Prime Minister Tony Abbott, aka The Minister for Women, has a long history of disparaging, degrading and disrespecting women, as well as substantiated allegations of violence against one woman who got in his way.
Abbott’s latest attack on women is his government’s declaration that there are women who are double dipping, defrauding and rorting paid parental leave schemes, in spite of the fact that there is nothing in the least fraudulent about women accessing available support from both employers and government when they give birth.
This is a new low in Abbott’s misogyny. When the leader of the country allows his ministers to use language such as rorting and fraudulent about women who are acting entirely within the law, we’re in a hostile and dangerous environment.
There is the issue of how the Abbott government’s latest variation of PPL will affect women. Then there is the separate issue of how the Abbott government describes women, from the “women of calibre” lauded by Abbott in his first attempt at creating a PPL, to the allegedly fraudulent and rorting female schemers attempting to take allegedly illegal advantage of both employer and government generosity when they give birth.
How much longer are we going to tolerate these tired, dishonest variations on the old madonna/whore dichotomy? Women are either of calibre (good women) or fraudulent and rorting (bad women). Language matters. Language is revelatory and what is revealed by the Abbott government’s latest linguistic attack on women is contempt, an utter lack of understanding, and a despicable willingness to exploit us and our babies for short-term political gain. Just how far have we come, when our government can describe us in such derogatory and debasing terms? Not much further than Euripides, it seems.
No Place For Sheep 
… because it would not be at all appropriate or timely for him to comment on rorting and fraudulent politicians, nor on the rorting, fraudulent access his daughter had to her fancy tertiary education.
Can we have that early election now, please?
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It is interesting how it only seems to take one bad egg to contaminate an entire system. If it wasn’t for the metastasised nastiness of two individuals – John Howard and Tony Abbott – then this country would I think have been a very different place.
What I think is very telling is that the people who have been most damaged by these two are those who have worked closest with them. Costello and Hockey started off as proud and successful men in their own right, and it’s been very sad watching them both lose their dignity and become shells of people as a result of the time they have spent in abusive relationships with their superiors.
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