Extract from The Guardian
Morrison’s present burden is of the party’s own creation. Their decades of defiantly gender-retrograde culture is to blame.
‘The Liberals’s insistent message that its preselections are “meritorious” has delivered a lopsided, blindsided caucus. A mere 18% are women and 82% are men unnaturally convinced of inherent ability.’
Last modified on Wed 24 Mar 2021 16.24 AEDT
If a week is a long time in politics, a single Scott Morrison press conference is an eternity. In the slow-motion catastrophe of Tuesday’s shocker, time was stretched and rubbery enough to fully appreciate just why the Labor opposition’s poll numbers have taken a sharp upwards turn.
No one wants to be the prime minister who has to answer to allegations that his party staffers have been masturbating on the Parliament House desks. The political playbook on how to handle this particular brand of scandal is, historically, quite thin.
For Morrison, the difficulty of negotiating these embarrassing, ridiculous reports is occurring amid public rape allegations levelled in two directions within his own party. The demand on him on Tuesday was to navigate an appropriate tone of delicate solemnity, decisiveness and no small amount of humility while being held to account for a party culture that appears to have indulged the clownish smut of entitled Tory frat-boys far too long.
He couldn’t do it. Over the presser’s fateful course, he alternatively turned on the tears, smirked, tried to out-gotcha the masters of gotcha at News Corp by airing (as it turns out, unfounded) harassment allegations, and insisted the women of Australia “stand with him” to almost audible groans from the gallery. By the time it was over, the Liberals’ political gender trouble had progressed from “bedevilled” to officially “scandal-plagued”.
Morrison’s present burden is of the Liberal party’s own creation, their decades of defiantly gender-retrograde culture is to blame. Morrison is not informed by voices of women’s experience – about unequal workplaces, gendered harassment, silencing and assault – because in a party that until recently was avowedly against gender quotas, there just aren’t that many women around. The Liberals’ insistent message that its preselections are “meritorious” has delivered a lopsided, blindsided caucus. A mere 18% are women and 82% are men unnaturally convinced of inherent ability.
Albanese’s political upbringing has trained him to be more sure-footed in knowing how, when and where to intervene.
Those Liberal women who rise do so dependent on support from the party’s male majority. It’s left the Liberals with Michelle Landry and her public sympathy for the desk-defiler. Then there’s Jane Hume and her only recently abandoned advocation that abused women should fund their escape from violence with their own retirement savings. Linda Reynolds, who had to apologise for calling alleged rape victim Brittany Higgins a “lying cow”. Michaelia Cash. The invisible “minister for women”, Marise Payne.
Morrison and the Liberals can promise equality to women all they like, but no one’s going to believe them till they show it in their own party.
The opportunity here is all Anthony Albanese’s. Towards the end of last year, the private messages were flying around the Labor faithful thick and fast as political faith waned in Albanese. The policy priorities were at best hazy, at worst bizarrely misdirected. Attempts to portray party unity were left in shambles as Joel Fitzgibbon took to media appearances like the unloved brother who snatches the microphone at a tense wedding reception. Did someone – anyone – in Labor have something tucked into a pocket that resembled a plan? Maybe Albanese did, given the visible, recent change in his trajectory.
While Morrison hides from the women roaring on the Parliament House lawn, lurching between missteps on the issues of gender he admits his own wife has to explain to him at nighttime, Albanese’s political upbringing has trained him to be more surefooted in knowing how, when and where to intervene.
The Labor factional culture so mysterious to outsiders is Albanese’s blessing here. He’s a pure creature of the New South Wales left, coming of political age and spending literal decades under the personal influence of Sydney feminist trailblazers such as Ann Symonds, Jeannette McHugh and Meredith Burgmann – the latter not so much a local feminist icon as a secular feminist saint. He has given one of his best speeches in response to present events, while the space he has ceded to Labor’s female MPs on these issues has allowed a powerful connection to be made between the party and the Australian majority view.
Those hopeful that Morrison’s gender tin ear will swing women’s votes away from the Liberals en masse are likely to be disappointed; class, economic interest and other tribal identifiers are as influential on women voters as they are on men.
But for all the public outcry over Morrison’s “what if it were my daughters?” comment, the irony is that a socially conservative segment of the population do think in those terms – and they’re likely to be asking themselves if the Liberal brand now represents greater personal risk to them than it does safety.
This may not be a massive constituency, but democratic majorities are won by the accumulation of thin slices – and while Morrison has been aggressively mutilating his press schedule, Albanese has been comfortably travelling regional Australia, where the pressing issue is jobs, and talking about them.
Labor’s new slogan of “we’re on your side” sounded cheesy when they all started saying it, but it has great appeal in the current Australian political moment. Doesn’t everyone want to be on the side that’s NOT jizzing on a desk?
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