Archive for the 'Feminism' Category

Coalition shows it doesn’t care about equal pay for women

Published
by
Mark
1 week, 4 days ago
in Feminism, Industrial Relations, Policy, Politics and Women
. 71 Comments

Writing in Crikey the other day, Eloise Keating suggested that “if Abbott wants to woo women, he should start with wages”:

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. Continue reading ‘Coalition shows it doesn’t care about equal pay for women’

Reaction to Abbott’s parental leave plan

Published
by
Mark
1 week, 4 days ago
in Feminism, Howardia, Media, Parenting, Policy, Politics, Poverty, Sociology and Women
. 59 Comments

As noted, Abbott’s International Women’s Day announcement of a paid parental leave plan has created a lot of debate here on LP [read previous threads here]. And it’s attracted a lot of commentary in the wider blogosphere and media.

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.

Unfairness and Abbott’s parental leave non-policy

Published
by
Mark
1 week, 5 days ago
in Economics, Feminism, Howardia, Industrial Relations, Media, Parenting, Policy, Politics and Women
. 144 Comments

A lot has been said about Tony Abbott’s parental leave speech yesterday and today on this blog, on these two threads. As I suspected would occur, most of the qualifications and the actual non-policy aspect of the policy were not reported in today’s press, and the general line was that Abbott’s scheme was ‘better’, because it offered income support for a longer period and at a replacement level of income, rather than the minimum wage.

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.

Continue reading ‘Unfairness and Abbott’s parental leave non-policy’

Feminism conquers the Liberal Party

Published
by
Paul Norton
1 week, 5 days ago
in Federal Elections, Feminism, Howardia, Parenting, Policy, Politics and Women
. 86 Comments

Well, the reality is more complicated and less cheerful than the title would suggest. However, without wishing to argue blow by blow with every point made by Mark or the commenters in this thread on the issue, I think there is another way to look at Tony Abbott’s announcement on paid parental leave – namely, as a concession of a key victory to feminism in Australia.

Prior to and throughout the life of the Howard Government, the question of whether it was all right for women to combine paid work and parenting, and of whether public policy should support this choice or discourage it, was a matter of partisan debate in Australia’s political mainstream. Whilst the Howard Government did not succeed in reversing, or even consistently strive to reverse, decades of sociocultural change and return to 1950s patterns of female workforce (non-)participation and stay-at-home motherhood, the policy initiatives which regaled single male breadwinner families (such as Family Tax Benefit B) or made life harder for working mothers (childcare cuts in its first couple of budgets), and the grudging nature of such concessions as were made to working mothers, were clear enough indicators of where Howard’s preferences lay.

The Mummy Wars were also a key front in the Culture Wars. In 1997 the Centre for Independent Studies disgraced itself by misusing social statistics to try to blame working mothers for increases in serious crime. Throughout the Howard Government’s life, writers such as Angela Shanahan, Bettina Arndt and the emerging Janet Albrechtsen filled copious column centimetres arguing that mothers ought to want to stay home with the kids, and misused or misinterpreted social statistics in attempts to prove that this is what most women really wanted.
Continue reading ‘Feminism conquers the Liberal Party’

Government: Don’t feed the trolls

Published
by
Mark
2 weeks, 2 days ago
in Authoritarianism, Crime, Ethics, Feminism, Life, Media, Politics, Race, Sociology and The Web
. 24 Comments

The last couple of weeks have seen a fair bit of furore about those intertubes. Anna Bligh wrote to Facebook about the defacing of a couple of memorial sites for a child and a teenager who’d been murdered in Queensland. Nick Xenophon suggested an Internet Ombudsperson, a suggestion Kevin Rudd applauded. There’ve also been numerous controversies about high school students posting racist groups, or offensive ones (for instance, effectively calling for attacks on sex workers). All this no doubt warrants condemnation – but it’s also worth observing that only a certain subsection of offensive content (usually involving children in one way or other) comes to the attention of the media and politicians. Little outrage is directed to the much larger subset of racist groups on Facebook (which don’t happen to be set up by high school kids), or the everyday misogyny that permeates much of the online space.

There’s no doubt that there are problems with Facebook’s method of dealing with offensive content. But the fundamental errors in this debate are twofold:

(a) Social networking sites are far more akin to phone networks than a traditional publishing model. A huge multiplicity of users constantly and simultaneously post content. Unlike talking on a phone, it leaves a permanent trace, but it’s a much better analogy;

(b) The direction of causation is the wrong way round. It’s not that the internet encourages people to do dumb and wrong things. It’s that people do dumb and wrong things, and they do them on the internet too.

The noise coming from politicians, and the ’solutions’, make one wonder whether they understand at all how social networking works. Part of the problem is one very easily resolved through taking more responsibility on the part of group creators for the little bit of the internet they set up, and using privacy and content management tools intelligently.

There’s an interesting take on all this from Colin Jacobs of Electronic Frontiers Australia, from whom I’ve borrowed the title of this post, and for a deeper examination of the issues, I’d also recommend the Oxford Internet Institute’s report on balancing freedom of speech and child protection online, which seeks to find some common ground between interlocutors who often seem to talk past one another.

Germaine Greer trashed in The Monthly

Published
by
Kim
2 weeks, 4 days ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Ethics, Feminism, Media, Politics and Women
. 245 Comments

I don’t know what qualifications you need to be a public intellectual. I think you get such a gig because readers of The Age have voted for you, or something. But apparently playwright Louis Nowra is one.

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.

John Quiggin’s Agnatology and the end of ideology

Published
by
Mark
3 weeks, 2 days ago
in Activism, Culture, Feminism, History, International, Philosophy, Politics and Sociology
. 30 Comments

There’s been a bit of word play on another thread about John Quiggin’s discussion of the coinage of the term ‘Agnatology’ to describe “the study of the manufacture of ignorance”. There are resonances between his diagnosis of the political right and Geoffrey Barker’s take on “bogan politics”, discussed on LP early in the week. What hasn’t attracted so much comment is Quiggin’s view on ideology.

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: Continue reading ‘John Quiggin’s Agnatology and the end of ideology’

You can take the boy out of up-country Queensland, but…

Published
by
Paul Norton
1 month ago
in Authoritarianism, Federal Elections, Feminism, Government, Howardia, Parenting, Policy, Politics and Women
. 214 Comments

…it would appear that it’s not so easy to take up-country Queensland (or, at least, 1970s up-country Queensland prejudices) out of the boy.

Nina Funnell in today’s SMH describes her gobsmacking encounter with the Prime Minister:

At that point one of my friends introduced me, dropping in that I am completing a PhD. At this, Rudd rolled his eyes and in a terse voice lacking any sense of irony remarked that is the “excuse” that “all” young women are using nowadays to avoid starting families. Since then I’ve come up with numerous one-line retorts, but in the moment I just froze in shock.

This tends to confirm the suspicions that a number of us at LP have expressed over the past three years.

Update: As of 12:53pm Brisbane time (that’s 1:43pm in NSW, ACT and Victoria) there’s nothing in the MSM or from the PM’s office responding to or denying Nina Funnell’s statement.

Elsewhere [by Mark]: In A Strange Land, Legal Eagle.

The Women’s Weekly and politicians

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in Authoritarianism, Culture, Education, Federal Elections, Feminism, Media, Politics and Sexuality
. 83 Comments

Over at Gatewatching, Jason Wilson references Andrew Elder’s very good question about the Australian Women’s Weekly being a graveyard for politicians, and asks another good one – given the magazine’s truly huge readership, were Tony Abbott’s comments ill advised?

The Weekly is a colossus, that really does reach an incredibly wide sweep of Australian voters. Looking bad in it means looking bad to a lot of people. For a man who is struggling with women voters, Tony Abbott has at the very least taken a huge risk with his comments. If they really were off the cuff, and really do hurt him, he will come to regret going unprepared to an encounter with the Weekly, one of Australia’s most important political publications.

To reiterate Mr Elder’s question – one that of course many feminists asked before either of us did – why aren’t magazines like the Weekly taken more seriously, more often, by more journos, scholars and political junkies, as both public sphere institutions, and as places where politics happens?

As summer holidays end, and Parliament prepares to resume, we’ve seen two stories this last week which have had lots of normally not so engaged voters talking; Abbott’s remarks about young women’s sexuality (quickly spun away as ‘private advice’ to his daughters when their potential for embedding a negative perception of his persona became clear) and Julia Gillard’s launch of the Myschool website.

Despite my own reservations about the latter, I have no doubt whatsoever it’s been a big political plus for the Government as the election year begins in earnest. Can the same be said for Tony’s thoughts about sexuality?

More public opinion on abortion – are hypothetical hard cases preserving a bad law?

Published
by
Paul Norton
5 months, 2 weeks ago
in Authoritarianism, Elections, Feminism, Law, Policy, Politics, Polls and Queensland
. 32 Comments

Todays Sydney Morning Herald and Australian both carry reports on an article by Katherine Betts in People and Place journal.

The article summarises findings that show solid and growing pro-choice majorities in public opinion surveys. This is not particularly new news, and is something I’ve written about previously. However, a reported comment by anti-choice bloke Alan Baker deserves some response:

I don’t know if you can say a majority of Queenslanders are supportive of decriminalisation. What it effectively means is that you can have abortion at any time, for any reason, up until the day of birth.

Continue reading ‘More public opinion on abortion – are hypothetical hard cases preserving a bad law?’

What’s (still) wrong with the Ernies

Published
by
Paul Norton
5 months, 2 weeks ago
in Culture, Feminism, Media and Politics
. 20 Comments

The Ernie Awards for 2009 were awarded last nght, with the Gold Ernie being awarded to religious wingnut Danny Nalliah for his comments blaming the Black Saturday bushfires on the Victorian Parliament’s decriminalisation of abortion in that State.

Why are the Ernies called the Ernies? They are named in honour of former Australian Workers Union Secretary Ernie Ecob, who infamously stated that women were only interested in being employed as shearers in order to have sex, to which women in the labour movement responded in the manner recalled by Alison Peters:

It all goes back to the original night held to mark the resignation of the late Ernie Ecob from the position of President of the NSW Labor Council. Ernie, who at the time was the Secretary of the Australian Workers Union (AWU) was notorious amongst women unionists for his comments (amongst others) that women who wanted to become shearers were only interested in the sex.

Continue reading ‘What’s (still) wrong with the Ernies’

If they were super athletes, they’d be in

Published
by
Helen
5 months, 4 weeks ago
in Feminism, Government, Immigration, International, Policy and Politics
. 50 Comments

There is absolutely no reason why Grace Gichuhi and Teresia Ndikaru Muturi shouldn’t be offered asylum in Australia under the provisions of existing international treaties: ”race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion”.

So, Immigration spokespeople and Senator Evans and Refugee tribunal, you think being a female member of a social subgroup which practices forced genital mutilation on women doesn’t constitute being a member of a particular social group?

There’s legislation set to go through Parliament to offer “complementary protection” to cover such cases, if their supporters can keep them here until then. Senator Evans, though, also has a measure of discretionary power and could have approved their application already. For reasons which I can only guess at, in this case, “can’t” means “won’t”.

(Contact Senator Chris Evans)

Look out! Incoming brain-fart!!

Published
by
Deborah
6 months ago
in Feminism and War
. 60 Comments

Robert has a very measured piece about defence, including thinking about women in combat roles. He mentioned Greg Sheridan’s column in The Australian, in which Sheridan offered several arguments contra women in front-line combat. Robert is clearly a nice person. I, on the other hand, may not be. Here’s a cross-post of my analysis of Sheridan’s column. Consider this light entertainment for a Friday afternoon.

Equality for women in war is sheer lunacy

You just know that Greg Sheridan is going to be on a sexist roll when the highlighted sentence from his column is…

The wilder shores of feminism have never been inhabited by normal people.

(Headline and quote from the print edition: the subbing of the on-line edition is slightly different.)

Hmm… well… the wilder shores of opinion writing in The Australian have clearly never been bedeviled by logical argument. Sheridan takes as his target the idea that women should be able to fight in all front-line combat units of the Australian army, if they (i.e. the individual women concerned) meet the physical requirements to do so. Sheridan doesn’t like it, and he says so, in several silly arguments, after saying that it’s the single stupidest idea he’s ever heard in his lifetime.

Warning: I might just be a little sarcastic in my responses to his arguments.

Continue reading ‘Look out! Incoming brain-fart!!’

Caster Semenya

Published
by
Robert Merkel
6 months, 1 week ago
in Feminism, Sociology and Sport
. 90 Comments

There was a broad-ranging discussion in this week’s Saturday Salon prompted by the middle-distance runner Caster Semenya.

Semenya, originally from a village in what I gather is a fairly remote part of South Africa, has come from almost nowhere over the past year to become the women’s world 800 metre champion in Berlin a couple of weeks ago. Her dramatic improvements in performance – from a time of 2:04 in October 2008 to 1:55 in the championships in August 2009, and rather masculine features – raised suspicions about her gender (or, alternatively, the use of performance-enhancing drugs), even before the championships.

Part of the results of what should have been a confidential IAAF investigation were somehow leaked to, of all places, Mike Hurst of The Daily Telegraph. Hurst’s report claims that the investigation has determined that Semenya has internal, undescended testes, no womb or ovaries, and an abnormally high testosterone level.

Continue reading ‘Caster Semenya’

Men, Women and Risk

Published
by
Helen
6 months, 2 weeks ago
in Feminism, Life and Medicine
. 137 Comments

Anson Cameron glares truculently out from the AGE Saturday opinion page (photo, sadly, not featured on this online version) and dishes it out to all those panty-waists, girly-men, Deltas, Gammas and drones “with fat voices” who would dare to suggest that bushwalking by yourself in a remote alpine area minus emergency beacon, crampons and other necessaries? Maybe not such a great idea.

It’s sad to live in a time when a man is slated for walking alone on a mountain. A cowardly age where the supine pontificate through a spray of Cheezels crumbs. Could John McDouall Stuart have foreseen a day when Australians upbraided one another for going close to the edge? Could Albert Jacka have imagined so many of his countrymen would come to believe mollycoddling themselves through their allotted span and dying amid a symphony of chirps and beeps given off by medical machines was a life lived? What might Nancy Bird have made of an age where her fellow Australians sit there and tut, immersed in disapproval, while stunning themselves with whatever calorific high their lapbands allow? How despondent would Sir John Monash be to see so many of his countrymen lost in a Bermuda triangle of couch, TV and fridge?

…etc. Yes, I think we get the idea.

Continue reading ‘Men, Women and Risk’