As tigtog says, “the level of personal vituperation” she’s attracted in some quarters is surely inordinate. However, I agree with her when she also writes that:

…it would be wrong to dismiss all that anger against the new leader as simply a misogynistic response to the reality of a woman finally running the country.

I think gender has been deployed in complex ways in the reaction to Gillard’s rise to power. As ludicrous as her characterisation as Lady Macbeth is (an analogy that could only be made by those that don’t know their Shakespeare), similarly praise of her as some sort of reincarnated Queen Elizabeth I sounds a most odd note.

And it’s been distasteful to read tendentious comments from Labor supporters damning any legitimate criticism of Gillard’s actions as PM as sexist, when a lot of it patently isn’t. This sort of thing is just the flip side of the uncritical fantasies projected on her, and the failure or refusal to assess her performance in the high office she’s attained outside the context of her gender is a common theme.

In part, this sentiment probably derives from a view that was common some time ago, an essentialisation of femininity which led to a belief that women’s presence in politics would bring about a utopia of niceness. Catherine Marshall’s article in Eureka Street partakes of this trope, reinforced by a portrait of Gillard as somehow fragile.

In both instances, whether people are praising Gillard or not, they’re drawing portraits of her in terms of qualities which are putatively of the essence of woman, qualities whose negation also shows forth in the rush to condemn her for the way she became Labor leader.

For what it’s worth, I think a lot of the angst about her successful challenge to Kevin Rudd derives from the fact that it made some of us confront the fact that the Labor Party is not much of a viable vehicle for idealism.

Those of us who’ve seen Anna Bligh’s government trash Labor values with abandon in Queensland over the last few years are left completely disillusioned with a party so prepared to adopt the views of its political opponents on the basis of presumptions about what marginal suburban voters want, now that attitude has also been enthusiastically embraced by the federal party.

On the other hand, we know well that the election of a female leader with a background in the left provides anything but a guarantee that progressive politics will triumph.

The truth is that Julia Gillard should be judged on her own merits.

There is no doubt that she is an impressive politician. Whether or not she fulfills that promise as Prime Minister is something that is not yet evident. While celebrating the fact that a woman is Prime Minister, we need also to be realistic about the fact the elements of the Labor Party who contributed to her ascension are ones whose motives are partly self-serving and partly purely electorally driven. Her election by caucus should prompt us to take stock of what the Labor party has become, and what could be done to change it.

While praising Gillard, rightly, for her significant past contributions to the feminist cause, and to the cause of equality for women in the workplace, Anne Summers is also right to warn us of the complacent attitude that a female PM means that all is now rosy in gender relations in this country. That’s a theme echoed by Shakira Hussein:

… the hardest feminist battles have never been the struggle for a few women to attain positions of power.

And the most difficult battles are also the most important, because they are the battles for the most vulnerable.

In recognising that, we need to make the way the Gillard Labor government responds to the needs of the most vulnerable our yardstick. And in so doing, we need to avoid the danger of lauding her to the skies simply because she is a woman. But we also need to be vigilant about those who can see a female PM only through a misogynist lens.

There is no doubt that the reaction to Julia Gillard’s rise to the top also demonstrates that we, as a society, have a long way to go in escaping the snares of a culture still too marred by misogyny. If we become more collectively conscious of that, then that would be a true gain from the events of the last few weeks.

Those who’ve been around here for a long time, and have long memories, might recall that I was backing Gillard enthusiastically when Kim Beazley’s leadership was on its last legs.

I welcome and celebrate her as Australia’s first woman Prime Minister.

I don’t welcome the way she got there. But more than enough has been said already on that topic around here of late. Later on in the week, I’d like to take some time to ponder the significance of her leadership for the feminist cause. But in the meantime, I’ll just recommend reading two interesting perspectives – from Anne Summers and Shakira Hussein.

So, as we adjust ourselves to the shock of the new, I think it’s worth taking some time to reflect on Kevin Rudd.

Andrew Elder writes of a big social change in Australia and other countries – the rise of insecurity at work and the fall of jobs for life. I don’t agree with the conclusions in his post, and politics has always been an insecure profession by definition. But a prevailing climate of insecurity encourages a culture of individualism and negates an ethics of care, which must have complex and profound implications for politics.

To me, watching Kevin Rudd’s farewell press conference on Thursday reminded me of the way we increasingly experience all manner of adverse experiences in our personal and collective lives, fluid and risky as both are. They come to us as the embodiment of our forebodings, as a nightmare made flesh, and the more we are disconnected from our fellow humans, the more disaster seems like a traumatic and inexplicable verdict on our endeavours.

In a workplace culture, for instance, where suspicion reigns, and goalposts constantly shift, organisation charts morph manically around us, people come and are disposed of at will, and trust is at a premium, we often don’t know how our performance is really perceived, and this lack of genuine dialogue can inspire a looming paranoia we try to put out of our minds.

I think Kevin Rudd may have been the wrong person for the job of Australian Prime Minister in these mad and maddening times.

I think, without equivocation, I was wrong to see Julia Gillard as best placed to lead the Labor party against John Howard in 2006 and 2007. Kevin Rudd, whose persona was reassuring at a time of insecurity and fear, proved an expert and successful campaigner. He also unlocked a Pandora’s Box of hope. The sentiment of anticipation and the euphoria of change was the leitmotif of the summer of 2007 and 2008, culminating in the Apology to the Stolen Generations on February 13.

There were some fine moments for our country, and balm for our collective soul.

The tragedy of Kevin Rudd, and I think it is a tragedy in the truest sense of the word, was that he was probably not well equipped, despite his image as a methodical bureaucrat, to manage and bed down change. The oscillation between poetry and prose wasn’t the old saw of “campaign in poetry, govern in prose”. Instead, moments of rhetorical (and I think, sincere) ambition resolved into a mountain of paper and procrastination.

In the end, it would seem that Kevin Rudd withdrew within himself and sought to retreat to a comfortable inner sanctum. That indicates, I think, that he fell victim to fear, and perhaps to recrimination over his failure to seize the moment on a climate change election. I think his experience at Copenhagen must have also been very frustrating for him personally.

I think the job he set himself, and that we who supported him wanted him to perform, may be beyond anyone’s capacity. The socially disconnected political machine can indeed keep itself ticking over, but the problems modernity has created really are diabolical, and incapable of being resolved easily through the governing modes of modernity.

I feel for Kevin Rudd because I think in the last months of his Premiership, he was deeply alone and no one reached out to him as a person. All this stuff about lacking ‘Labor mates’ ignores the fact that these ties are mostly surface deep, and that the culture of politics is a disposable one, a machine that rips up its cogs, rearranges them and recomposes them according to forces greater than any one agent can control.

When we can’t trust each other, when loyalty becomes a slogan, when commitment gives way to convenience or the narcissistic needs of the isolated self, we are all truly islands. In a world where many social ties are fluid and lightweight, we have created dysfunctional and deeply dehumanising structures which threaten to crush us.

The cynicism of the “hard heads” is a protective and defensive mechanism. They too know, in some corner of their being, that orienting oneself according to supposed pragmatism provides no safe haven. The Real will have its revenge.

I don’t think any of us, no matter how strong our character, could have stoically endured the relentless drumbeat of negativism and personally hurtful press hysteria Rudd faced, nor the feeling that all we had worked for was as nought compared to the next poll. I hope something changes before Julia Gillard confronts the same insane pressures.

If we really look into our hearts, we are all Kevin Rudd. We are all unable, to greater or lesser degree, to manage the competing demands of our lives, and to close the gap between the desire to do good and the realities of a chaotic and unmanageable world. And it all takes its toll, which can be a terrible one in the true sense of that word.

We can only achieve anything if we start to care more.

Often, we only know what we have when it’s gone.

I want to wish Kevin Rudd all the very best personally. I’m not proposing him for “canonisation”, but I think he’s a good man and not some sort of ambition-bot. I think that should be very clear. And I hope that Australia will continue to benefit from his undoubted talents. I also hope he takes real solace in the good he has done, and can attain some peace outside the maelstrom.

Editor Marni Cordell sums up the website’s achievements, and discusses its financial plight, in an editorial published this morning:

The online media environment we’re leaving is vastly different to the one in which we started. Since we launched, several mainstream opinion and analysis sites have joined us, including The Drum, Unleashed, The Punch and the National Times. Although we hope that the newspaper presses keep on clattering for decades to come, it’s clear that the role of online media outlets will only grow in the future — whatever business model they follow.

This is very sad news, as NM did indeed provide an excellent counter-point to the mainstream media, publishing stories based on genuine research and analysis and featuring a range of writers on a range of topics rarely seen in print.

Cordell writes:

The big media players are struggling to find a workable online business model that allows them to pay their writers and maintain high standards — and so are we.

We’ve noticed that too at LP. When we began taking advertising, it brought in revenue probably sufficient to support one person in frugal comfort. Now it’s pretty much running costs and beer money.

Phil Gomes, an LP blogger, has this to say at his eponymous blog:

But there can be renewal after death. What I’d like to see is all contributors to New Matilda who don’t already blog turn their energies to that form so that we can build a genuine independent new media ecosystem – one that unfortunately died before it had a chance to fully develop.

The tools are now even more refined to connect that ecosystem. Unfortunately everyone will have to get a real job, but you can’t have everything and dying for your art is a noble gesture.

I think he’s right. The NM model, though indeed run on the smell of an oily rag compared to big media, in some senses mimicked the business model of a magazine: a physical office, five or more paid staff. It’s always going to be difficult to sustain that sort of cost structure. The cost of running a blog, by contrast, is minimal – mainly consisting of the somewhat incalculable and largely unremunerated energy, passion and time of its contributors and writers.

We’ve been publishing since March 2005.

In that time, the portion of the Australian blogosphere devoted to public affairs has shrunk, with a lot of the independent blogs hoovered up by Crikey, and others leaving as their lives and priorities change. Feminist blogs remain extremely lively, but there are fewer independent voices writing about Australian electoral politics.

I’d like to see that change.

Some of us have been tossing around some ideas for some time about how we could expand the established readership of LP, and the scope of its contributors and content, in order to fill a gap I believe still exists in commentary and analysis of Australian public affairs, a gap which has just got bigger.

That’s not to diminish the value of many of the contributors and contributions to some of the sites mentioned in this post. But I do think there’s a need for independent commentary and analysis from a site which does not see itself as a media organisation, and whose energy and verve derives as much from its commenters and readers as its writers.

That wouldn’t come for free, as I think that marketing is necessary, and I also think that people’s commitment of time and knowledge has to be recognised financially. But I don’t think it necessitates replicating a model with full time paid staff and a physical space they work in.

Watch this space.

In the meantime, we’d be delighted to talk to any NM contributors who might be looking for a new outlet for their writing.

Elsewhere: Andrew Bartlett:

There has been an increase in online sources of commentary and news in recent years. As their announcement on NewMatilda.com notes, this has included sites such as The Drum (funded by the ABC), Punch (funded by News Ltd) and The National Times (funded by Fairfax media). Whilst these new sites have provided new vehicles for commentary, I believe it is still very important to have independent operators in the media and online environment.

Crikey is still rolling along as the main independent web-based source of news and views, and Online Opinion continues to provide a wide range of articles and comment each day. There is also still a number of reasonable quality blogs around which focus on social and political commentary. None the less, the pending disappearance of New Matilda will certainly leave a hole in the fabric of independent social and political commentary, which is already much too threadbare.

Elsewhere: [by Kim] Spike.

Elsewhere: [by Kim] Qed.

Despite all the blah about ‘Western values’, women in the West also have issues with compulsory sexualised visibility. The claim that this regulation of dress is somehow a feminist move is both ambiguous and problematic. I’ve rarely seen a better discussion of this than Liz Conor’s. Go read.

Recent figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show Australian women earned just 82.5% of the average male rate of pay across the country in 2009. On average, a female worker would have earned more in 1985?—?and will be $1 million worse off over their lifetimes than their dads, brothers and partners.

That rather understates the size of the problem, because that differential refers to full time earnings, and 57% of women in work were full time, with 43% being part time or casual in 2009. As the recent House of Representatives Standing Committee Report on Equal Pay, Making It Fair, observed:

In August 2007, the average mean earning from all jobs for women was $680 per week (compared to $1022 for male employees) partly reflecting women’s greater participation in part time employment. On a comparison of full time employment earnings, women on average earned $910 per week and men earned $1131 weekly.

The point I’ve been making in my commentary and analysis of the Abbott parental leave plan is that there seems to be a perception that women in the workforce are much better off than they actually are. Otherwise it would be impossible to conclude that income replacement was ‘generous’ or ‘fair’. My argument has been that the Coalition’s approach would further entrench existing inequalities. In that context, it was interesting to note the comments from Eric Abetz on the 7.30 Report tonight. Abetz was responding to a case which starts tomorrow in Fair Work Australia seeking to revalue the work performed (very largely by women) in the community sector.

To say that Abetz was hardly filled with enthusiasm for a case which would raise women’s wages by around $100 a week would be an understatement. Pay equity was a principle no one would disagree with, he observed, but it appears that in practice, it’s never the right time to do anything about it.

This, of course, is the whole problem. The principle was accepted in Australian law in 1972, but the practice has lagged behind, and is now trending backwards.

The method by which the ACTU, the ASU, and the Equal Pay Alliance are proceeding is by a test case based on principles of work value. The Coalition removed the power of FWA’s predecessor, the AIRC, to hear such cases, opposes anything but minimal safety net awards, and rejects the principle of industrial tribunals determining pay rates by an assessment of the skills and values worked.

So, if they were still in government, this campaign could not succeed. And it they return to government, it will not succeed. The Labor government, by contrast, is intervening in the case in support of the union position, and Julia Gillard made a cogent argument as to the timeliness of properly valuing community sector workers’ skills and experience tonight.

The audacity, and gross hypocrisy, of the claim that the Coalition cares about working women has been exposed for what it is, only two days after Tony Abbott’s IWD speech.

Elsewhere: Useful background and context at Business Spectator.

Gary Sauer-Thompson at Public Opinion has a handle on the politics:

So the Coalition’s strategy [of] messing with the system by throwing anything at the Rudd Government that comes to hand continues. It doesn’t matter about the contradictions –introducing a big tax when the promise is no new taxes—as it is about getting noticed and destabilisation with whatever-it-takes to oppose the Rudd Government on everything.

The strategy is to wedge Labor—”supporting big business over working families” is the new talking point— and to win back female voters who have been deserting the Coalition.

Trevor Cook asks whether Abbott is really a Liberal. Meanwhile, in The Age, Leslie Cannold disputes the claim that parental leave is solely a women’s issue and Julia Perry in the SMH examines who should pay.

I’ve built on the arguments I made in a post here yesterday in a piece for The ABC’s The Drum Unleashed to nail the canard that Abbott’s plan is more ‘generous’ than Labor’s policy, and set out my reasons why it’s not something progressives should support.

That’s highly questionable – or rather, it would be ‘better’ for those who are already relatively advantaged, and worse for many who are not.

Let’s put some facts on the table.

The Government’s scheme would pay eligible recipients the adult federal minimum wage ($543.78) for 18 weeks. Other benefits and transfers available would provide support equivalent to six months.

Abbott’s scheme would pay someone on $150 000 a year $75 000 for six months (the full replacement of the wage being the reason why his plan would cost around $3 billion dollars rather than the government’s $300 million a year). But someone on less than the current minimum wage would presumably only receive what they earn. So if someone works casually for a couple of days a week, they might get, say, $250 a week from a Coalition government compared to $542.78 from Labor – because “All those employed with a reasonable degree of attachment to the labour force” – including contractors, the self employed and casuals are eligible under Labor. Or perhaps such workers would get nothing from the Coalition, as the entire tenor of the proposal seems geared to full time work.

The point of the scheme proposed by the Productivity Commission was precisely to target public assistance to those most in need of it, and not to provide additional benefits to higher income workers, who were much more likely to have reasonable arrangements for parental leave in place, and much better economic resources to cope with a loss in income. The Productivity Commission rightly anticipated that those with employers who had a better capacity to pay, and employees with stronger market bargaining power, could access supplementary schemes from their workplaces. The Labor proposal seeks to level the playing field and enable those who are on lower incomes, whose attachment to the labour force is less secure, and whose resources for raising children are more straightened are the appropriate targets of publicly funded income support.

So, the claim that it lasts for longer is untrue, and fairness or its alleged ‘better’ status is very much in the eye of the beholder.

[Btw, the point of contrast between Ruddite dithering and 'Direct Action' Tony is also a falsehood. Abbott says his sheme would start in "his first two years in government" in response to a question on Lateline, while the government's intention is to begin its scheme in January 2011.]

In short, as Terry aptly put it on another thread:

The principle that payments are based on income rather than need simply entrenches existing inequalities, and will do little to benefit the vast majority of mothers and children.

It’s a regressive, not a progressive scheme.

As I said in my post last night, the welfare state isn’t the sole creation of social democratic regimes. There is also a conservative welfare state, as Gosta Esping-Andersen argued, which is dedicated not to the reduction of inequality but to support for favoured members of ‘traditional’ social categories. This is precisely what Abbott’s plan does, and its inspiration has bugger all to do with any putative conversion to the importance of working women’s issues in his mind, or even any disseminated influence of feminism as a social movement, but everything to do with a highly paternalistic and conservative social outlook. Oh, and base electoral politics, Howard style.

There is no good reason why any progressives should be tempted to support it for even a passing millisecond.

Update: I’ve set out my reasons for opposing Abbott’s plan at greater length in the ABC’s The Drum this morning.

Update: I’ve put up a links post to some of the reaction to Abbott’s plan.

In 2007, he wrote a short book, Bad Dreaming, which to put it mildly, met with some legitimate criticism. Nowra, disavowing the work of Indigenous women, took it on himself to solve all the problems of Indigenous Australia himself. Last month, he published what could reasonably be described as a laudatory piece on the life and character of one Tony Abbott in The Monthly.

He’s now followed that up with an amazing rant about Germaine Greer, to be published in the same mag on Friday. Allegedly, it’s to mark the fourtieth anniversary of the publication of Greer’s The Female Eunuch.

You can get a taste of it from this article in The Independent:

In the essay… Nowra not only attacks Greer’s work, but criticises her appearance, her character and even her sanity. “She will do anything to get noticed,” he says, adding that when Greer appeared on the reality TV show Celebrity Big Brother, she looked like “a befuddled and exhausted old woman” who reminded him of “my demented grandmother”.

Yet Nowra has the gall to accuse Greer of misogyny. Nowra says that Greer doesn’t understand “what makes women tick” and that her work is too “middle class”. Presumably he is immune to such criticisms because:

Nowra… lives a studiedly bohemian life with his writer wife, Mandy Sayer, in Sydney’s red-light area, Kings Cross…

To allege that because women still wear make-up, Greer’s work had no value at the time it was written is risible.

This is not the first *controversial* editorial decision Monthly editor Ben Naparstek has made. What possessed him to commission such a piece of abusive raving? Were there not any women who might have written a fair and measured reflection on Greer’s influential book? To build sales? I won’t be giving him the satisfaction of buying a copy. I’ve already read more than enough of Nowra’s “intellectual” contribution.

Elsewhere: tigtog at Hoyden and [H/T Gummo] Philippa Martyr at Quadrant.

The long struggle of left and centre-left parties to maintain their relevance in the face of the resurgent market liberalism of the late 20th century gradually eroded any belief in the possibility of a fundamental transformation of capitalism, to the point where such ideas no longer receive even lip-service, let alone serious and sustained attention. Instead, these parties have found themselves lumbered with the task of managing the mixture of social democratic and market institutions that emerged from the conflicts of the 20th century, tweaking them sometimes with market-oriented reforms and sometimes with marginal new interventions. This is broadly consistent with the ‘end of ideology’ story.

[Incidentally, I think there's an interesting story to be told about the right's turn to the manufacture of ignorance, and its new-found populism - having to do with, among other things, profound social changes - but that's a tale for another time.]

I recently read Donald Sassoon’s magisterial One Hundred Years of Socialism. Sassoon tracks the history of the European left, and while there’s much to take away from his discussion, one conclusion to be drawn is that the project of social democracy lost its transformative edge because of its reluctance to make institutional changes – both in governance and in the broad field of political economy. Where such changes were made, and where there was a hegemonic cultural space for social democracy, as in some of the Nordic democracies, social democracy, even at the height of neo-liberal reaction, retained a strategic capacity to think long term about the shift to a different form of society.

It’s sometimes argued that the left won on the terrain of culture, and lost on the terrain of economics. There’s some truth to this, but not much comfort can be taken from it, because the social shifts towards a greater liberty to choose one’s style of life largely bubbled up from below, rather than being intended by left parties (in which there’s always been an authoritarian stream matching that of conservatives). And the post-materialist politics of liberation has shown a remarkable capacity for co-optation into consumerist capitalism, mistaking civic for collective action, as Nina Power has recently remarked.

It’s also somewhat questionable that Australian Labor has ever really had a strategic and transformative dimension. There’s good reason for the ideological distinction between labourism and social democracy.

Quiggin concludes his post:

But, in the meantime, their abandonment of reality-based politics has left managerialists like Rudd and Obama wrong-footed. Their whole approach to politics assumes that the other side shares a broadly consistent view of reality. But in John Cole’s acid metaphor, dealing with the agnotological right is like going on a dinner date where you suggest Italian and your date prefers a meal of tire rims and anthrax.

The big political problem is that while competent management commands widespread approval it does not mobilise much enthusiasm. What is needed here is a return to ideology, and a project to move beyond day-to-day management and offer the ‘light on the hill’ of a positive social transformation, based on justice and equality.

I couldn’t agree more.

It’s actually possible to construct a transformational narrative (albeit in minor key) around some of the initiatives of the ALP. But it’s not done. Too much of what Labor has done in office is represented as being about ‘restoring balance’, and tends to default back to the defensive posture characteristic of centre-left parties in the face of neo-liberalism.

For myself, I’d also diagnose the failures of the social democratic project as resulting from a too heavy dose of statism and a lack of concentration on the possibilities of autonomy and mutualism, but that’s perhaps a story for another post.

But the experience of UK Labour is instructive.

A government at the end of its life needs to contain the seeds of renewal within it. While there is some talk of a progressive revival through shifts to the voting system and coalescence with elements of the Liberal Democrats, and there’s no lack of interesting thinking about the relations between state and civil society, values and the economy, in the Labour Party itself, all passion is spent.

That’s the inevitable result of a process which hollowed out the party and tacked towards an illusory centre of gravity, with the best that could be achieved being minor adjustments to the prevailing policy consensus.

It may very well be possible to lay the foundations for a lengthy-ish period of government by prudent electoralism. But, in the absence of a broader strategic and ideological vision, it may also be futile in the medium term. Quiggin’s call for a return to ideology deserves much discussion.

Tony Abbott warns women against sex before marriage

Commentary: In a strange land.