Joanne McCarthy: It’s time for a walk

It happened a couple of months ago when Scott Morrison explained why the Liberal Party can’t bring itself to put women in positions of political power. That was after Julie Bishop finally got the message she would never be respected by enough of her colleagues to give her the top job, and walked away from trying. 

One minute Morrison – that’s ScoMo if you’re into people as “brands” and rely on rhyme to remember names – was waxing lyrical about “removing” unspecified “obstacles” that stand in women’s way (for the record, those Liberal “obstacles” would be men).

Then he squashed any thought of quotas to lift the Liberal Party’s abysmal female representation in federal Parliament. He doesn’t like them (and just so there’s no confusion, I mean quotas there, not women). As far as Morrison is concerned, “I believe in any political organisation it should be a matter of one’s own credibility, exertion, work and merit”.

How that explains some of the dud men the Liberal Party has nursed or parachuted to positions of political power over the decades, and then protected when their dudness couldn’t be ignored, Morrison didn’t say.  

And then he said the stupid thing.

Instead of quotas to force Liberal men to recognise women as their equals, our 30th Prime Minister favours a more “practical” approach involving “training programs” and support for women to win preselections, like the Liberal Party did back in 1996, which was another time it copped flak for having a “women problem”.

Once the women were trained, presumably, they would understand “the things that would be expected of them” when they reach Parliament, as Morrison explained it. Something like training your dog not to pee on the rug, I guess. He didn’t mention anything about a training program for men. Nor did he explain why, despite “training” women up on the Liberal way of doing things from 1996, the percentage of women in parliament has gone backwards.

The nadir was one woman in Cabinet in 2013 under Prime Minister Tony “What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing” Abbott. Recall that Abbott at the time was “disappointed that there are not at least two women in Cabinet” because there were “some very good and talented women knocking on the door”, which made half the population feel so much better.

But back to Morrison. It was the day after the new Prime Minister’s “We decide what women will do in federal Parliament and the circumstances under which we’ll recognise them” speech that I remembered a similar incident years ago as I sat around a table with a bunch of journalists, the majority male.

There were some pretty stupid things said there, too.

It was the one and only time I can remember us all – maybe 20 people – sitting around a large table to discuss something, and it was grim before we’d even set foot in the room.

A woman journalist’s copy about a sexual assault case had been changed, without her knowledge, by senior male journalists.

The changes outraged my female colleague because they accentuated the graphic sexual elements and appeared to hold the woman victim partly responsible for what happened to her.

My female colleague was livid, outraged and distraught in equal measure.

At the table, across from the men who had changed her copy without telling her, she was angry, but with a cold and controlled anger that was wonderful to behold.

I can’t remember most of what was said during a meeting called to “thrash things out”, but I do remember how clinically she dealt with the arguments used to defend changing her copy.

They had needed to “beef up” the article, one of them said. She reminded them a crime had been committed, a woman had been violated, injured and humiliated, and their reference to “beefing up” the copy was offensive.

They tried to defend highlighting the graphic sexual detail as a way to show what the woman had endured. She slammed that. They suggested she was being too sensitive. She slammed that too.

There was more. Much more. It was the late 1980s. Everyone got involved. Old grudges suddenly came to the fore. Women were accused of lacking a sense of humour. The blokes were accused of being dinosaurs.

Every small and large gender-related gripe that had simmered in that workplace for years was suddenly dragged out. Then one of the senior men said something so stupid and lazy that the women stopped, got up and left because there was no point going further. Women needed to understand they had to toughen up or go back to the kitchen, he said.

In a speech this week former Liberal MP, and now independent, Julia Banks called out the “culture of appalling behaviour” in politics that led her to resign from her party, but which was not confined to the Liberals. The decision was directly related to the self-interest shown by too many Liberal MPs in the most recent knifing of a sitting prime minister, she said.

Banks told Parliament that “Sometimes the most effective and palatable action is to walk away”, which is not the same as walking past bad behaviour. It’s knowing the point where trying to engage is a waste of time.

Morrison’s comment that women need to understand the “things that would be expected of them” is one such marker. Women and men are turning away because it’s his government that doesn’t understand what the majority of Australians expect of it.