Can women have it all? It’s the question that seems to have overtaken ”what do women want?” in the media (though the latter still figures), and to feminist writer and journalist Anne Summers, it’s a particularly galling one.

”It epitomises the inequality between women and men, because no one asks men if they can [...]]]> By Amanda Dunn

Can women have it all? It’s the question that seems to have overtaken ”what do women want?” in the media (though the latter still figures), and to feminist writer and journalist Anne Summers, it’s a particularly galling one.

”It epitomises the inequality between women and men, because no one asks men if they can have it all,” she says.

In fact, this is the opening gambit of Summers’ new book, a polemic called The Misogyny Factor, in which she argues that women’s equality is still far from won in Australia, stymied by an entrenched view of their ”inferiority and unworthiness” and therefore unsuitability to take an equal place in society alongside men.

And, she points out, these views can be held by women or men.

”I guess one of the things that I have very reluctantly had to conclude … was something that I just couldn’t really believe was possible, that a lot of people don’t actually believe in equality. There is a fundamental disagreement on the part of some people that women should be equal and I just find that truly shocking. It’s like a denial of basic human rights for women.”

We digest this sobering thought while looking out of Trocadero’s wide windows onto the Yarra River, an unseasonably warm day showing the city at its best. While we talk, we munch on pumpkin risotto with roast pumpkin and candied pepitas, and a miso roasted salmon with black and white eggplant puree and ginger. We also share a colourful iceberg salad.

Summers’ book traverses considerable ground in relatively few pages, tracing the history of the women’s movement in Australia from its second-wave halcyon days, in which much progress was made, to the past 30 years, during which that progress seems to have stalled.

She also details some of the more offensive abuse levelled at Prime Minister Julia Gillard – some of which is sickening, no matter your political persuasion – and makes a compelling case that Gillard has been the victim of sex discrimination and bullying in her job.

It may be, Summers reflects, that this particularly nasty sexism has been brought out by having a female PM. But the rise of social media has also given people a much louder voice than they otherwise might have had.

Having said that, Summers sees many reasons for optimism, too. Social media has also swung in feminism’s favour, with the hashtag everydaysexism gaining traction, and the emergence of Destroy the Joint (a reclaiming of broadcaster Alan Jones’ lament that women were ”destroying the joint”). The everydaysexism hashtag has been a powerful tool, Summers says, giving voice to issues and problems that otherwise would go unsaid.

A frequent user of social media herself, Summers says the difference between political agitation now and in the early 1970s is stark. For example, many people didn’t even have telephones at the time, so if someone wanted to organise a rally, it had to be done via letters or doorknocking. Now it’s as simple as a tweet or a Facebook post.

Summers also feels encouraged that young women seem more comfortable with the F-word – feminism, that is – than in previous generations.

”I think it’s changing dramatically and it’s one of the things I’ve actually found quite heartening in the past year,” she says. ”Though I actually think it is irrelevant. I think it’s just a total distraction to talk about ‘are you a feminist or are you not a feminist?’ I don’t care what you call yourself, what I care about is what your attitudes are. And if you support women’s equality, and the basic tenets of that, which are the right to control your body, the right to control your income, freedom from violence … we’re marching shoulder to shoulder.”

Suddenly, all these issues are back on the table. And, yes, she knows there are people who have become impatient with the constant calling out of what they consider to be minor instances of sexism, wanting instead to focus on problems such as economic equality or an end to violence. Summers has sympathy with that view: of course the big things are ultimately what matter, ”but the big things are made up of little things, too”.

Asked if she can remember when her feminist consciousness was first raised, Summers doesn’t hesitate. It was 1969, when she was an arts student at Adelaide University. She had been married for two years, changing her name and thinking nothing of it. ”I thought that I was a thoroughly modern woman.”

But then she read an article by Juliet Mitchell in New Left Review, called Women, the Longest Revolution, which detailed areas in which women were yet to achieve equality, such as in education, employment and sexuality. ”It was just a eureka moment, because I identified with everything she’d said and it made me re-examine my own life.”

Summers became involved in the women’s movement, along the way leaving her marriage ”in a great flurry of liberation”.

”We were really on a voyage of discovery. We were learning about ourselves, we were trying to understand the way we fitted into society or the ways we didn’t fit in.”

After four years of research, she created waves of her own with the publication of her ground-breaking 1975 book, Damned Whores and God’s Police.

After the early years of ”women’s lib”, progress for women seems to have stalled since the 1980s, Summers says. But it was given new impetus by Gillard’s ”misogyny” speech, in which she took Opposition Leader Tony Abbott to task on the floor of Parliament, saying ”I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man”.

Summers, who writes at length about it in her book, sees it as a watershed moment, in which the most powerful woman – person – in the country named sexism and said she had been offended by it.

Often, powerful women will argue against sexism, Summers says, but ”they all say, without exception: ‘It’s never happened to me.’ Which, of course, is complete bullshit, because it’s happened to everybody, one way or another. But they all say ‘it hasn’t happened to me’, because no one wants to be seen as a victim.”

As Gillard herself said, calling out sexism is not ”playing the gender card” and so other women began to follow her example.

”Now I think women are saying, if you complain about it, it’s empowering,” Summers says. ”And that’s quite a big shift.”

Originally published: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/lunch-with-anne-summers-20130516-2jnaz.html

”Paid parental leave is an important economic reform, very important economic [...]]]> If Tony Abbott is serious about wanting to boost women’s workforce participation, there are more effective and less expensive ways to accomplish this than via his paid parental leave scheme, which has been forecast to cost $5 billion a year by the Parliamentary Budget Office.

”Paid parental leave is an important economic reform, very important economic reform, that will boost participation and productivity,” Abbott said this week on ABC’s AM program.

Actually, Mr Abbott, no it won’t. Or at least not nearly as much as other measures, ones that are needed by women much more and for far longer than the first six months after the birth of their babies.

I am talking about childcare.

There is plenty of high-calibre research on the reasons – and the remedies – for women failing to return to work after they have had babies. For instance, ”Game-changers: Economic reform priorities for Australia” released last year by the Grattan Institute. It devotes a chapter to the overall economic benefits to Australia of lifting our woefully low, by OECD standards, rate of workforce participation by women.

The report says if Australian women did as much paid work as women in Canada – which would entail an extra 6 per cent of women in the workforce – our gross domestic product would be boosted $25 billion (think what that would do for the budget bottom line).

All the research shows that the two main factors influencing female workforce participation are marginal tax rates and the net costs of childcare. Canada’s female workforce participation ”increased substantially above trend levels when [in 1997] marginal taxes and the net costs of childcare were reduced”.

Paid parental leave is a factor, of course, but it is not nearly as crucial as Abbott seems to think. International experiences suggests, according to the Grattan Institute, that ”government support for childcare has about double the impact of spending on parental leave” in influencing women’s workforce participation.

This makes perfect sense.

The availability and cost of suitable childcare is a continuing parental nightmare and for many families is the tipping point for deciding whether or not a mother returns to work.

The Grattan Institute has had modelling done by NATSEM (National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling) that shows ”take-home rates of pay after childcare costs, tax and foregone welfare benefits are the primary drivers in the female workforce participation rate”.

And women, particularly mothers of young children, are treated harshly by our tax system. The effective marginal tax, welfare and childcare rates are, the Grattan Institute reports, ”exceptionally high – in [many] cases, above 100 per cent”.

So where is the incentive to return to work?

Having six months leave after childbirth, even at full salary, does nothing to address the far more intractable problem of how to find, and fund, full-time childcare for the first five years, and then before and/or after-school care for up to a further decade.

The government has put a lot of money into childcare, principally in assisting with the costs via the childcare benefit and the childcare tax rebate, which pays 50 per cent of costs to a cap of $7500 per child per year and which is no longer indexed.

But these measures, while welcome, barely make a dent in the costs for some parents and are not applicable at all to others.

Some Sydney parents pay more for childcare than they do for private school fees. We are talking about $25,000 a year.

Then there are those who have to hire home help because centre-based childcare does not suit their hours of work. These mothers might be shift-workers (police officers, emergency workers, nurses) or they might be high-paid senior executives. Either way, the tax system does not help with the cost.

The whole question of tax deductibility for childcare is pretty much a no go-area for both political parties, on equity and cost grounds. The calculations show that a family earning $75,000 would be worse off, receiving considerably less back from tax deductibility than they now get from the direct government payments and rebate, but a family earning $150,000 would receive substantially more than the maximum of $7500 they are entitled to.

Given the critical importance of childcare for enabling mothers to return to work, it is time we had a conversation about how to reduce the costs for all working mothers, not just those fortunate enough to be able to use centre-based care.

The Grattan Institute recommends that the Family Tax Benefit be treated as income in the hands of the family’s first wage earner, and that childcare costs be a deduction in calculating tax and eligibility for welfare benefits. This model, rather than straight out deductibility of costs, would seem to be more equitable and might be effective in removing the current disincentives to mothers returning to work.

There is no question that, rather than wasting billions on a paid parental leave scheme that leaves mothers stranded after six months, the policy debate should be around how to improve our chaotic childcare system so that it facilitates, rather than blocks, women’s return to work.

But Abbott does not have a childcare policy. Not yet anyway. He will refer the whole mess to the Productivity Commission and let it sort it out. Mothers who would like to return to work will need to wait several years under a Coalition government until it develops a policy.

Which raises the question: is Abbott’s scheme in fact a natalist policy masquerading as economic reform?

Perhaps Abbott, a Rhodes scholar let’s remember, did not misspeak when he said: ”We do not want educated women, at the higher degree level, to deny them a career. If we want women of that calibre to have families – and we should – well we’ve got to give them a fair dinkum chance to do so and that’s what this scheme of paid parental leave is all about.”

If his scheme is ”all about” raising the fertility rate of highly educated Australian women, this perhaps explains why he is willing to pay them up to $75,000 to have a baby but not address what happens when the six months is up.

Despite all the talk of ”economic reform”, it’s the babies he wants.

Leopard and spots come to mind.

Originally published at: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/abbotts-baby-bonus-in-disguise-20130517-2jrmf.html

A few weeks ago, when a woman was abused on [...]]]> What would I do? I ask myself each time I hear about another racist rant on a train or a bus somewhere in our country. Would I stand by complicitly or, as more and more people seem to be doing, would I take on the ranter?

A few weeks ago, when a woman was abused on a Melbourne bus for singing in French, my partner and I talked about how we would have reacted if we’d been there. I would have gone and sat beside her, I said. All I could imagine myself doing in the face of such hostility and implied violence was a silent act of solidarity. I could not see myself confronting and arguing with the abusers.

Illustration: Simon Bosch

Since then, however, there have been several more such incidents on public transport in both Melbourne and Sydney and at least on some of these occasions other passengers have defended the person under attack and have rounded on the abusers. These incidents have also been filmed (smartphones are changing everything) and some people have been charged as a result of the evidence thus collected.

Melbourne writer Sarah Jones this week wrote a compelling article in Daily Life about the time on a train in Perth nine years ago when she heard a fellow passenger abuse a young Asian couple, calling them “f—ing slopes” and telling them to go back to where they came from.

“No one in the carriage I was sitting in was happy that this was going on. There was certainly no sense of triumphalism that the racist was telling it like it was,” Jones wrote. “You could see it in people’s eyes that we were all thinking What should I do? And the longer we tried to work this out and the longer the abuse went on the more collectively ashamed we became.”

“Something in me responded before my rational self engaged,” Jones recounted and she yelled to the man to “pipe down”. Her action incited the man to transfer his belligerence from the Asian couple to her. She describes how he elbowed other passengers aside to stand in front of her exuding “pure unadulterated aggression” and she grasped she was in danger.

“I realised I was in it now and my only hope of getting out of it physically unscathed was to convince this guy that I was up for a fight,” Jones wrote. “That underneath my pin-striped suit and spectacles I was as raging and unpredictable as him.” As the man told her he was going to rip her limb from limb, Jones poked her index finger in his chest and “never breaking eye contact for a second, said ‘Just you try it mate. Just f—ing try it’”.

At this point some other men stood to support her, phones were used to call police and Jones survived unscathed.

Afterwards, however, she fell apart.

What if no other passenger had stood up for her? she wondered. What if the man had followed her off the train? She had put herself in danger without a thought but later, when rationality returned, she regretted what she had done.

And that’s the thing. Standing up to aggression of any kind is often an instinctive response. You don’t know how you are going to react until it happens to you, and sometimes your instincts are at odds with your rational self.

I had a comparable experience years ago when three women confronted me in the bathroom of a New York bar and demanded my handbag. I was so outraged that I yelled at them to rack off; they were so astonished at my failure to follow the muggees’ code and simply hand over my stuff that they did. Only later did I worry: What it they’d been armed? What if they’d beaten me up? Was it worth risking injury for a stupid handbag?

These incidents of racial abuse on our public transport not only prompt us to at least theoretically evaluate our personal bravery limits but they raise the far bigger question of why is this happening.

Is it something new or is it just that we are now talking about, and filming, such incidents?

Often it takes a visitor to confront us with the racism (and sexism) that is so much a part of our daily existence that we scarcely notice it. This week John Oliver, filming here for The Daily Show, the renowned US TV program, described us, with some astonishment, as “comfortably racist”. Perhaps it is only when this racism – or sexism – is used aggressively against total strangers, on a bus for instance, that we are forced to confront the fact that this is who we are.

And let’s hope most of us don’t want us to be that. But taking on individual instances, while brave and I think necessary, is not going to reach into the vast underbelly of our country where these sentiments are nourished and reinforced.

Our political, business, church and other leaders are going to have to use their positions to confront, challenge and change these sentiments, to make crystal clear to our citizenry that we are – and always have been – a country of immigrants.

The racial and ethnic composition of our population is becoming more diverse and, our leaders should be insisting, this is making us economically, culturally and morally strong.

We should not fear what our country is becoming – we should embrace its opportunities. But clearly this view is not being argued, particularly at the political level.

Instead, under the radar, some politicians exploit fear and rage for what they think will be electoral advantage.

It is an unbecoming and dangerous strategy that will test us, not just on public transport should we happen to witness an act of racist aggression, but as a nation as we try to make our economic way into the Asian Century.

Original published at: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/the-courage-to-take-a-stand-20130419-2i5a5.html

There are four women, including Gillard, in the 20-member cabinet [...]]]> When she announced her new ministry last Monday, Julia Gillard made history. For the first time, women make up one-third of the Australian government. Although the cabinet remains unchanged, the promotion of three women into the ministry has radically altered the gender balance of the government.

There are four women, including Gillard, in the 20-member cabinet which in itself is a record (and the numbers were even better before the resignation of Nicola Roxon as attorney-general this year).

But it is the outer ministry where the radical change has occurred. Gillard promoted three women: Sharon Bird, Catherine King and Jan McLucas. This means that six of the 10 members of the ministry are women. That’s 60 per cent. That’s unprecedented in Australia.

Photo: AP

The cabinet of French President Francois Hollande has perfect gender balance. This was something his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy promised but did not quite achieve (although he did manage seven women in his 15-person cabinet). Hollande has expanded his cabinet to 34 people and appointed 17 women and 17 men.

“When you look at Hollande and his Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault’s choices for the French government, few raise questions of competence and legitimacy,” wrote Agnes Poirier in The Guardian last May. “There seem to be few ‘gimmick’ appointments and no Sarkozy-like beauty contest (the former president was famous for favouring slim and fit people, and if possible, good-looking). In fact, Hollande’s parity achievement feels normal. At long last.”

While we cannot make such a claim in Australia, we can certainly take some pride in seeing better representation of women in the government.

In addition to the cabinet and the ministry, there are also 12 parliamentary secretaries, of whom four – or 33 per cent – are women. All up, there are 14 women in the 42 positions so women make up 33 per cent of the government.

Women are 37.3 per cent of the parliamentary Labor Party so they do not (yet) have perfect representation in proportion to their numbers, but this is the closest they have come.

It took a female prime minister to make it happen.

It might be worth noting that all the women ministers remained loyal to Gillard in the attempted coup on her leadership. Although a few female members of caucus supported Kevin Rudd (and were willing to be filmed with him while he spoke after the meeting where Gillard was re-elected unopposed), there were no women in the key group of plotters. Nor did any women resign as a result.

We do not know whether this was the result of gender solidarity or a combination of other factors, but it would be fascinating, down the track, to interview the key women ministers and ask them their reasons.

If we look around the world at comparable democracies we see that Australia is now a leader in gender equality in government.

President Barack Obama’s cabinet in his first administration comprised 29 per cent women which while good is overshadowed by the current Australian statistic. (Obama is still selecting his new cabinet and given that his nominees mostly require Senate confirmation it will be some time before we know the gender balance of his new team).

In Britain, the government of David Cameron barely registers on the gender equity Richter scale. According to the recently published Sex and Power 2013, which tracks women in leadership positions, only 17.4 per cent of the government’s ministers are women.

Gordon Brown’s government had women occupying 27.3 per cent of cabinet positions.

What is pretty clear is that conservative governments tend to have the worst track record when it comes to electing and promoting women.

It is really puzzling why this should be so.

In Australia, the Liberal Party once championed women and ensured, via its party structure, that certain positions in the organisation were reserved for women. This thinking did not extend to parliamentary representation so that the Liberal Party finds itself with an embarrassingly low number of women in Canberra.

Labor, with its 40:40:20 affirmative action policy, which requires 40 per cent of seats to be held by women (and 40 per cent by men), currently has 38 women members and senators. The Liberal Party has just 19. Yet the party resists the notion of positive action to remedy this.

“Every woman on our side of politics has been selected on merit,” Julie Bishop, the deputy leader of the party, said last November. Given the numbers, this is a rather alarming admission that there are fewer women of merit on the Liberal side of politics.

Privately, of course, the Liberals are worried and have asked former senator Kay Patterson to conduct an investigation as to how the numbers of women in the parliamentary wing of the party can increase. Some within the party are privately hoping that Patterson will be brave enough to raise the question of quotas. It has worked for Labor (Gillard would not have won preselection without the party’s affirmative action policy) so why wouldn’t it also work for the conservatives?

As it is, the numbers of women in Federal Parliament are on a downward trajectory. Four fewer women were elected in 2010 and it may be there will be fewer again after this year’s poll.

What we do know, with utter certainty, however, is that if there is an Abbott government, Australia’s historic improved gender representation will be reversed.

Abbott has said that his current leadership team will be his government. If he sticks to his word, there will be just two women in cabinet – a halving of the current numbers – and far fewer women ministers and parliamentary secretaries.

Under Abbott there will be just nine women – two out of 20 cabinet members, four out of 12 ministers and three out of 15 parliamentary secretaries – making up 19 per cent of his government.

It will be a gender U-turn of massive proportions and Australia will find itself making a different kind of history.

Originally published at: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/high-tide-for-women-ministers-20130329-2gz20.html

Maybe our wartime leaders, John Curtin and the sainted Ben Chifley, deserve the mantle but it was before my time, so I can’t say. [...]]]> While I was watching the ugly events of Thursday afternoon unfold, I was trying to remember the last time Australia had a perfect prime minister. Or even one who was universally popular.

Maybe our wartime leaders, John Curtin and the sainted Ben Chifley, deserve the mantle but it was before my time, so I can’t say. Certainly those men who have ruled us since have all been divisive figures whose popularity waxed and waned and whose competence was continually questioned – by their own side as much as by their opponents. But our memories of them become more benign the further away they are from having been in power.

Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

Gough Whitlam is now a revered person but I remember the vituperation of 1975. Malcolm Fraser is now an out-and-out leftie but I was in Canberra in the late 1970s when he was seen as a chaotic and divisive figure.

Maybe even John Howard will eventually become beloved.

But for Julia Gillard, the judgments are so harsh they border on the demonic. Never has there been a more incompetent and unreliable leader, people say, including many of her own colleagues. Yet this week marked Gillard’s 1000 days as Prime Minister. She will soon have served longer than Whitlam.

Gillard has been unlucky enough to have stepped up to the job under two unprecedented circumstances: the hung parliament and the 24-hour news cycle.

The absence of parliamentary majorities is a fact of life in the US Congress and most European parliaments. But for us it is new (at the federal level) and it means that virtually every action the government wants to take must be negotiated. This is then portrayed as a negative – ”the Prime Minister was forced to …” – rather than as an example of the skilled exercise of governance.

The 24-hour news cycle is now on steroids, so that the pace of politics is absurdly accelerated. There is no time for reflection or second-guessing – and plenty of scope for mistakes, which a voracious media then pounces on as confirmation of its earlier negative judgment (”the Prime Minister was forced to …”).

It was in this environment that Kevin Rudd’s supporters used the media like patsies to try to promote the notion that Gillard’s time was up, that her standing in the polls was terminal and that only their man could prevent Tony Abbott from romping into The Lodge.

Simon Crean, acting like the mad uncle at a wedding, provided the trigger to try to fell the Prime Minister. It was a spectacular own goal. As we all know, Rudd did not have the numbers and did not stand and Gillard, for the second time in 12 months, prevailed. Crean’s ministerial career is over and his appalling judgment makes him a ridiculous figure.

It is probably no coincidence that when Gillard and the ALP were riding high(er) in the polls, at the end of last year, it was when any chance of a Rudd comeback had been thoroughly dismissed by the media and there was no obvious public dissent within the ranks.

The descent in the polls for the party and for Gillard personally can be tracked to the Rudd comeback talk.

Whether the Rudd forces will, finally, surrender and unite behind Gillard remains to be seen. It seems unlikely given the fissures but Joel Fitzgibbon did say after Thursday’s non-ballot that this is ”a time for healing”.

Imagine if he meant it and he and the rest of the Rudd forces in the ALP were to set aside their petulant and self-indulgent conduct and throw their energies into promoting the government and its impressive legislative track record. What would the polls make of that?

Thursday showed Gillard’s toughness and her coolness under intense pressure. This is an asset that Australians of all stripes should appreciate. It’s what we need in a leader. A person who is not prone to panic.

The trouble is Australians are not used to such toughness in a woman and there are plenty who feel uncomfortable with it. Gillard revealed recently, in a very interesting video interview with the blogger Eden Riley, that she felt women in politics needed to be as tough, if not tougher, than the men. Not for her the notion that women should make politics kinder and gentler.

Being a tough female prime minister makes Gillard a unique target but, as Thursday showed, no matter what is thrown at her, she stands firm. Many of us might find this unpalatable (especially as it contradicts our stereotyped notion of how women should behave). But my guess is that the judgment of history will be very different.

Originally published at: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/judgment-of-history-will-be-kinder-to-pm-than-tv-news-cycle-20130321-2girw.html

First, it was DLP senator John Madigan, who entertains high hopes of being Tony Abbott’s Brian Harradine.

Two weeks ago [...]]]> If Tony Abbott was hoping he could tiptoe across the victory line on September 14 without having to take a definitive stand on abortion, he clearly wasn’t counting on the derring-do of some of his political bedfellows.

First, it was DLP senator John Madigan, who entertains high hopes of being Tony Abbott’s Brian Harradine.

Two weeks ago Madigan introduced legislation that would prohibit the Medicare rebate being paid on abortions decided on the basis of the gender of the foetus. Widespread as such gender-specific (and mostly anti-female) abortions are in countries such as India and China, there is absolutely no evidence that they are being performed in Australia. So, why the bill? Why indeed?

Abbott may be at pains to assure us, as he did on 60 Minutes last Sunday, that his faith ”must never dictate my politics” but Madigan, who hails from a party that most of us thought had died a natural death decades ago, has no such constraints. The entire reason he is in politics seems to be to advance a religious agenda.
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”There is no such thing as a safe abortion,” he told The Sydney Institute on February 19, the week before he introduced his bill. ”Someone always dies.”

Madigan’s bill is unlikely to go anywhere but he has done us all a big favour by reminding us what life was like under Howard and Harradine and how it could well be again under Abbott and Madigan. (For those with poor memories, please remember how Harradine won a ban on RU486, the so-called abortion drug, as his price for allowing the partial privatisation of Telstra).

Don’t say we haven’t been warned.

Then last week in Victoria, the maverick member for Frankston, Geoff Shaw, effectively sacked premier Ted Baillieu by going to the crossbenches and depriving the government of its working majority. He let it be known his two conditions for supporting the new government of Denis Napthine: reform of the parliamentary superannuation scheme to make it more generous for recently elected members such as himself (he only won his seat in 2010), and repeal of the state’s laws that decriminalised abortion in 2008.

Shaw is an evangelical and is, not to put too fine a point on it, rabid when it comes to abortion. When then premier Baillieu called him in to reprimand him over the infamous car-rorting scandal, Shaw turned the tables and abused the premier for having voted for abortion decriminalisation, according to a report in The Age this week.

Premier Napthine has said he respects the decision of the Parliament on the abortion law: ”I have no plans of changing abortion law to a new state,” he said somewhat confusingly this week. However, actions may speak louder than words. Napthine, who voted against abortion decriminalisation in 2008, this week dumped Mary Wooldridge as his Minister for Women’s Affairs. Wooldridge, who voted for the abortion law reform, was replaced in that role by newly promoted minister Heidi Victoria, who voted against it.

”There are two places where I think children should be safe: one, in the womb; and two, in the home,” Geoff Shaw has said. All eyes will be on Victoria in coming months to see the extent to which Shaw uses the balance of power to hold the government to his demand for abortion law change.

And if he does, Tony Abbott will have nowhere to hide.

The recent women-only Galaxy poll that found two-thirds of women ready to vote against Prime Minister Julia Gillard still found deep levels of distrust towards Abbott’s views on abortion. Overall, 39 per cent of the 800 women polled were concerned about his views, while with younger women, aged 18-34, a full 46 per cent were concerned.

Abbott has recently tried to recast himself as tolerant towards abortion. Now, instead of believing, as he has said in the past, ”up to 100,000 abortions a year is this generation’s legacy of unutterable shame”, he now blithely thinks abortion should be ”safe, legal and rare”. It beggars belief that he, or his advisers, felt it wise to take this language from Bill Clinton on this subject.

Abbott might just as well go around repeating that other famous Clinton utterance, ”I did not have sexual relations with that woman Miss Lewinsky”, for all the relevance that the ”safe, legal and rare” comments made in the United States in 1992 have for this country and our context.

Clinton’s comments were inserted into the Democratic Party platform as a means of trying to lower the temperature on the fierce partisans discussions on Roe v. Wade, the 1973 US Supreme Court decision that legalised abortion at the federal level. In Australia, where abortion is a state law, a federal politician has no power to determine abortion’s safety, legality or frequency. It is a red herring for Abbott to use such language.

Perhaps no one told him that the words were removed from the Democratic Party platform in 2008. No one uses them any more and for a very good reason: women find them offensive.

Dawn Laguens, of US Planned Parenthood, said earlier this year that language about making abortion ”rare” polled very poorly because women found it judgmental and shaming. Similarly, Planned Parenthood has made the momentous decision to drop the language of ”pro-choice” after research that shows most Americans feels the pro-choice/pro-life polarity fails to represent the actual complications of what it’s like to find yourself with an unwanted pregnancy. Women complained that the word ”choice” made the decision seem frivolous.

If you haven’t been there, you probably will never understand so just get out of the way and let women decide what is best in the circumstances in which they find themselves.

And as for men like John Madigan and Geoff Shaw, they need to understand that holding the balance of power does not give them the right to seek to control women’s lives. It is shameful they should for one moment think it does.

Once again, our tiny team of industry stalwarts has, together with some of the best writers, photographers and illustrators in Australia and [...]]]> It’s taken a little longer to produce our second issue than we had hoped, but Anne Summers Reports #2 is finally out, and I’m possibly even prouder of this edition than our first.

Once again, our tiny team of industry stalwarts has, together with some of the best writers, photographers and illustrators in Australia and overseas, produced a collection of articles, photo essays and reviews that are of the highest journalistic standards and compare favourably with magazines around the world.

I hope my profile of Alan Joyce will deliver some insights into the character of the Qantas boss to which few have previously been privy. It may change the way you think about him.

I could go on about the range of articles in this edition, but I’d prefer to let it speak for itself. I invite you to download it, read it, share it, encourage your friends to subscribe and perhaps consider donating to help us keep it going and growing.

There is still so much unfinished business. Women still do not participate [...]]]> International Women’s Day is a day to celebrate the achievements of women, to honour the struggles of those who fought to get us where we are today, and to remind ourselves of what we still need to do if we are to achieve equality.

There is still so much unfinished business. Women still do not participate in the workforce in the same proportions as men, and we get paid less for doing the same work and with sexism and misogyny rampant, we are not accorded the respect we deserve.

But of the many issues that clamour for our attention, I think on this Women’s Day we should be focusing on one that destroys or ruins the lives of so many women around the world: violence against women.

There is no doubting that, as human rights campaigner Bianca Jagger has pointed out so eloquently in The Huffington Post, there is a pandemic of violence against women. The details of what girls and women around the world are subjected to are horrific – from being raped by their teachers, to being jailed for adultery after rape, to constant beatings from their supposed loved ones.

Yet targeting such violence was not included in the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals adopted in 2000.

Perhaps to compensate for this, the Commission on the Status of Women – the UN body that addresses women’s equality issues – now meeting in New York has made violence against women its focus. Yet already we are hearing reports of language being watered down to reach consensus. There is no unanimity nor sense of urgency, it seems, when it comes to how to end this violence. Perhaps too many world leaders are invested in this system.

Let’s hope we in Australia can do a little better.

We know alarming numbers of women experience violence, most often at the hands of a partner or other close relative. The 2005 Personal Safety Survey conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed 1,135,000 women, or 15 per cent of all women, had experienced violence at the hands of their previous partner and 16,100 had endured violence from their present partner.

These and other statistics contained in the report are confronting enough, but we get a better, albeit more chilling, picture of the daily reality of domestic violence in this country when we hear the following: ”Victoria Police responds to close to 140 incidents … every day. In every suburb of Melbourne. From Doveton to Toorak – from Hawthorn to Epping. That’s close to one every 10 minutes. And these are the ones we know about.”

This is Victorian Police Commissioner Ken Lay speaking on White Ribbon Day last November.

He went on to say: ”We often talk about this issue in terms of numbers and statistics so we can better understand the magnitude of the problem. But I sometimes think this takes us away from the reality of seeing women with broken eye sockets, missing teeth, broken arms and broken spirits.”

There could be no more eloquent description of a plague of violence that is now of such proportions that increasing numbers of companies are providing up to 20 days’ special leave and other entitlements for people who are dealing with domestic violence. Telstra recently made available free silent numbers for domestic violence victims, in addition to the free SIM cards it provides. These are welcome and pragmatic responses, but a horrifying acknowledgment of the extent to which such violence is accepted as a ”normal” part of everyday life.

So what can we as ordinary individuals do in response to these ongoing attacks on our gender?

Plenty.

First, we can demand our governments treat violence against women as a crime epidemic and devote to it the kind of resources they would mobilise if this were, say, a terrorist attack.

Second, we must demand to know the extent of the epidemic. Let’s record all those murders, car ”accidents” and other violent incidents that are, in reality, attacks on women and children and include them in the official statistics.

Third, there must be zero tolerance towards those individuals who are convicted of crimes of violence against women. They must be spurned by decent society.

Finally, we must never forget the women who have died in this epidemic. Just as we honour those who have given their lives for their country in war, so we must honour those women who have died in the domestic wars plaguing our country. We don’t always know their names. It is time we did. Let’s start with Jill Meagher from Melbourne who, we will all remember, was raped and murdered last year. If we start putting names to the statistics, maybe we will realise the horror in our midst and the need to get really serious about it.

Originally published: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/this-womens-day-remember-fallen-in-domestic-wars-20130307-2fo1v.html

No doubt Kevin Rudd felt the same way. And Brendan Nelson, and Kim Beazley and Simon Crean and [...]]]> ON Q&A last Monday night, Malcolm Turnbull described, with unusual candour for a politician, how it felt when he lost the Liberal Party leadership in December 2009. It was ”very, very gut-wrenching, it was devastating”, he said.

No doubt Kevin Rudd felt the same way. And Brendan Nelson, and Kim Beazley and Simon Crean and all the other leaders who in recent years have been dismissed by their parties.

Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

Now that these political assassinations are more often than not conducted under the media spotlight, the defeated leader is expected to front the cameras, be brave, be sporting, not cry (even if, as happened to Kim Beazley, you’ve just learnt of the sudden death of your brother) and, most of all, move on.

Politics is a pitiless business.

But it is also increasingly absurd the way the media no longer waits for leadership failure; it now anticipates it and, with no attempt to disguise its bloodlust, makes the presumption of a change in leadership the prism for day-to-day coverage of politics. Such is the fate of Julia Gillard, whose demise is confidently predicted on a daily basis by the politician commentariat. If her party doesn’t get her, the voters will. Either way she is dead, politically speaking.

Such is the confidence of the journalists and shock-jocks and others who peddle these opinions, that they see no need to wait for history to happen. Why bother waiting for the actual voters to actually vote when these pundits have persuaded themselves that already it’s all over? As a result, they feel no obligation to respect the person, let along the office of prime minister, since in their minds she is already gone.

So they feel free to mock her in ways that would have been inconceivable with other leaders and, as recently as a year ago, even with her.

Gillard has always had to put up with intense, often unfair and sometimes cruel commentary about her clothes, her voice, even her body shape. As I have documented, since she became Prime Minister Gillard has been subjected to vile sexual and at times pornographic vilification of a kind that is new to our political vocabulary (and which still continues).

But now there is a new element. The pundits are scoffing and mocking her every action, from her new glasses to every policy or political step she takes, as if to say: why bother, lady, it’s all over anyway.

They are mocking her plans to spend a week in western Sydney. (No one mocked Tony Abbott when he spent a week in Aurukun with indigenous communities last year.) They are mocking the name of the place where she will stay because Rooty Hill is seen to have sexual connotations. The obnoxious Larry Pickering, who continues his cartoon offensive against Gillard, this week drew her at a place he labelled ”Nookie Knoll” with the Prime Minister, as always in his cartoons, carrying an enormous dildo. (In fact, I understand Rooty Hill was so named in 1802 by Governor King after a hill on Norfolk Island that had been difficult to dig because of the number of roots under the surface of the soil.)

They are mocking her, openly and shamefully, when she tries to communicate with the Australian people. When Gillard and Treasurer Wayne Swan this week tried to talk about the G20 meeting they have secured for Brisbane in November 2014 – a gathering that will bring many millions of dollars of income to the city and state – all the media wanted to know was whether the visit to western Sydney meant she was ”campaigning” rather than ”governing”.

That they even had to ask the question was another cause for mockery: fixing the election date eight months in advance is seen, not as an admirable introduction of some certainty into the year’s political calendar (as The Australian Financial Review’s Phillip Coorey stood up and said at the National Press Club when Gillard announced it), but as further evidence of ineptitude. She’s such a loser, this woman, they say. Ergo, everything, every single little thing she does, is wrong, stupid, ill-judged, and thus both the reason she will lose the election and why she deserves to.

The media, and those in politics who push a similar line, justify using this circular reasoning by reference to the opinion polls. These have been universally bad for Gillard in the past few weeks, no doubt about that. Last week, the Age/Nielsen poll had the Gillard government trailing the opposition 44-56 on the two-party preferred vote. On those numbers Gillard cannot win.

But you’d think only the foolhardy, or those with no memory (or even ability to Google), would make firm predictions about election results on the basis of polls seven months out. John Howard experienced similar, or worse, polls even closer to elections that he subsequently won.

In 1998 his government sat at 44-56 11 weeks out from the election that he went on to win 49-51 (the Coalition won a majority of seats despite Labor winning the popular vote). Again in 2004, with the media asserting confidently that he faced ”a landslide defeat”, Howard was at 44-56 five months from the election that he won 53-47.

This time, apparently, it’s different.

This time, voters are not just waiting for Gillard with the proverbial baseball bats. This time, according to Senator Nick Xenophon, ”some of them almost have a nuclear missile”.

The hatred of Gillard is such that voting her out of office is not enough. She has to be nuked.

Really?

”It’s a devastating business, a terribly cruel business, politics,” Malcolm Turnbull said on Monday night. ”Because all of your mistakes and blunders are out there in the public arena. You’ve got nowhere to hide. There is not an ounce of privacy.”

Nor, in the case of Australia’s first female Prime Minister who, we were reminded again this week by the (female) Liberal candidate for the western Sydney seat of Lindsay, has no children, is there the slightest drop of mercy. Or respect.

Is mockery the new misogyny?

Originally published at: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/pms-critics-make-a-mockery-of-political-debate-20130301-2fbi7.html#ixzz2MLRVOfnf

These days, the attention-grabber is ”Can Women Have It All?”

We’ve come a long way, baby.

If once we were vapid creatures who, in the view of Sigmund Freud, could not [...]]]> Once, if a newspaper or magazine wanted to sell extra copies, it would put a banner headline ”What Do Women Want?” on the front page.

These days, the attention-grabber is ”Can Women Have It All?”

We’ve come a long way, baby.

If once we were vapid creatures who, in the view of Sigmund Freud, could not decide what we wanted, now we are voracious careerists who want the lot. That the question is even posed is, of course, gratuitous and demeaning, since the ”all” refers to having a job and a family.

If you are a bloke, you can have it ”all” without anyone raising an eyebrow – or even asking how you manage to ”do it all”.

This was a source of particular irritation to Nicola Roxon who resigned as attorney-general earlier this month and who is leaving the Parliament at the next election because she wants to be at home for her young daughter. She often mentioned in media interviews that it really riled her that she was constantly asked how she managed to combine being a cabinet minister with being a wife and mother, whereas her male colleagues who were husbands and fathers were never asked the same question.

It is not just frustrating but, in fact, scandalous that the myriad assumptions and, let’s face it, prejudices that lie behind this question have not really altered in more than half a century. If we didn’t still think, deep down, that women’s primary function is to breed and raise children, the question of ”all” simply would not arise.

If we truly accepted the proposition that women and men are equal, and equally entitled to enjoy having a family and having a job, we wouldn’t be wasting our time having this conversation.

Instead, we’d perhaps be telling our kids about the bad old days before the harmonisation of work, family and school. We’d be rolling our eyes at the memory of school holidays that were so out of sync with parental holidays, at the way school finished hours before the end of the office day, leaving parents at their wits end with how to cope.

Craziest of all, how childcare had been seemingly designed by a sadist who expected mothers – yes, you wouldn’t believe it but it was the mums who had to do it back then – to drop kids off on their way to work and then hightail it back through peak-hour traffic to pick them before the centre closed. As for what it all cost, well, women would tell their incredulous offspring, I practically worked for nothing by the time I paid childcare fees.

The kids were also amazed to hear that a society that was supposed to be managed by economic rationalists had been unable to figure out that enabling women to get into the full-time workforce in the same proportions as men would increase gross domestic product by 13 per cent (and this was after all the services needed to support women’s employment – childcare and so on – had been purchased).

There’d be other horror stories but by now the kids would be bored witless at hearing accounts of the olden days when society was so, well, stupid. They take utterly for granted that both women and men ”can have it all” because that’s the natural state of affairs, and society is organised around ensuring that it all works smoothly and equitably.

Some societies are well on their way to doing this. They tend to be in Europe. Perhaps surprisingly, countries such as France that we might have viewed as rather conservative when it came to gender matters, have worked out a way for women to combine having both fertility and workforce participation rates that far outstrip ours. As far as I know, there is no talk of ”having it all” in France. They just get on with it.

In Australia we are censorious towards women who don’t conform to our (impossible) ideals. We prefer women with children to stay home (they can worry later about losing their skills and their confidence and their super), or if they insist on combining motherhood with having a job, we expect them to be totally stressed out all the time. That’ll teach you, we seem to be saying.

Then there’s the women who have had the temerity to have successful careers and neglected to have children. Our two leading female politicians, Julia Gillard and Julie Bishop, are both alternately castigated and pitied for being in this category. Not for not ”having it all” but for choosing a different path. And seeming pretty damned satisfied with their choices, too.

Most tragic of all is the fact we are still having this conversation, a full 50 years since the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, a landmark book that chronicled the dissatisfaction of those highly educated, middle-class women who were fulfilling what was then considered to be their female destiny as full-time wives and mothers. There was no question whatsoever of ”having it all” – and it was driving them crazy.

Friedan’s book helped give rise to the modern women’s movement which laid out a few markers for giving women some choices about their lives and equal rights to pursue where their dreams took them.

Back then, all the talk was about how to break down the barriers that had kept women out of the workforce and all the other places they wanted to be. It was about redesigning our lives so women could be everywhere (”A woman’s place is in the House. And the Senate” was an early slogan) and do everything. No one thought for a minute that it would not be possible, once the legal barriers were removed.

And it was – for a decade or so. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the backlash began and women were suddenly being told not just that they couldn’t ”have it all” but that, actually, they didn’t want it. Suddenly it was too hard, too stressful. The long march backwards had begun.

Originally published at: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/why-only-half-of-us-can-have-it-all-20130215-2eieu.html