Boys’ club called to heel
THERE’S a change sweeping Australian politics that is as undeniable as it is potent.
Women are standing up to the Liberal Party boys’ club.
This week’s defection of Victorian Liberal MP Julia Banks to the crossbench — joining Kerryn Phelps, Cathy McGowan and Rebekha Sharkie, three women in seats previously held by the Coalition — is the latest blow to the conservative male hegemony that controls the Liberals.
“My sensible and Centrist values, belief in economic responsibility and always putting the people first and acting in the nation’s interest have not changed,” Banks explained her defection to Federal Parliament.
“The Liberal Party has changed, largely due to the actions of the reactionary and regressive Right wing who talk about and talk to themselves rather than listening to the people.”
Banks joins a conga line of disgruntled Liberal women.
Julie Bishop, who gave the impression of being well across Australian foreign policy, moved to the backbenches after handing in her badge as foreign minister after the regressive Right’s catastrophic coup attempt in August.
Bishop, Banks and West Australian Liberal senator Linda Reynolds have spoken of sexism, bad behaviour and bullying in the wake of the coup.
Phelps’s victory as an independent in September’s Wentworth by-election was a clear message that progressive liberal voters are looking for alternatives.
Here in Tasmania, state Liberal MP Sue Hickey hijacked the role of Speaker, with the former Hobart lord mayor championing a more progressive liberal perspective where she has the casting vote.
Labor’s landslide in the Victorian election has widely been attributed to a backlash against the regressive Right’s knifing of a PM and a perception that they are anti-gay, climate deniers and misogynists.
The regressive Right has a stranglehold on Liberal policy. This cabal of powerful men is part of an informal network of government ministers and MPs, media personalities, party hacks and spin doctors inside and outside state and federal parliaments.
They disguise themselves as conservatives, but are far too radical, reactionary and politically aggressive to wear that moniker with conviction.
And they will not relinquish power without a fight.
The women taking them on have commandeered the red high-heel emoji as emblematic of their movement. In solidarity last week, Bishop donated to the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House the sparkling red pair of heels she was wearing when she resigned from cabinet.
But there is a different heel of concern here — the progressive liberal movement’s achilles heel.
The women leading the charge represent educated voters with a social conscience, such as those in Phelps’s seat of Wentworth, and to arrive at this degree of altruism requires a modicum of wealth.
The Glenorchy mother of four desperate for her partner to get a job to put food on the table, register the family sedan and fix the leaking roof sees the world very differently.
The welfare of asylum seekers, gay rights, transgender birth certificates, the climate and environmental sustainability are trivial and inconsequential to her and, when politicians spend time on such matters, she takes it as a personal insult.
The regressive Right will, like Donald Trump in the US, exploit this and recast itself as champion of the downtrodden (conveniently forgetting it branded battlers “leaners” and “bludgers” and tore gaping holes in the welfare safety net). It is a proven political strategy, modelled on the Trump experience and being rolled out across Europe.
It would be surprising if it did not come to Australia, which has an underclass that’s ripe for incitement because it is disenfranchised from politics, outcast from the workforce and failed by government services.
Aussie battlers have bugger all chance of being able to afford a pair of Bishop’s bejewelled red satin pumps, and even less of owning their own home, once the quintessence of the Australian dream.
They have been condemned to feed off the crumbs spilt by the wealthy.
The irony is the very same policies, unflatteringly branded trickle-down economics, that have united the regressive Right and progressive Centre under the straining arches of the Liberal Party’s broad church are now widely criticised for having failed to improve the battlers’ lot and for having widened the gulf between rich and poor.
Former PM Paul Keating, the Labor architect of much of Australia’s economic liberalisation, has himself questioned its effectiveness in the light of recent widespread angst from underclasses in liberalised economies in Europe and the Americas. Can a new way be found? Hopefully progressive liberal women can chart a course where male hegemony has failed.
Doubling the pool of potential leaders by including women must increase the chances of finding a path.
Perhaps, after so many lifetimes manoeuvring to get their way within the paradigm of a man’s world, women have mastered the art of politics, of negotiation, compromise and persuasion.
After all, how many old-fashioned families with a male figurehead were actually led by women?
Depends who you ask, I guess.