Extract from The Guardian
Katharine Murphy on politics Australia news
Scott Morrison needs to realise this is a cultural reckoning, not some political problem to treat with diversions and a production line of straw men
Last modified on Sat 6 Mar 2021 06.02 AEDT
When Julia Gillard delivered her famous misogyny speech, pretty much everybody in parliament – journalists and protagonists alike – missed what was arrayed very obviously in front of them.
The Gillard speech was an indelible cultural moment, but we viewed it through a different lens.
Because of the process obsession drilled into professional political reporters, we saw a prime minister fighting for her political life (a common vision in the bitterly contested years of the 43rd parliament).
Reporters and equally process-obsessed combatants saw Gillard throwing down a diversion on the floor of the House to distract from a now long-forgotten micro-drama involving the Speaker, Peter Slipper. Gillard was a brilliant parliamentary performer, and in intraday tactical terms, the speech was, indeed, a diversion.
But it was something else as well, which is why Gillard’s precision demolition of the then opposition leader stopped office workers in their tracks. The speech grew wings, and flew around the world (staff working for Barack Obama watched the speech whenever they had the shits with Tony Abbott).
Gillard’s words became an anthem because they universalised female experience.
I’m reminded of this episode because some of Canberra’s pale, stale and male tribal council are, again, missing the moment – and right now, Scott Morrison most profoundly of all.
The prime minister has spent weeks acting like he thinks he’s temporarily mired in a political crisis – something he can parse intricately with his backroom and deftly turn with a rivulet of diversions and transactions and a production line of straw men.
All the inveterate micro-managing has somehow obscured his ability to intuit what is right in front of him.
This is a cultural and societal reckoning, not a political problem to be massaged with sporadic damage control.
Perhaps Morrison comprehends this intellectually. There was some evidence of that collective comprehension in Christian Porter’s high stakes framing of his situation on Wednesday. The deeply distressed attorney general (as my friend and sometime colleague Malcolm Farr put it pithily) linked his own fate to the global survival of liberal democracy; an innocent man invoking the shield of justice against the mob.
In that bit of overreach, perhaps, lies evidence that the government brains trust does understand, intellectually, that Morrison has washed up at a cultural crossroads.
But there’s no evidence the prime minister gets this viscerally.
If the prime minister got this viscerally, in his gut, in his soul, he’d find the capacity to lead rather than follow.
He wouldn’t trip over his feet or his words, as he’s done for much of the past three weeks.
Morrison would feel the weight of the moment, and exercise responsibility rather than expressing irritation at the persistence of the questioning.
Perhaps Morrison doesn’t entirely comprehend the moment he’s in because his phone is not lighting up with his female friends processing events in real time.
Perhaps I can share a couple of modest observations in the hope it helps the prime minister locate some stable ground beneath his feet.
Every woman I know is following the events of the past three weeks in politics very closely, which is unusual because women are often too busy juggling to do that.
Every woman I know is also bringing their own life experiences to the listening.
Every woman I know, regardless of how old they are, who they love, who they vote for, whether their profession is public-facing or whether their profession is caring for others, has had an experience in their life of a man not listening to them when they should have been heard.
These experiences can be trivial and transient – the normal irritations of getting on in a society that congratulates itself for being equal, but really isn’t.
But some women have endured searing experiences of being silenced – experiences that rupture their lives.
Every woman I know who has been sexually assaulted, and every woman I know who has loved another woman who has been sexually assaulted and tried to help them recover from that cruel violation, had one life before that incident, and another life after it.
In the life before, they suspected they might be vulnerable. In the life after, they knew they were vulnerable. These experiences are much more common than many people think.
The point of me laying this out so directly is simple: these experiences inform how many Australian women are listening to a government trying to dig its way out of what it imagines is a political crisis.
Women are listening to Morrison constructing various formulations to ride out the daily news cycle. First we were having an in-house inquiry to deal with Brittany Higgins and her rape allegation. When that didn’t cut it, there was a scramble to have something more substantial. As new insights tumbled in, Morrison apparently knew nothing about an alleged rape in the ministerial wing, while a number of people in close proximity to him knew everything. Mrs Morrison counselled him to respond like a father. Many women suppressed a sigh and rolled their eyes.
While he was still battling Higgins, the second tsunami rolled in – the inexpressibly sad story of a woman and a (categorically denied) allegation of rape from 30 years ago levelled at the first law officer of the land; a dead woman speaking through an unsworn statement and the ardent testimony of her friends, testimony the prime minister didn’t read before forwarding to the Australian federal police (who don’t deal with rape allegations committed in state jurisdictions).
A lot of women I know aren’t watching current events obsessively because they want to know all the details, all the minutiae.
They are watching for one purpose.
They want to know if anything can, or will, change.
They want to know if this government is prepared to make things better.
If that’s the test, and for many people it is, then the government gives every appearance at the moment of failing it.
Morrison and most of the people around him can’t seem to get the tone right. Is Brittany Higgins a daughter substitute for Morrison, or is she a “lying cow” (thank you Linda Reynolds – unbelievable).
Then there’s Porter, who strenuously denies he raped a teenage friend in 1988 when he was 17, and declares the rule of law would be fatally compromised if he had to front a credibly constituted arm’s-length inquiry that would allow him to defend his reputation – a process increasingly common in the #MeToo era.
What this all boils down to is simple.
Standards are changing.
Expectations are evolving.
Over the past three weeks – extraordinary weeks on any measure – the world outside has knocked hard on the door of the Australian parliament.
The world outside is telling the Australian parliament it can’t stay cloistered, sequestered, running on demonstrably different rules from the rest of society, rules that say a flat denial from a powerful bloke should be the end of the matter, no further correspondence entered into, because #RuleOfLaw.
The world outside is very clear: the response to these terrible events has to be systemic. Parliament has to let the light in, to be an exemplar of best practice rather than a petulant problem child.
The response can’t just be lip service, and Morrison needs to rise to the moment.
No comments:
Post a Comment