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?
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?’
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’
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)
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!!’
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’
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’
The Crikey inspired revival of that hardy perennial – pace Jonathan Green – “where are teh wimminz?” – was discussed by Anna Winter in a post here at LP. It also sparked wide discussion all over the tubes. Notable is a late entry – Lisa Gunders’ second post at The Memes of Production. Responding largely to the comments threads at Possum’s Pollytics, she makes two very interesting and well argued points which go to the heart of the issue much more acutely than most of the fairly predictable verbiage generated by the Crikey provocation.
First, a response to the suggestion, which was a mainstay of what we might call the Neocon era of political blogging – that women in Australia are privileged, etc, etc, and that Australian feminists are ignoring their sisters in Iraq, Afghanistan, wherevs, you know the drill. I only have to refer to the archive of furious debates on FGM to signal where this rhetorical move was coming from. Gunders doesn’t necessarily contextualise it in this way, but she makes a very salient reply nevertheless.
She makes a closely argued and well referenced case that there is significant gender inequality in Australia (the denials of which are all too predictable and coloured by ideological blindness), and segues into a consideration of what is properly counted as politics, which moves beyond the usual dichotomies once again: Continue reading ‘Women in/and political blogging Redux’
The persistence, and now the widening, of the gap between men’s and women’s pay is one of the continuing scandals of Australian public life. Despite the fact that unequal pay for work of equal value has been illegal since the Whitlam era, what ought to be a major issue is typically surrounded by obfuscation, if not ignored entirely. In today’s Crikey, Eva Cox has published a useful corrective to many of the myths which serve to excuse, obscure and justify what is a continuing disgrace: Continue reading ‘Unequal pay for work of equal value’
So, we did what Hitchens and Bone and all those people thought was the right thing to do, and we went into Afghanistan and we bombed it from the air and we killed all those people, including noncombatants, and we effected regime change.
We helped to install Hamid Karzai. Who has has freed drug traffickers from jail, pardoned rapists, gang rapists, he has signed off on a law that makes Shiite women obliged to have sex with their husbands, where their husbands are entitled to withhold food and shelter from them, he has brought back into his circle half a dozen of the worst warlords of the 1990s, these are people who, because of their place in Afghan history, they are feared, and they are loathed, by the bulk of the population. And he has promised more government offices than there are provinces to govern.
Whenever we invade these countries and cause such immense suffering it’s always supposed to be about the womens’ situation. Because our invasion and our “peacekeeping” will fix it. And if feminists oppose doing this, or are “silent”, they’re demonstrating their lack of real commitment to the cause of womens’ liberation.
Explain to me again why eleven of our young people have died putting this man into power and keeping him there?
It’s time for the annual discussion about the lack of women in the Australia political blogosphere.
But with all the talk about how women are doing political blogging – they just aren’t being recognised – why is the question never: why are so many women avoiding the men of the political blogosphere? As I wrote over there in response to the suggestion that Crikey create a Double X style blog for women:
Women are blogging about politics in very high numbers now, it’s just that they are being ignored or not counted as “political”. A new women’s blog won’t stop that, it will only help reinforce the reasons many women don’t feel welcome in the more male-dominated commenting spaces if a new space is created just for them; and I doubt it will bring in any of the blokes who’ve been ignoring the huge number of female bloggers who already exist.
My feeling is that the number one reason women either stay away from the hard politics blogs or don’t identify as women on them is the sexism that they frequently encounter, whether from unfair and irrelevant comments about their appearance, their “shrill” and “angry” tone, and the dismissal of women’s experience, to the more apparently benign but still as frustrating sense that women are “above” that sort of thing that makes them feel judged as being unwomanly if they appear to enjoy it.
The women aren’t missing from the political blogosphere. If there are men here who are noticing their absence from wherever you are, then perhaps the more relevant question is why they are avoiding you and the places you go.
WTF SMH? WTF Simon Letch?
Screen capture from SMH - 6-08-2009_3-52-40PM
Why represent women planning to engage in political action as smugglers? In their underwear? And barefoot?
What the hell is your point? That women are being treated like they should be barefoot and in the kitchen and not engaging in political activity when corporations can torpedo their plans for protest with a “computer says no” response? Hey, that might be a good point. Shame that the news story underneath just mentions a “national homebirth rally” without any description of what the government is planning to do that has instigated the protests.
So, if that was the possibly useful point of your cartoon, then why dilute that by showing a woman as someone wanting to smuggle infants clandestinely instead of travelling openly as the carer of an infant? And then dilute it even further by engaging in casual sexualisation with the underwear? Could you have trivialised this whole issue more if you’d employed a thinktank to brainstorm it with you?
Also, to all the other sub-editors engaging in headlines about tantrums and dummy spits? Continue reading ‘One for the WTF files: SMH cartoon on QANTAS “overbooked babies” error’
Professor Barbara Pocock, of the Centre for Work and Life at the University of South Australia, thinks that we shouldn’t be talking about work-life balance at all. We should call it work-life interference, and try to measure how much work interferes with our life.
Professor Pocock leads a research team that conducts an annual survey relating to work-life in Australia. The survey has been running for three years now, so she and her team are starting to be able to pick out some trends. The most recent survey shows that part time work is no magic solution to the work-life balance struggle.
Professor Pocock, director of the Centre for Work and Life at the University of South Australia, told The Weekend Australian full-time working women should not kid themselves that going part-time would solve their problems.
“A third of full-time working women overall, 40 per cent of mothers and 25per cent of women without children, say they would rather work part-time,” she said.
“But this study suggests a lot of women will be disappointed by the amount of emotional relief they get by going part-time. On average, it will be better, but it is certainly not as big a change as you might expect.
“Everyone thinks those two free days mean you can run a house without help. So women tend not to purchase substitutes for their own time — they are much less likely to use a cleaner. But on the other side of that is a workplace that is often asking you to work from home or be available on those days off.”
Continue reading ‘Work-life balance; we’re doing it wrong’
From today’s Crikey: Bernard Keane:
Politics has to be, perhaps along with long-distance road transport, one of the least family-friendly occupations in the country.
Even your average backbench Federal MP works long hours. They’re away in Canberra 19-20 weeks of the year, and with a long schedule of electorate events and duties when they’re back home. Ministers, shadow ministers and swing vote senators, who have to get their heads around every piece of legislation and work out whether to back it or amend it, work even harder.
This time of year, the last sittings before the winter recess, are particularly intense.
Sarah Hanson-Young is to be commended for having her child with her in the chamber yesterday. It was for a division, not a debate, and her daughter was about to leave to return to Adelaide.
Instead there has been some remarkable vitriol, particularly on radio, and from at least one of her colleagues, Barnaby Joyce, who accused her of pulling a stunt. That was one of the lowest jibes I’ve seen in this place for a while. The distraught look on Hanson-Young’s face as a staffer took her daughter outside didn’t look much like a stunt.
Continue reading ‘Shame, Barnaby, Shame…’
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I might have mentioned in passing here, and I know I’ve said on Facebook, that I’ve become interested lately in exploring some themes which don’t really seem to fit into the LP space, and also in a more personal form of blogging, and indeed, a more writerly form of blogging.
One of the issues I’ve been interested in discussing is the complex intersections of the religious, the spiritual and the social. That’s in part from a place based perspective – associated in particular with the continuing life of Saint Mary’s, South Brisbane – and in part from a radical Catholic position. In the process of so doing, I’ve been addressing some themes both personal and philosophical.
I’m not entirely certain the ‘one size fits all’ blog works for this sort of discussion. I’m also not interested in getting into an argument about the existence of God, or whether all religion is evil, or Richard Dawkins, or whatnot. That sort of thing might have its place, but it’s rarely conducted with much intellectual rigour, and it simply doesn’t do anything for me.
Anyway, I write this really just to highlight some of what I’m doing for the benefit of those who enjoy my writing and appreciate my perspective. Continue reading ‘Blogging otherwise…’
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