It’s a man problem, people

Australia’s rightwing Coalition is approaching this weekend’s federal election with deeply patriarchal and traditionalist attitudes, and the commentariat is still describing this as a woman problem.

Australia’s media traditions, not to mention our clickbait present, lean us to a victim-blaming coverage of crimes against women. Jane Gilmore’s social media account has enough material to require a book to tackle the constant media framing of violence against women as women’s fault. The framing of Australia’s rightwing politics as having a “woman problem” lies in similar distorting territory.

There is a woman problem within Australia’s rightwing coalition, of course. The few women who climb to the top of the party now have repeatedly proven themselves to be amongst the most off-putting, even grotesque, characters on our political stage. A party that is endemically and brutally patriarchal will, naturally, only enable a certain kind of woman to rise to the top.

Primarily, however, it is a man problem. In 2022, I explored the connection between the man problem in US and Australian rightwing politics.

There was a review of the Liberal Party’s crisis with women after the 2022 election loss, carried out by Jane Hume MP and Brian Loughnane (political advisor and Mr Peta Credlin). It resulted in the founding of the Dame Margaret Guilfoyle Network in 2024.

No other progress appears to be made as Australians go to the polls by Saturday afternoon. As Bri Lee has pointed out, the Network’s intent to foster women does not appear to have begun with internships or other strategies to date. Furthermore, the policies promoted by the Coalition in this campaign have been rejected by women, particularly the promise to end working from home. The main policy pitched at women, Bri noted, is a campaign to protect the little lady from nasty (foreign-born) criminals.

A significant Australian figure has speculated that former Prime Minister Tony Abbott was placed on the Fox Board in 2023 to “run” Australia’s right for Rupert Murdoch. This decision by Peter Dutton’s Liberal Party to treat policy for women as a matter of protecting vulnerable feminine creatures from violent (foreign) men seems to hark back to Abbott’s era of paternalistic Liberal Party politics. Not only did he make himself Minister for Women, for those who have forgotten, but he made policy pronouncements for women home slaving over ironing boards.

The 2022 hysteria amongst the Liberal Party’s men – and the fellows at their public relations agency at News Corp – over the rise of women as independent candidates in safe Liberal seats was a spectacle to behold. The certainty that these previously safe seats were these men’s possession was absolute. The gall of women to challenge and, worse, defeat them was shattering.

In an attempt to win back one of the prizes, the Liberal Party has placed a female scion of their aristocracy to contest one of the seats taken by an independent. Thirty-one year old Amelia Hamer is having extraordinary resources poured into that one campaign, as if managing to win back the seat, even if they have to sacrifice the possible prize to a woman, would redeem wounded male pride. Lee’s analysis illustrated that amongst the rest of the candidates running for the Liberal Party in Saturday’s election, only 1/3 are women, and 84% of those women are positioned in “glass cliff” seats.

It should not surprise Australians that the men of the rightwing Coalition are so deeply unable to challenge their misogyny. They largely belong, as do their friends who are senior at News Corp, to the National Conservative (NatCon) broad ideological trend.

The trend is, admittedly, an exaggeration of their traditional gut-level certainty that men belong in power and women belong in the home. Hierarchy is ordained by God and nature in their mindset. Adrian Daub is amongst those who have explored how the cruel trajectory of Trump’s second government is, to some degree, the backlash against women and minorities merely demanding consequences for misbehaving men. The efforts in pursuit of equality in the 2010s did not win much, but those tokens were enough to make (powerful) men feel existentially threatened. That certainty was pounded into the (powerless) audience for podcast bros.

This utter certainty is revealed in the way Australia’s rightwing politicians reject quotas. They cannot allow that their structures (and policies) prevent good women from achieving office. They do not notice that the current system fosters mediocre men by nobbling women challengers. Instead they complain that an effort to overcome the hurdles would work counter to merit-based selection. Leg ups for mediocre men are the norm. Women are, in this mindset, less worthy than them by nature.

I’ve covered in previous essays the past and serving Coalition politicians who serve on the board of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), and those others who attend the conferences. There they mingle with Christian Right leaders and Western chauvinist misogynists from America and Europe. ARC appears to function as a conduit for NatCon thought, as does Murdoch’s News Corps.

The constant messaging from these circles is that children suffer if not nurtured by a mother’s full-time care. They depict women as best fulfilled in their role as wife and mother. Divorce is presented as a threat to women and children, rather than a literal life-saver. Reproductive healthcare is portrayed as a threat to civilisation rather than crucial to wellbeing and justice. Women’s duty, although this is only articulated by the most reckless, is to breed for the “race.”

And anyone who is not cisgender and straight is beyond the pale for these thinkers. Borders will be fiercely policed in sexual and gender matters too.

Meanwhile, as in NatCon circles, our politicians are surrounded by extremist religious figures reinforcing this worldview. The Coalition’s almost universal commitment to the Australian Christian Lobby’s Christian Nationalist platform was deeply concerning, not least for its erasure of trans existence. The misogynist and homophobic Exclusive Brethren are forbidden to vote but are out in force volunteering at polling booths for the Coalition. Former Coalition MP George Christensen is representing a Spanish Catholic extremist fringe group, working with a Coalition-allied “free market” think tank President there. This activity is homophobic and appears to be abortion abolitionist.

Furthermore front groups for big money donors like those behind Advance are spewing out hateful and misleading characterisations of the women independents that the Liberal Party has defined as its biggest enemy.

Rightwing politics has come to accept the absence of a silent majority and is prepared to govern, as in Trump’s America, imposing minority positions on a shocked majority.

Unless Australians are prepared to pressure the government to address all the integrity and governance failures that allow our politics to descend into the chaos we are seeing in political campaigning, we are at risk of fatally damaging our battered democratic experiment.

We need transparency on funding and much greater scrutiny of foreign influence operations. We need fake thinktanks stripped of charity status and donors exposed. Representatives of these public relations operations need to be accurately labelled when platformed, at least on the national broadcaster. We need to debate how to control the proliferation of harmful front groups masquerading as grass roots operations. Parallel spending in politics has been catastrophic in America, and the Act passed in Australia to control political spending outside the official political straightjacket needs to be honed to tackle that more precisely: Clive Palmer, for example, is a poison.

The Misinformation and Disinformation Bill needs to be better drafted and tabled, no matter how noisy the “free speech” campaign the bad actors will drum up to defend their right to lie.

The Murdoch Royal Commission is overdue.

We need protections for our political party branches and structures to barricade them from religious (or ideological) groups that intend to colonise and distort them: we can’t allow a “conservative” vote to become an inadvertent vote for patriarchal theocracy.

Without this kind of work, Australia can only become a dangerous place for the majority. Trump’s America offers plentiful warnings of what the toxic minority can achieve.

 

Footnote: Adrian Daub and Moira Donegan’s discussion about the anti “woke” commentariat’s utter and entrenched sense of male centrality is well worth listening to if you have the scope to subscribe to their Patreon for In Bed With The Right. The point that one Atlanticcolumnist exemplar made stands out: he sulks that people are paying attention to such meaningless clutter as people being kidnapped by ICE on America’s streets while a man suffered (the horror) a professional set-back for abusing women.

 

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