Childlessness pot shots may have worked with Julia Gillard, but there is rage over 'Princess Palaszczuk'

Extract from The Guardian

Opinion

Annastacia Palaszczuk

Van Badham

Queensland LNP leader Deb Frecklington has shown the same poor judgment this summer as Liberals all over Australia

@vanbadham

Tue 31 Dec 2019 11.08 AEDT Last modified on Tue 31 Dec 2019 16.24 AEDT

Queensland’s Labor premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has been attacked by LNP leader Deb Frecklington for how she looks and her lack of children. Photograph: Darren England/AAP

A flaming torch has been taken to the Liberal party brand over the summer and the scorchmarks are entirely self-inflicted.
Scott Morrison’s stunningly misjudged Hawaiian vacay at the height of the bushfire crisis has provoked intense visual mockery; a memorial Hawaiian shirt is also on sale as a firefighting fundraiser.
The infamous cuts to fire services made by Morrison’s comrade, the premier of New South Wales, have resulted in similarly merchandised mockery. The emergency services minister, David Elliott, has been short on friends since a November insistence parents should be “happy” with illegal police strip-searches of their children. His holiday in France – while fatal fires burn at home – is unlikely to win him any more.
So it somewhat defies reason why Deb Frecklington, the diffusion-label “LNP” Liberal leader in Queensland, would choose this fire-fronted Christmas holiday to double down on her party’s blooming reputation for callousness.

In an interview with the Sunday Mail, she laid into Queensland’s Labor premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, for both how she looks and her lack of children. “All the makeup, the designer labels, it’s too much,” said Frecklington, “thank goodness that I am nowhere near like her.” The Australian explained: “Ms Frecklington said she was more “grounded” because – unlike the premier – “she had to deal with her children at the end of a tough day”.
Memes have since travelled the internet exposing the designer value of Frecklington’s own wardrobe, showcased – no less – at the polo. Wry these may be, but they miss the point. In this cynical era of politics without candour, Frecklington’s dog whistling the premier as less a leader than an unnaturally overgrown girl – a gendered stereotype in which the maturity of responsible motherhood has been eschewed for teen-like frippery. “Princess Palaszczuk” roared the Mail’s headline, in case the sledgehammer hit too soft.
Look, at least it is a dog whistle – in the butterfly-life of Julia Gillard’s political career, conservatives just used to say this stuff out loud.
“I mean, anyone who chooses to remain deliberately barren,” said Bill Heffernan of Gillard in 2007, “they’ve got no idea what life’s about.” “She has never had to make room for the frustrating demands and magnificent responsibilities of caring for little babies,” decried Janet Albrechtsen in 2010. “She has chosen not to be a parent,” George Brandis said the same year, “she is very much a one-dimensional person”. In 2012, Tony Abbott denounced her government because of its “lack of experience raising children”.

The attack line was repeated because somewhere, someone had decided that it worked. Maybe it did back then – although it’s always worth remembering that Tony Abbott did not actually defeat Gillard at the 2010 election. The lines sting particularly now; time has passed, attitudes have changed and we have grown unused to them. But there are more than just these reasons that Frecklington’s resurrected tactics are perhaps less assured of impact.
On a political level, Palaszczuk has the value of a lengthy incumbency; whatever her political faults, her ability to front tough decisions – even horrible ones – is a matter of record.
But, beyond the individual, time has also corrected a demographic trajectory within which the post-war insistence on mass-market motherhood is a conspicuous anomaly.
The truth is that from the 1500s on, western women began delaying marriage, and, with it, childbearing. By the French Revolution, up to 22% of women were remaining single and, mostly, childless. In the 1800s, childless marriage became more common – of the women born in the United States between 1885 and 1915, 20% never had children.
Australia was always part of the pattern and, since the 1970s, that pattern’s returned to pre-boom levels of childlessness: 2017 census data revealed that over the next decade, the number of local couples who don’t have children will overtake those who do.
For a politician, that’s quite the number of people to insult. And enrage – because the reasons women don’t have children are so personal.
Personal does not equate to shameful. Something else has evolved since Gillard’s time; the internet has provided a platform for women’s collective discussion that has deshamed intimate issues once considered taboo. Like involuntary childlessness. Going through fertility treatment. The trauma of miscarriage. Having endometriosis. We now know these are common Australian experiences; miscarriage alone affects 103,000 women a year. And all have been experienced by the Queensland Labor premier, Annastacia Palaszcuk – and discussed by her, quite publicly.
If Frecklington’s aim was therefore to destabilise the premier with a cruel allusion to some sort of private suffering, I suggest it was – as is the present Liberal fashion – quite misjudged.
When endometriosis activates, its adhesions tear tissues apart like amateur, internal surgery, without anaesthetic. Someone who manages that level of physical pain whilst pursuing a pre-eminent political leadership position is one unlikely to feel much sting at being slagged out as a “princess” in the Sunday Mail. In an aware modern moment, they instead appear serious and committed.
This cannot be said for the unapologetic person humble-bragging they’ve got kids while having pops at people’s makeup. They come across as quite the opposite.

• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist