances of existence as opposed to obliteration via havoc and confusion?