Extract from The Guardian
Katharine Murphy on politics Australian politics
The women of Australia have opened a wound. Let’s not waste this moment with cynical tribalism
Last modified on Sat 20 Mar 2021 06.01 AEDT
Nicolle Flint has been upset and angry this week, and understandably so. I’ve been trying to convey for a month just how extraordinary the atmosphere in the parliament and around the parliamentary diaspora is just at the moment. Brittany Higgins, courageous soul that she is, has opened a wound.
Flint is a Liberal MP who holds the most marginal seat in South Australia. She won’t recontest the next election. She confirmed that recently. It’s also a matter of record that she had a really tough time during the election in 2019.
According to a submission Flint made to the joint standing committee on electoral matters after the last election, she had “skank”, “$60/hour” and “blow and go” scrawled on posters in the window of her campaign office. She had to get police involved after a bloke kept turning up to her campaign events with a camera.
I tried to ring her this week. She didn’t call me back. Had she called me back I would have commiserated. The sad truth is many women with a public profile endure comparable experiences ranging from persistent casual sexism from anonymous trolls through to threats and stalking.
I also suspect a lot of women in politics, and in public-facing professions like journalism, haven’t developed the language to talk about these experiences freely because women still think they need to earn their place in public. Earning your place involves copping it sweet.
Silencing is pernicious and it assumes many forms. Earning your place, and keeping it, can mean actively minimising your gender-based experiences, because these experiences can still be weaponised against you by blokes who can’t shift their supposition that you don’t belong here.
In any case, Flint said this week that progressive women had been deficient in not standing up sufficiently for conservative women wading through the sewer. While she’s absolutely entitled to give voice to that feeling if that’s her lived experience, I have two quick observations about it.
The first is I’m not sure why women were the focal point of the critique. I’m not sure why women are constantly pushed to the front of the deficiency queue, in this case by another women, criticised for not fixing things, when what women need is for men, and the cultures they dominate, to change.
The second is lateral violence can read like a cat fight, and the problem with that tired misogynistic trope is it serves the interests of people who either don’t want anything to change, or are desperate for a distraction.
I don’t make these observations to invalidate Flint’s experience, which was appalling.
We’ve been complacent, or too busy surviving to be strategic, I’m not sure which. Many of our daughters are old enough now to be entering the world, and we haven’t made life better for them. I’ve lost count of the number of women who have said this to me over the past month, and it is absolutely right.
Scott Morrison, who has been fumbling this crisis comprehensively, unable to rise to the exigency of the moment, seemed to find Flint’s emergence helpful.
I gather the prime minister’s office tipped off some journalists that Flint was going to use an adjournment speech after the extraordinary March 4 Justice protest on Monday to tee off about Penny Wong and Tanya Plibersek not denouncing her terrible experiences sufficiently in 2019, and to excoriate Labor for creating a campaign environment “in which hate could flourish”.
It seemed clear that the prime minister thought that Flint’s personal recount (at one point, the distressed MP told Anthony Albanese “I will not be lectured by you, I will not be lectured by your side of politics about the treatment of women in this place”) served his political objective.
From the moment Higgins triggered parliament’s #MeToo reckoning by recounting the violation she says she suffered in March 2019, Morrison has tried to inoculate the government by projecting the sense that everyone in politics is as bad as each other. This isn’t a Liberal party problem, or a symptom of a government that has lost its way. It’s a politics problem.
Now I don’t pretend to fathom the complexity of Flint’s private and professional experiences and obligations. I have the luxury, professionally, of absolute independence. I have clear values, but I’m not part of a partisan tribe. I’m not a servant of a political movement with intra-day imperatives that need to be served.
But if I were Flint, I would want my story to be my own.
I wouldn’t want my visceral experience fashioned as an artefact of damage control, as it was, by Morrison, at various points this week. I would resent that very profoundly.
Flint might be perfectly sanguine about it, but I would resent being cast in an Aesop’s Fable. For me, that would feel like cynical appropriation – like any port in a storm.
This is a crisis that should not be wasted. This feels like a moment when it seems just possible to change a defiantly retrograde culture if we can just focus, as a collective, as responsible publicly-minded institutions, on the substantive problems, rather than constructing a minor mountain of alibis and excuses.
We don’t need tribalism, we need a sense of our common humanity, and unity of purpose.
For weeks, Morrison has been operating on an assumption that Labor would back off about his government’s handling of the Higgins rape allegation, and stop asking questions about whether Christian Porter’s position as attorney general remains tenable, if he uttered the words “glass houses” often enough.
In plain sight, nothing furtive about it, Morrison has invoked the closed shop, referencing the mutually assured destruction pact.
Morrison is absolutely correct. Parliament is a glass house.
But knowing this advances nothing. That insight is heat, not light.
There is no dispute that Labor has its own problems with toxic bros abusing their position.
Labor women have been weeping and mourning amongst themselves ever since Higgins kicked the hornet’s nest.
Labor women are mulling what they might tell Kate Jenkins privately during her inquiry into parliamentary culture, and what they might say publicly, and senior figures are telling staff with just claims to come forward.
So the threshold question currently before the parliament isn’t whether or not bad things happen on all sides.
The pertinent questions are as follows: are powerful people prepared to be accountable when terrible things happen?
Are powerful people prepared to change a retrograde culture?
These are the questions Morrison has ducked repeatedly in front of the women of Australia.
This is the moment our prime minister seems hell bent on missing.
This is why Morrison has just racked up the worst month of his prime ministership.
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