Extract from The Guardian
How is it that the prime minister knew about an alleged incident in a media organisation, but was unaware that a government worker had been allegedly raped just a hop, skip and a jump from his office?
Last modified on Tue 23 Mar 2021 18.06 AEDT
The first thing you need to know about Tuesday is this: Scott Morrison now understands that he has got this all wrong.
When I say “this” I mean the last month of his prime ministership, where he’s blown it every single time he’s opened his mouth.
Morrison had one objective on Tuesday, and that was to convey to the women of Australia that he was now listening, and had been listening all along, even though he’d given every impression, within the government and with the public, of being incapacitated with intransigent deafness.
Tuesday’s effort was a Howard-era pivot, all the bells and whistles, which is notable as a piece of political craft, because that is not normally Morrison’s style. John Howard made an art of noisy repositioning when he’d messed things up just to make sure the recalibration hadn’t been missed in the nosebleed seats. But Morrison isn’t cut from that cloth, preferring liquidity to sudden sharp movements.
Anyway, the point of Tuesday morning was to say “look ladies, I’ve been an idiot”.
When asked why it had taken him a full month to recognise he’d been an idiot – a full month to recognise very basic things that any woman could have conveyed to him in a heartbeat about their lived experience – Morrison invoked his basic humanity.
He also invoked his busy schedule as prime minister. Prime ministers can’t be expected to “get” everything, right?
Except this was an important thing not to get, and an easy thing to get had the prime minister possessed the intention of actually getting it rather than trying to manage it. You’d get this, mate, if you weren’t so busy trying to war game it and wait it out.
In any case, Tuesday morning was as close as Morrison gets to saying sorry, I’ve made a political misjudgment so catastrophic that launching a full mea culpa is now my only valid recourse.
There was an empathy gap to close, and Morrison’s intention was to close it.
But as soon as the questions starting rolling in, things ran off the rails.
The Sky News journalist Andrew Clennell asked Morrison whether he had lost control of his ministerial staff. Morrison bristled at the inference, and promptly returned fire.
Morrison noted that Clennell would be aware there was a complaint of harassment “in your own organisation” – a “matter being pursued by your own HR department”. I won’t repeat specifics of this alleged incident, but the prime minister, unfortunately, did.
As it turned out, Clennell was not aware of any such complaint at Sky. Worse, it was entirely unclear whether the woman who had allegedly made the complaint wanted her experience weaponised arbitrarily at a press conference as part of an improvisational man-off between Morrison and a TV commentator.
Not done with that, Morrison editorialised that people in glass houses who wanted to stand on pedestals needed to “be careful” – which sounded a lot like shots fired in broad daylight.
For the record, Morrison has an entirely valid point about the ubiquity of predatory conduct, and about journalists and their employers living in glass houses, and possessing glass jaws. All accurate.
But the show of aggression was off-brand with the mea culpa; suddenly the prime minister was silencing when the objective had been listening.
Knowing that a harassment complaint had been made at Sky News, or perhaps at News Corp, or perhaps somewhere else in the media, also begged an obvious question – a question Morrison copped before the end of the listening tour in the Blue Room.
How is it that the prime minister found himself minutely informed about an alleged incident in a media organisation, but completely unaware that a member of government staff had been allegedly raped in the ministerial wing just a hop, skip and a jump from his office?
How is it that you know about something that you can deploy to neutralise an annoying line of questioning, but you don’t know about an event that fundamentally changed the life of a woman to whom the government owed a duty of care until two years after the fact?
Another gust was also blowing savagely outside the Blue Room of parliament house, ripping through the messaging apps of Australian women – why was the tipping point for Morrison, where he finally transited between not getting it and getting it, triggered by a group of taxpayer-funded man-children jerking off and sending each other dick pics on Facebook messenger, rather than the alleged rape of a young staffer?
Why wasn’t what allegedly happened to Higgins enough to switch on Morrison’s emotional intelligence, to widen his field of vision to encompass the universality of female experience?
Why wasn’t a rape enough?
Why is it never enough?
I tell you what else isn’t enough.
Words.
Words are not enough.
Australian women will need more than words from the prime minister, they will need action.
After a month of appalling deafness from the highest office in the land, women will need more than an acknowledgment of being seen.
Women will need to see that the prime minister is serious about reforming a culture that is within his immediate control – the parliament of Australia – reforming it, permanently, without blame-shifting or performative both-sidesing. And understanding that that is his responsibility, and he will be judged by how he acquits that responsibility.
Morrison also has a responsibility to the women of Australia to shift the dial, to understand that women don’t want protection or patronage, they want equality and justice, and they are tired of waiting for it.
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