Sunday 14 October 2012

Gillard's monomania more psychotic than feminist

It has been a remarkable week in federal politics - a nasty, spiteful orgy of name calling and over the top theatrics which has taken political debate to a new level.  We are now suffering an unprecedented new level of divisiveness and bitchiness we never thought we'd ever see in this country.

At first it seemed so straightforward.  Disgraced speaker Peter Slipper had sent a series of lewd text messages to his gay sex partner referring to women's genitalia and other grubby material.  Although his lawyers tried to suppress it, they became public and he had no other course of action but to either resign or be dismissed by the parliament.  That afternoon a deal had been done for Slipper to resign.  But in an incredible display of ineptitude, Gillard stood by the man who had sent the most appallingly sexist and mysoginistic text messages and launched an extraordinary personal attack on Tony Abbott.  She spat the dummy well and truly.  To illustrate how low she sank, she even tried to use the death of her father as ammunition in her demented jihad.  What we saw was not a feminist tour de force, it was the psychotic rantings of a madwoman, someone who had snapped psychologically and had lost it.  As the psychiatrist on Fawlty Towers said, there's enough material here for an entire conference.

Yet despite this pathetic and embarrassing performance we had sections of the media hailing the speech, indeed it has been referred to as a great milestone in feminism and a wonderful day for women.  Pardon me but all I saw was a graphic exposition as to why women should not hold powerful positions.  When the pressure was on, all sense of rationality and levelheadedness went out the window and short-tempered hysterics took over.

More disturbing than this is the wider context in which this speech was being played out.  It has introduced the new wildcard of gender politics into an already divisively bitter and polarised political landscape.  The gender war is the ultimate losing game because it can never be won.  There are always two points of view - male and female - and if the debate escalates out of control - which it has done - the two sides drift further and further apart.

Many people might think this is a new phenomenon but in reality it is just another front in the ongoing class warfare and divide and rule philosophy of the Labor party.  A direct comparison can be made with the Hawke/Keating era of the 1980s and early '90s.  During that period several divisive debates about immigration and multiculturalism were prominent.  Opinion polls showed as much as 80% of the population wanted an end to immigration and multiculturalism.  Faced with this barrage, Labor ministers began labelling anybody who criticised their immigration policy - and indeed anybody who tried to discuss multiculturalism in general - as racist.  Indeed back then the word racist was being bandied around much like the words "sexist" and "misogynist" are being used now.  It is a last resort tactic - playing the race/sexism card.  It didn't work back then and it isn't working now.  Since Labor's handbag hit squad began their smears against Tony Abbott and the Liberals, Labor has gone from being in a winning position in the polls to slipping back well behind the Coalition.  Gillard's personal popularity - boosted by the sympathy vote following her father's death - has since slumped.  Are we to have the spectre of anybody criticising the government being labelled sexist?  Is this all Labor can offer?  Their policies have been a disaster, the deficit and foreign debt are at record high levels, they have failed on every front so they only shot they have left in the locker is name calling and smears based on sexuality.  It is the politics of last resort.

Gillard's speech quickly went viral on the Internet and was hailed on feminist and leftist websites around the world.  But beyond the gleeful squealing, the high fiving and the "you go girl" nonsense we have been bombarded with, the reality is that this speech - and indeed the entire tenor of political debate since the last election - has gone down like a lead balloon out in the 'burbs.  People are horrified as they receive their carbon tax inflated power bills to see the perpetrators of their misery in Canberra mired in a gender war yelling "sexist" and "misogynist" at their critics.  Are we to be forever held hostage by the fact that Gillard's father has died?  Will we have Gillard flying off the handle whenever anybody uses the phrase "died of shame"?  Can we afford to have as prime minister someone who is so emotionally frail and damaged that she drops her bundle and loses it whenever the going gets tough?  This is not the good old traditional Australia that we know so well, this is a dangerous and unstable new frontier which will inflict untold damage to the national psyche and hurt us all no end in the long run.

We are now less than a year out from an election when the experiment with a female prime minister will finally be dumped in the political trashcan.  The death rattle of a government is now almost deafening.  The gender war is hastening their demise.  Some good has to come out of all this.  It will be a lesson and a case study for future politicians and governments how not to run their agendas and how not to conduct themselves on the public stage.  The gender war cannot continue indefinitely, in a year's time feminist politics and class warfare will end and we can pick our shattered country off the floor, wipe the slate clean and get back to normal again.