BISHOP’S CABINET PLOY IS SEXISM

THE sexism of Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop is not just a shocking principle for running the country.

It’s also more evidence that feminism, like anti-racism, has become the evil it claims to fight.

Bishop last week was moaning atan Australian Women’s Weekly event that she’d been the only woman in the first Cabinet of prime minister Tony Abbott.

How terribly the boys treated her: “I would say something, come up with an idea, put forward a point of view and wait for a response. Nothing.”

Then one of the lads would allegedly propose “exactly my initiative and the others would say: ‘Brilliant, what a genius idea!’”

That already strikes me as unlikely. Has anyone ever heard Bishop propose a great idea?

But her fake victimhood is one thing. How Bishop addressed it is a very serious other thing.

She claims that when other women joined Cabinet, they made “a little deal”: “It didn’t matter what the other woman said, the rest of us would say: ‘Oh, that is brilliant!’”

Seriously? So no matter how stupid the suggestion, Bishop praised it as “brilliant” — if it came from a woman?

How reckless is this? Cabinet deals with hugely important issues that can cost Australians their jobs and affect their ability to look after their children.

And here are women in Cabinet playing gender wars instead? Backing ideas not because they are good for the nation, but good for Julie Bishop’s ego?

Wow, what sexism.

But more remarkable is that Bishop has not been called out for it by our most prominent campaigners against sexism, from Clementine Ford to Anne Summers.

I guess their silence demonstrates that their battle was not for a principle, but for a side. Sexism is fine, after all, as long as your own gender benefits.

Similarly, racism now is fine if it’s whites now copping it.

That’s why whites are now banned from some public service jobs, banned from some university computer rooms, and trashed in the latest Human Rights Commission anti-racism ad.

In fact, Deakin University’s “anti-racism” conference this month kicks off — absurdly — with a speech entitled: “Don’t Talk to white People.”

At least Bishop now has company. So many others are the sexists or racists they condemn, and the greater good can go hang.