Extract from ABC News
Analysis
What we're seeing right now in federal Parliament is something you very rarely get to see: The emergence of a new head of power.
Power shifts in politics are not rare. They happen all the time, in ways either big or small.
Someone gets promoted or resigns in disgrace; that's a small shift. A minor party acquires the balance of power in the Senate, and suddenly the members of that party go from "Random Nutter" status in the Prime Minister's Rolodex to "Invite to Lodge Immediately". That's a biggish shift.
As are tectonic rearrangements of factions in major parties, which occur at a subterranean level away from the public eye but sometimes burst forth in spumes of spectacular red-hot lava in the periodic events known as leadership spills.
This upheaval we're witnessing right now in Australia is entirely different, however, from the routine rearrangements we're used to seeing in Parliament House.
It's a new head of power. And what's extraordinary is that it's been generated nationally by the voices of people conventionally thought powerless, or near enough to powerless for the difference not to mean much. A young political staffer, close to the bottom of the heap. Schoolgirls. The voice of a woman from her grave, telling a contested story from long ago. Women who've been spat out from the system in Parliament House. Tens of thousands of nobodies gathering in the streets.
The driving element of the new power is this: Actions that previously did not carry consequences are now carrying consequences. Behaviour that was once tacitly acceptable in the elaborate and bespoke workplace that is Parliament House is now — with the benefit of sunlight — recognised as unacceptable.
Women are telling the stories of what happened to them and — rather than being dismissed as sluts or nuts, or being shuffled out of Parliament entirely — they're being believed.
How bad was the situation before? Bad enough that a young man allegedly thought he could probably get away with forcing sex upon an intoxicated young woman in the executive wing, and bad enough that for nearly two years he was proved right.
Bad enough that the young woman — a smart young woman, cognisant of her legal rights — correctly perceived that there was a distorting power structure around her that made it dangerous for her to seek the remedy to which the rule of law would ordinarily entitle her.
Brittany Higgins — a powerless person, a nobody — is the figurehead for this new force. You can see its influence every day at the moment, as women who previously assessed their circumstances and decided it was wiser to say nothing are revisiting that decision.
The barriers that keep rational women and girls from saying what happened to them — whether it be sexual assault or sexism in their workplace — are breaking down, creating a wave of consequence for the male-dominated ranks of their malefactors.
A generation breaking the pattern
Higgins may be the figurehead, but she was inspired by Australian of the Year Grace Tame, who stood beside the Prime Minister in January to be honoured for her persistence in turning her childhood abuse at the hands of a teacher into a galvanising force for change.
What is astonishing and heartening is that this generation of young women seems to have been able to break a pattern that has been so destructive among the generations of women that went before; this strange, almost chemical transfer of guilt and shame from offender to offended-against.
Why has this happened for so long — that victims of sexual assault nurse their hurt to themselves in private? Persecute and loathe themselves to the point of distraction? It's only rational when you consider that for a long time, this was the response that society preferred them to have.
At best, women would suck it up and cope. At worst, they'd go mad and die. But this generation of young women is different. This generation gets mad, and lives.
Witness Chanel Contos, and her British equivalent Soma Sara, who like Contos has collected accounts of young women harassed and abused in elite educational institutions; hers is called Everyone's Invited and it's driving an upheaval among those institutions in Britain right now.
Witness Grace Tame, Saxon Mullins and Brittany Higgins, who took only a year or two to understand — most powerfully — that the guilt and shame did not belong to them, but to the person who hurt them. This is an extraordinary and welcome shift.
And it's happening further afield
These young women are part of a compelling global pattern of young women finding and wielding significant power from a starting point of nowhere.
Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg are obvious examples, but the United States is seeing an extraordinary array of powerful young women just now, from articulate survivors of school shootings to Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors to the influential young congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The documentary Knock Down the House captures, in part, Ocasio-Cortez's unlikely defeat in 2018 of the powerful and connected incumbent Joe Crowley, then Democratic caucus chair. It becomes clear that — to a fascinating extent — Crowley's connectedness and power works against him.
Faced with a congressional district of poor people demanding answers, Crowley is constrained by the power structures around him — of which he is part — from speaking to them clearly the way Ocasio-Cortez can. He has money coming in from everywhere, which creates obligations. She has none, and thus has nothing to lose. Like Brittany Higgins, she is outside the system. She is unshackled by its constraints.
While we're talking about a film, it's worth pointing out that popular culture can play a significant role in emboldening "powerless" people to speak out. Soma Sara says she was inspired to create Everyone's Invited after seeing I May Destroy You, the anthemic rape-survivor TV series made by young creative powerhouse Michaela Coel.
Can it be a coincidence that Game of Thrones — which IMDB lists as the most-watched television series ever — features the overlooked and spat-upon young girl Arya Stark kicking over the traces in the most unthinkable way?
Morrison no longer in control
Okay: Back to Australian politics. Let's look at the effect all this movement is having on the existing power structure, starting with the man at its apex.
We've seen for weeks now how hard the Prime Minister has found it to respond to what's going on.
The first approach he employed was the traditional survival strategy in politics, which has become more popular in the age of the short media attention span. That is to say: Batten down the hatches, deflect and defer, don't read the document, avoid the question, issue general statements but avoid the detail. None of this has worked.
This new eruption of power is occurring outside his field of control and it's not going away.
Option 2 in the traditional playbook — deflection — hasn't worked either, particularly well. This is: It's not just us, this stuff happens in workplaces all over Australia, the Labor Party is worse, what about the media, and so on. Option 2 is understandable and it is deployed with real emotion by Scott Morrison because there's some truth to it.
Yes, there is bad behaviour on both sides of the place. Yes, there are senior men in the media who should reflect very seriously on their own behaviour around women and would probably be in serious trouble if they were the Member for Wandering Hands right now. And Scott Morrison — a man against whom one could never imagine an allegation of sexual misconduct being levelled — could rightly feel aggrieved that other men's chickens are coming to roost on him.
On Tuesday, the PM tried Option 3: Bargaining. I've listened, I've heard you, here's what I've learned, I'll do better, I'll change things, let's think about quotas. But he switched back to Option 2 pretty fast when provoked, snapping at a News Corp journalist to watch his own backyard, with an allegation subsequently found to be groundless.
In short: He's still struggling. Partly with his emotions, which tell him that all this is unfair and not his fault.
Like floodwater, the disclosures of recent weeks have come in a mighty rush and the tide brings all sorts of things jumbled within it. In the last parliamentary sitting week we heard that a federal MP had used social media to bully women in his electorate. That male staffers had filmed themselves masturbating over a woman's desk. That a federal minister (female) viewed the drinking culture in Parliament as unhealthy and excluding-of-women. That a senior senator had allegedly expressed the view that a girl drunk enough to have sex in parliament was a possible security risk (the senator denies the comments).
Female rage is everywhere, and it's multidirectional.
There are dangers associated with this sudden and explosive rearrangement. One is that individuals accused of certain acts end up carrying the can for everything bad that's ever happened to women. Men feel this particularly strongly, as you can imagine, being the people most likely to lose out from this disproportion.
This is why male commentators will often identify the presumption of innocence as the headline feature of the rule of law, or write of the "weaponisation of rape", as if rape hadn't been a weapon for centuries.
The prime candidate for the Everything Charge right now, of course, is Attorney-General Christian Porter, whose pattern of ungallant behaviour as reported by the Four Corners Canberra Bubble story last year was radically sharpened by a historic rape allegation sent to the Prime Minister's office just four weeks ago (seems longer, doesn't it?).
The question of how most fairly to consider one allegation amid the noise and upheaval of everything else is not one that has been answered. The Prime Minister is right to deplore the concept of mob trial, but is yet to establish an alternative in this extraordinary instance.
What about Liberal women?
The terrain has also changed, meanwhile, for women in the Coalition.
These women are extremely familiar with the constraints imposed on them by membership of the conservative ranks with respect to gender issues. They know that they will never fit the image of campaigning feminists established by women in the left-leaning parties.
They also know that outspoken remarks about gender will land them accusations from their male colleagues that they're siding with the Labor Party. They are typically hard-working, diligent members of their team, and prefer to work behind the scenes. But they see the change that's afoot.
Julie Bishop — the most senior woman the Liberal Party has ever produced, interviewed on 7.30 for International Women's Day — was scathing about a group of Liberal Men who used to undermine her and called themselves the Big Swinging Dicks.
On Tuesday this week, the enraged Industry Minister Karen Andrews tore into the culture of Parliament House. Saying her conscience would not allow her to stay silent, she voiced support for preselection quotas to boost the numbers of Liberal women (this is a red-hot issue on which even supporters of the idea are careful about endorsing in public). She is, to date, the most plain-spoken woman in Cabinet about the gender logistics of working in Parliament.
The Minister for Women, Marise Payne, is also the Foreign Minister and she is the most powerful woman in the government. After a long and distinguished career, she is probably as powerful as she will ever be. She is an avowed feminist, a judicious person and a competent minister. She is a loyal Liberal. She has, to date, played by the rules.
Payne is the absolute counterpoint to Brittany Higgins; she's a woman bound by her own power, while Higgins is liberated to speak by her lack of it. And now, Payne's reward for faultless loyalty to her team and leader is to be accused publicly of cowardice and of failing women. Worse: she has been called into question thanks to the shenanigans of men around her, having never done anything herself but work hard and not mess up.
This is what happens when a new head of power appears. It can create extremely uncomfortable conditions.
New power, new game
It can also create opportunity. There is always opportunity, when power shifts.
In this instance, there is opportunity for women to seek justice, to speak out, to demand restitution in this new environment which suddenly gives a damn about what's happened to them. But there's opportunity for strategically-minded blokes, too. For some, the emergence of a cool new way to bring down their enemies is exciting, a brand-new update to the first-person shooter game called Political Ratf**kery.
The political gossip network — on which horrible rumours about women have regularly been trafficked — is now alive with speculation about which bloke will be brought down next, or in some cases with blokes shopping tales about their enemies.
It's possible that in this new environment, pressure may be brought to bear upon some women to cough up their stories in order to bring about a desired political assassination.
As the Prime Minister discovered when he tried strategically to deploy an allegation of misconduct in the media last week, it doesn't quite work like that.
This new power comes from a different source and it doesn't behave like the old kind.
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