Archive for the 'Women' Category

Coalition wedges itself on parental leave

Published
by
Mark
5 days, 19 hours ago
in Parenting, Policy, Politics, Polls, Sociology and Women
. 41 Comments

Today’s Essential Research poll might show the reversal in the movement of the polls, which I suspected prompted Tony Abbott’s parental leave thought bubble last week. My view was that Abbott’s speech was a ‘crazy brave’ attempt to shake things up and respond to internal polling which was either showing the Coalition going backwards or, at best, failing to build on the momentum he’d displayed, in some measure, in public polls. There was some support for the view that it was polling driven in statements by Coalition MPs, and almost a week on, it’s certainly looking more and more like it was hardly considered policy which had been worked over for a long time, to put it charitably.

At any rate, as Possum observes, Labor’s lead in today’s poll is its best so far this year.

I think we can also see that Abbott’s parental leave announcement has been viewed very much through the prism of the parties’ images – which in themselves are composites of longstanding perceptions of party strengths and weaknesses, how the parties relate to social cleavages, and less long term assessments of competence and direction in office or in opposition. Policy tends to be mediated through this prism, rather than being an independent variable in its own right. In other words, few policy announcements – in and of themselves – are likely to be political game changers.

It’s useful, then, to counterpose two tables from Essential Report’s research [courtesy of Possum]:

As Possum also observes, the crunch is in the cross-tabs:

Among Labor voters, 61% supported the Government’s scheme and 15% supported the Opposition’s. However, only 37% of Coalition voters supported the Opposition’s scheme – 20% supported the Government scheme and 35% supported neither.

Continue reading ‘Coalition wedges itself on parental leave’

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

Published
by
Mark
1 week, 3 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’

Abbott’s parental leave non-policy

Published
by
Mark
1 week, 5 days ago
in Ethics, Industrial Relations, Media, Parenting, Policy, Politics and Women
. 46 Comments

Tony Abbott has chosen to mark International Women’s Day which is, to his mind, of course, all about “benefits… provided to families with children”, by announcing a policy for six months’ paid parental leave at actual salary levels, funded by a levy on big business.

Or has he?

That’s the impression given on the tv news tonight, but a reading of Abbott’s actual speech shows that it’s not a policy announcement.

Rather, Abbott is determined to show that a Liberal government would:

let people know what it has in mind well before positions are finalized because the job of government is to make the best decisions, not to pretend to have all the answers from the beginning.

So, what’s been reported is actually not firm, and is supposed to be some sort of example of Abbott’s idea of the policy making process, to provide a point of contrast with what he alleges the Labor government’s approach to policy to be. This is something he has in mind, rather than an announcement, and it will be subject to consultation and further reflection, and so on. It will be interesting to see if this is the way it’s reported, and whether all the qualifications, musing and speculation in his speech make it into the papers. Continue reading ‘Abbott’s parental leave non-policy’

Germaine Greer trashed in The Monthly

Published
by
Kim
2 weeks, 3 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.

Vote for the Hottest 100 songs of all time by female artists

Published
by
Paul Norton
2 weeks, 5 days ago
in Music and Women
. 103 Comments

Last July, we directed a few (well, quite a lot of) well-chosen words towards JJJ, its listeners and various other parties over the dearth of songs by female artists in their Hottest 100.

On the premise that it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness, I would like to draw your attention to this Facebook group.

Happy voting. My Hottest 25 (in no particular order) were as follows:
Continue reading ‘Vote for the Hottest 100 songs of all time by female artists’

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.

Karen Brooks on Tony the Abbott and ‘His’ Women

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in Media, Parenting, Politics, Sexuality and Women
. 42 Comments

Karen Brooks’ post on Tony Abbott’s now infamous interview with the Women’s Weekly is the best piece I’ve read about its implications. Read it here.

Rudd’s honeymoon and Abbott’s one night stand

Published
by
Anna Winter
3 months ago
in Levity, Music, Politics and Women
. 231 Comments

So no doubt all you ladies out there have finally felt that you have permission to admit your passion for the love rug.

Tony Abbott laughing
“What about the Love Rug?” he demanded. “Can’t you lift your gaze?” (via)

Emboldened by Ms Albrechtsen’s words I will admit to a level of respect for the man. His beliefs really are genuine and well-considered. He, for the moment at least, seems rather incapable of bullshitting the electorate about what he thinks. On a certain level I find that more understandable and easy to empathise with than I do politicians with no discernible policy ideas or passions at all.

But invoking the bad boy fantasy in support of Abbott’s chances is more apt than Ms Albrechtsen seems to understand. Sure the fantasy of catching and taming the bad boy might be common, but almost everyone understands it as fantasy. We all know that in real life it plays out as an action-packed summer, ending in heartbreak and/or difficult life lessons (and maybe even a love child).

Of course, most of us also cast our votes for reasons other than analogies with teenage fantasy. But that’s all a little serious for a Friday afternoon. So instead, listen to Sabian Wilde do a Gregorian chant about the Mad Monk.

[audio:http://inconversationwith.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/091114_icw_madmonk.mp3]

The Women

Published
by
Anna Winter
3 months, 2 weeks ago
in Media, Politics and Women
. 114 Comments

Dr. Cat’s post on women and Tony Abbott is a must-read. She really nails one of the problems I’ve had with the general coverage about Abbott’s “women problem”. So go and read it now. I’ll wait.

I’m not going to repeat anything she’s written because it’s unnecessary, rather I want to talk about another thing I’ve noticed through all the exciting #spillage of the last week, and that’s the role of women in the events themselves. We’re really starting to see the effects of decades of pushing to get women accepted into all areas of public life, while at the same time we’re still seeing the effects of keeping them marginalised for so long.

This week, after Penny Wong negotiated a deal with the Liberal party on the ETS, we’ve had Sophie Mirabella’s exit from the front bench alongside Tony Abbott, triggering a mass walkout of further Liberal frontbenchers. We’ve had “loyal girl” Julie Bishop, who has managed to survive three leadership spills and keep her job. We’ve had the brave and principled senators Judith Troeth and Sue Boyce, who walked the walk when other Liberal Senators toed the party line. While all this unfolded, Kevin Rudd was overseas, leaving Julia Gillard to run the country, while the new opposition leader promises to stop flirting with her. And over in NSW, the ALP caucus voted to make Kristina Keneally their first female premier.

Continue reading ‘The Women’

Women in/and political blogging Redux

Published
by
Kim
6 months, 2 weeks ago
in Activism, Blogging, Culture, Ethics, Feminism, Media, Politics, Sociology, The Web and Women
. 30 Comments

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’

Unequal pay for work of equal value

Published
by
Mark
6 months, 4 weeks ago
in Activism, Feminism, Industrial Relations, Politics, Sociology and Women
. 171 Comments

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’

Explain to me again why we’re there?

Published
by
Helen
7 months ago
in Afghanistan, Feminism, International, Politics, War and Women
. 194 Comments

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?