Our Australians of the Era deserve respect. So do the rest of us

This week, I saw that same proud designer, Paddy, take pride of place in the struggle to protect trans kids from harmful schools (note to readers: public schools take everybody). Paddy is the son of law academic Julia Quilter and Labor MP Stephen Jones, who this week in Parliament revealed his fears for his son as debate raged around which kids should be protected from which discriminations. The Coalition wasn't all that interested in protecting trans kids. It also turns out, not all that interested in protecting the rest of us either.

And this week, that same Paddy made history while our politicians made fools of themselves.

At about the same time, two young women were planning the next stage of their demolition of the patriarchy at the National Press Club. Two Australians of the Era, Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins, dressed down the nation, or at least its politicians, for utter, utter uselessness.

What's the common theme here? Disrespect. Politicians who disrespect the people who vote for them, and the children of those who vote for them.

This is not limited to the Liberal Party, nor even the Nationals (because who can forget the cavalier way in which the Gillard Labor government forced single mothers on to Newstart, and then said how sad it was that Newstart was not enough?). But since the Coalition parties are the ones holding power right now, let me recap.

The Liberal Party has not done one single thing - not one - to protect or support the rights of women. At the micro level, its treatment within the party is a shitshow: from refusals to endorse female candidates at a seat level to staffers underminining the female ministers for whom they work. Julia Banks recalls getting an email not meant for her, a draft of an abusive email sent to the sibling of a male minister. That sibling endorsed the contents of the email, asking it be sent on to Banks. And the party has tolerated untrammelled workplace harassment in electoral offices and parliamentary offices for years. Who behaves this badly?

That's just what the Liberals do to women in the tent - women they know, maybe like the wives and sisters and children of their colleagues. Imagine the licence that disrespect gives them when it comes to the rest of us - the great, washed, general public of the female persuasion? Here's a hint: rates of violence against women and children have not shifted since the first National Plan to Reduce Violence Against Women and their Children was released 10 years ago. There is no serious commitment to enacting the recommendations of Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins's Respect@Work report, including the crucial "postive duty" recommendation where employers must make workplaces safe. As for employment, women with children copped it worst during COVID times. Women have taken major hits to their jobs and incomes in the pandemic, says Alison Pennington, senior economist at the Centre for Future Work. As for the intransigent pay gap? Women's disproportionate concentration in insecure, low-hours & low-paid work widened the gender pay gap in 2021 to 31 per cent across all jobs. Childcare is unaffordable, and its availability arbitrary.

Every single one of these impacts could be ameliorated by a government that knows and understands its power and then uses it to help the vulnerable.

Instead, to be a woman in Australia is to be at the epicentre of chaos enabled by the federal government's utter contempt for those who are not like them. It would genuinely help future Coalition governments if there were more women in the parties, women making decisions, women participating.

READ MORE:

But this extreme disrespect has become embedded in everything this government does. The ham-fisted way it went about the Religious Discrimination Bill and proposed amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act reveal a complete lack of consultation - so much so that its own backbenchers had to cross the floor to make themselves heard. As Michelle Grattan put it, this was "a humiliating rebuff to Scott Morrison".

Usually, men like Morrison get their own way. It is no surprise to me Grace Tame received a call asking her not to be critical of the Prime Minister when she next spoke on the same platform as him. She told the National Press Club on Wednesday that the person asked "for my word that I wouldn't say anything damning about the Prime Minister on the evening of the next Australian of the Year Awards". I am reasonably confident that this instruction did not come directly from the Prime Minister, because it didn't need to come directly from the Prime Minister.

If you live and work in almost any organisation, then you live and work within the values of the men who run everything. You come to embody those values, and they are embedded in everything you do and say. The person carrying that message to Tame might have considered they were doing the right thing, trying to protect the reputation of the Prime Minister. But even last August, a reasonable Australian should have known that horse had bolted.

Even now, it turns out, among his own party members. Now the government has opted for a Senate inquiry into key parts of the Religious Discrimination Bill so it can avoid a bollocking in the upper house. NSW Liberal senator Andrew Bragg told the government he was prepared to cross the floor to protect the rights of transgender children.

If only there was real consultation, and then real action. As Brittany Higgins said on Wednesday: "[The Prime Minister's] words wouldn't matter if his actions had measured up. Then, or since."

All we want is a little respect, and a federal anti-corruption commission (worth pulling an all-nighter for that one). Glorious corsets are a bonus.