Tag Archives: Mark Latham

Trump isn’t ironic about women, & neither is Turnbull

2 Apr

 

 

 

The announcement by US President Donald Trump that the month of April is national sexual assault awareness and prevention month was greeted with hollow mirth by many, and described by some as “ironic.”

There’s nothing ironic about this announcement. It is a calculated display of contempt for women, particularly women who endure sexual assault. It’s the most powerful man in the western world demonstrating to the women of his country that he can toy with them, as and when he chooses, in case they haven’t already worked that out.

Contempt isn’t irony. It’s far more dangerous, and we’re seriously underestimating the danger if we misread it.

Trump’s announcement is similar to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s campaign aimed at encouraging men to “respect” women as a means of preventing sexual and other violences perpetrated upon us. However, Turnbull simultaneously ripped federal funding from community legal centres, and frontline services such as refuges and crisis counselling.

The “irony” of Turnbull’s scathing indictment of men who abuse women, and his own abuse of us by withdrawing resources we need when we are attacked, apparently escaped the PM. Except that it wasn’t irony: it was reckless disregard, born from contempt, for the safety of women and children under threat.

Turnbull acts from the same deep-seated contempt for women as does Trump: he is better at disguising it, or rather, Trump doesn’t care about disguising his contempt, while Turnbull needs to maintain at least the appearance of interest and concern to preserve both his self-image, and votes.

Yesterday I read this account of how Sheriff David Clarke of Milwaukee forced a prisoner to give birth while her hands were shackled. When during her labour she needed to go to the toilet, her ankles were also shackled. She was not permitted to move into positions that eased her pain or aided the delivery of her child. Her baby died at birth. It is customary in Clarke’s jail, for pregnant women to be shackled.

Last week I read many accounts of former politician Mark Latham’s attacks on women, enabled by much Australian media, up until he called a young man who spoke about feminism “gay.” For gay, in this instance read feminised, and therefore a suitable target for Latham’s misogyny.

It is no coincidence that misogyny and homophobia go hand in hand. For Latham, obviously a proponent of hydraulic male sexuality, the most toe-curling aspect of love between men is the assumption he makes that somebody has to be “the woman.”

There’s barely a day without attempted or successful attacks on women’s reproductive rights somewhere in the world. In Queensland and NSW abortion is still a crime for both women and doctors. Male politicians, such as former Prime Minister Tony Abbott and right wing senator Cory Bernardi, continue to imply that women who seek abortions are morally corrupt. Bernardi describes abortion as “an abhorrent form of birth control”

Just yesterday in Iowa, legislation that could force women to continue a pregnancy to term after the foetus has died, was passed.

Women’s access to contraception is continually under attack. 

There is no irony to be found in any of this.  There is unrelenting hatred and fear of women, expressed in… let me count the ways.

That our governments, state and federal will not, and it is will not, it isn’t cannot, provide adequate frontline services for women and children fleeing violence tells us everything we need to know about the contempt in which women are held in this country.

The contempt for us is so great that state and federal governments enable violence against us by refusing practical options that will give us an escape route, while at the same time launching ludicrous campaigns to “raise awareness” of that violence. This is not irony. This is full-fledged misogyny, and it is murderous.

So next time you think feminism is about female CEOs, or the choice to enlarge your breasts, or more women in parliament, remember that your governments hate you so much they will not provide a refuge for you and your children, they will not provide accessible legal assistance for you, they will not ensure you have housing if your home is too dangerous.

More female CEOs has not changed this. More women in parliament has not changed this. It’s difficult to see how becoming part of the system can ever change the system. Feminism’s ambition used to be to destroy an abusive system, not to be subsumed by it.

Where it actually matters and where it actually counts, governments have turned their backs on women, while engaging in expensive and useless campaigns to convince us otherwise.

Hatred of us is normalised. And now it’s so normal we’re calling it “irony.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I’m flying myself to the footy & I’m wearing Hugo Boss suck it up you sexist socialist serfs

15 Jan

flying-pigs

 

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Friday made a desperate attempt to staunch the bleeding from wounds inflicted on his government by his own ministers thieving from the public purse for personal gain.

An independent parliamentary expenses authority will be a compliance, reporting and transparency body, he said, applying the tourniquet.

It will monitor and adjudicate all claims by MPs, senators and ministers, ensuring that taxpayers’ funds are spent appropriately and in compliance with the rules…

The sacrifice intended to appease the howling socialist, sexist pack of rabid dogs is former Health Minister Sussan Ley, whose cavorting between capital cities in a hired plane piloted by her own self, cost us thousands more than if she’d taken commercial flights along the same routes.

(By the way, the above link is to a quote from Bronwyn Bishop, late Speaker of the House, now quite settled into her spot in the Sky News Graveyard for Former Politicians, along with the likes of Ross Cameron and Mark Latham. Bishop, you might recall, was also finally brought undone by her penchant for helicopters as a means of transport, and feels Ms Ley’s pain.)

Fairfax intimated that Ley exploited her ministerial position to up her flying hours, and fulfil CASA requirements for commercial pilots.

When confronted with evidence that he’d attended the footy in 2013 at our expense, Minister for Trade Steve Ciobo brazenly declared that people expect Trade Ministers to show up at such events as part of their job description. Unfortunately for Mr Ciobo,  it was later revealed that at the time he wasn’t the Trade Minister at all, merely a lowly back bencher with aspirations. Proving, to my mind, the validity of deep and raucous public suspicions of the justifications trotted out by politicians for entertaining themselves at our expense.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop impulsively cancelled a long-planned appearance at the Portsea Polo when it emerged that last year she attended, with her partner, at a cost of some $3000 to the taxpayer. No doubt she has Ms Ley to blame for ruining her Saturday. The Foreign Minister was to have been dressed for the occasion by couturier Hugo Boss. The story took a totally unexpected turn when  it was revealed with much mirth on Twitter that the Boss fashion house was also responsible for outfitting the SS in Nazi Germany.

It’s a terrible indictment of our 45th Parliament that ministers can’t be trusted to properly manage their expenses. These people are elected to take responsibility for our budget, our legislation, our daily lives, and our country’s future. Yet they cannot be trusted with public money. They are thieves. They ought to be referred to the AFP, investigated and if necessary, charged with fraud.

In Gough Whitlam’s day, politicians were forced to fly economy class as their contribution to reducing the deficit. To paraphrase the man, a pissant is still a pissant even if it flies first class. Or its own plane. Dressed in Hugo Boss. To the footy or a wedding or a book launch or, in the case of Kevin Andrews, a prayer meeting in the USA.

If these people want to live the capitalist dream they need to clear off out of politics and get jobs in the private sector. Politicians are not celebrities or high-flying CEOs. We are not their customers, their clients or their share-holders. We are their employers, and they are servants of the public. That’s neither sexist nor socialist. It’s democracy.

 

 

 

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March of the white men children.

21 Nov

white-pride

 

“We are proud that there’s absolutely no balance whatsoever. No gender balance. We’re all white. We don’t believe in things like gender balance.”

Thus spake the white man Mark Latham at the announcement of the new panel show on Sky,  featuring former Howard front bencher and proud white male Ross Cameron, and Rowan Dean, white as editor of The Spectator magazine. The show will be called “Outsiders” (owing to them all being white and male, a disadvantaged and marginalised demographic in this country) and broadcast on Sunday mornings, immediately after Barrie Cassidy’s “Insiders” on ABC TV.

The trio also like to be known as “Trump’s Aussie Mates,” and fervently hope for a Trump landslide victory in 2020.

Latham breathlessly expressed the trio’s vision: “We want Trump to abuse the media and for them to abuse him back and we want more lectures from actors…”

I don’t know that anyone has yet characterised Donald Trump as a man-child, however, he seems to me the perfect poster boy for the breed, and it comes as no surprise that Latham, Cameron and Dean have at last found the pack leader they’ve so long been looking for, the man who endorses their regression.

Normalising television shows based on the spectacle of abuse, delivered to us by white men children who are opposed to gender balance (no emotionally mature male would oppose gender balance, let’s face it) may well be our future since Trump let white men children everywhere know that from now on shoving your white dick right in everyone’s face is more than ok, it’s what real men do.

It will end in tears, these things always do, the question is, how long will it take?

Pray for premature ejaculation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Domestic violence and the bourgeoisie

23 Aug

Domestic Violence Silence

 

In the last few weeks two rather disparate male journalists, Martin McKenzie-Murray in The Saturday Paper and Mark Latham, late of the Australian Financial Review, have observed that the current orthodox position on domestic violence against women and children holds that domestic violence can affect any woman, in any demographic, and is not socioeconomically determined.

Both men contest that position, arguing instead that women living in poverty are disproportionately vulnerable to domestic attacks, and that current opinion is based on the erroneous belief that patriarchal notions of male domination, entitlement and privilege (otherwise known as rape culture) are the cause of violence against women.

Personally, I don’t subscribe to the concept of so-called rape culture as the sole cause of violence against women, but neither do I agree that violence against women is predominantly determined by socioeconomic conditions.

What I find interesting is that two white middle class males have within weeks of each other put forward the argument that middle class women are significantly less subject to domestic violence perpetrated by intimate partners than are less affluent women. It’s interesting because feminists have spent the last few decades struggling to expose middle class violence, and it has been a far more difficult exposure than one might at first imagine.

Both Latham and McKenzie-Murray point to statistics to support their view, however, neither explores the possibility that domestic violence is quite likely underreported by middle class women. Without even trying, I can think of a wealth of examples of women and children living middle class lives, all of whom have endured or are enduring violence perpetrated by intimate partners and who have not, and will not, report the crime to police.

The middle class life has long been associated with denial and repression, and a pathological dedication to privacy, all of which are designed to build a wall of silence intended to keep things in the family. The common prescription is to refrain from airing dirty family linen in public. To transgress these bourgeois norms is to commit a social crime that is not readily forgiven or forgotten by peers. If you doubt me, reflect how only very recently have we begun to hold institutions and public figures to account for decades of sexual transgressions against children, and how so many offenders got away with it because it was wicked of them to say bad things about that good kind man. Why, even our Prime Minister appears in court to provide character references for paedophile priests!

It’s perfectly possible to account for domestic violence as both a socioeconomic issue, and a product of male privilege and entitlement. There is also, as McKenzie-Murray points out, the criminological aspect of domestic violence, which acknowledges the individual pathologies of perpetrators. Surely, if we are to have any chance at all of halting this epidemic we have to address all possible contributing factors?

I am uncertain why this argument that ostensibly pits the middle class woman against the less affluent in terms of their comparative rates of suffering, has suddenly emerged. I don’t think it’s a good sign. For far too long domestic violence was framed as an us and them problem: consigned to the poor, to Indigenous communities, far removed from the middle class whom, it was unquestioningly assumed, did not behave like that.

What we ought to be doing is making it easier for middle class women to come out of the closet about our experiences of family violence, not advocating a caste system of suffering based on socioeconomic factors. Domestic violence and violence against women is not an us and them situation, however comforting that delusion might be to some. It’s alarming to note the beginnings of a swing back to that delusion, after so many years of feminist efforts to escape it.

In the interests of fairness I disclose that I grew up in a professional family whose male head, a doctor, perpetrated unspeakable violence on its members.

 

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Kev’s new best friend; Latham the Loomer, and Dear Prudence

5 Apr
Kevin Rudd on Novembre 2005.

Image via Wikipedia

All the Foreign Minister, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had to do was sit back and let Deputy Leader of the Opposition and Shadow Foreign Minister Julie Bishop do it for him.

Dump Gillard in it, that is.

An aroused and indignant Bishop, glittering eyes made famous by The Chaser boys (remember her staring contest with the garden gnome?) strafing panel and audience alike, passionately retold to an entranced crowd the circumstances that brought about Kev’s disastrous dip in the polls when as PM he backed down from the ETS.

This backdown, Bishop reminded us, was entirely due to Gillard and Wayne Swan persuading Kev to relinquish his greatest moral challenge of all time, probably on purpose so they’d have an excuse for declaring him a total loser as far as the public was concerned, a menace to the ALP‘s chances of re election, and best removed from the highest office.

That move gave the men who now have faces what they needed to chuck out a first term PM, and replace him with Australia’s First Hollow Lady.

Throughout Bishop’s retelling, Kev remained stoic, his features clouded with sorrow and pain, albeit mitigated by reflection.  Earlier, the Foreign Minister had most engagingly accepted full responsibility for what he now admits was a grave error in judgement. He might have been wrongly, even maliciously advised, but when the chips were down, he was the PM and the final decision was his to make.

Bishop’s death stare is scary, and no wonder the garden gnome fell off its table and shattered into a hundred pieces. I felt momentary sympathy for Tony Jones and American Ambassador Bleich seated either side of her  last night, on the occasions she spun round in her seat to burn through their brains with her laser gaze. Does she have a problem with her peripheral vision, I wondered out loud to my household, or is it that her powers only work when her stare is directed in a straight line?

A few in Cabinet Kev revealed, coyly resisting all Tony Jones’s efforts to provoke him into naming names, wanted the ETS killed for once and for all, and this morning on Radio National Breakfast, journalist Lenore Taylor reckoned Gillard was one of them.

Oooeeer – the First Hollow Lady gets even more closely aligned with expediency rather than morality.

I enjoyed seeing Kev’s dial again. I like his grin. He can be very likeable but he’s a complex bloke. During his brief sojourn as PM I found him at times extremely irritating especially when he apparently descended into a sleep deprived mania, just like a very young child who will not give in to the need to rest, and becomes unbearably obnoxious as a consequence.

However, he seems to have learned from that to nap, and take food and water.

Kev will always have charisma as a result of what they did to him, a fact none of the men who now have faces seem to have considered  before they dumped him. He can’t help but look far more interesting than just about anybody else in the ALP. In the morality stakes, he’s a zillion points ahead of our First Hollow Lady. His admission last night that he’d blown it with his great moral challenge only adds to the impression of a politician capable of sincere reflection, a rare beast indeed, except when they’ve aged and long left office.

He’s found a way to deal with the humiliation heaped upon him that is acceptable. The wry shrug, the laughing off, the live and learn attitude hints at an emotional intelligence sadly lacking in just about everybody else, and it seems to be sincere. He doesn’t hide the pain, but he looks as if he’s come to terms with it and is probably all the better for the experience.

But that’s not to overlook the calculated little bomb he did drop on the matter of who wanted to kill the ETS, a little bomb that will give the Opposition plenty of return ammunition for a while as they take every opportunity to point out that these would-be-killers are still there, and what does that mean, and who are they, and how can we trust anyone in that government?

Kev does make Gillard look both bad and boring, and that’s an unacceptable combination. If you’re going to be bad, you have an obligation to be interesting with it.

Speaking of which, I don’t know why anybody bothers listening to that Mark Latham whose ridiculous attack on Gillard’s child free choice renders anything else he might have to say  hardly worth listening to. Latham has no respect for anybody’s personal space, emotional and physical. This was concretely demonstrated when he loomed into the Prime Minister in a public place and asked stupid questions,and prior to that, loomed into John Howard as he attempted to enter a room Latham was leaving. He’s a loomer. He looms. it’s not attractive. He should give it up.

Prue Goward by publik15 via flickr

Then there’s Dear Prudence. Prue Goward, recently appointed NSW Minister for Families, whatever that is, has taken a nasty swipe at radio personality Jackie O for the manner in which she fed her baby.

Apparently Jackie O gave the child a bottle while simultaneously walking across a pedestrian crossing, an action Goward likened to the famous Michael Jackson moment when he dangled his little son over a balcony in Germany and subsequently earned global contempt for his fathering skills.

Why this is a concern for the Minister for Families remains a mystery to me. An over zealous commitment to her new portfolio? Is she going to focus on perceived child abuse by the rich and famous? If the mother had been a working class woman would Goward have even blinked her mascara-ed lashes?

I’m glad she wasn’t in the nursery when once, in a sleep deprived state similar to those experienced by the former PM, I accidentally stuck my fingers in the wrong jar and pasted my baby boy’s bits with Vicks Vapour Rub instead of nappy rash cream.

Soon to become a dad himself for the first time, he looked at me stunned, speechless and quite judgmentally, I thought, when I recently confessed this transgression. Too late I realised my mistake. Now I probably won’t be allowed anywhere near the new baby, but at least we know the Vicks didn’t do its daddy any damage.

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