Australia confronts ‘toxic male’ culture
SCOTT MORRISON, Australia’s prime minister, took to the lectern with a tear in his eye. His voice quivered as he spoke on the sex abuse scandal engulfing his parliament and triggering a public reckoning over toxic masculinity.
“I acknowledge that many Australians, especially women, believe that I have not heard them,” said Mr Morrison, who cultivates an image as an affable, suburban family man. “That greatly distresses me. I have been doing a lot of listening over this past month.”
There has been plenty for him to listen to. In what he has described as a “traumatic month” for the political class, Brittany Higgins, a former political adviser to Mr Morrison’s ruling centre-Right Liberal Party, went public with allegations that she was raped in a minister’s office by a colleague in 2019. She further alleged that she received no support from within the government.
It was then revealed that the country’s top law officer Christian Porter, the attorney general, had been accused of raping a 16-year-old girl in 1988. The woman contacted police in 2019, but took her own life last year. Mr Morrison admitted that he did not read an anonymous letter sent to him detailing the accusations, which Mr Porter denies.
The two sets of allegations sparked nationwide demonstrations earlier this month by women demanding an end to violence and harassment. Further outrage has been stoked by reports that Liberal Party employees had filmed themselves having sex in Parliament House, and that one had masturbated on a female MP’s desk.
Pressure has been building on Mr Morrison for not taking the mounting allegations seriously enough. Yesterday he sent an MP on an “empathy” course for mocking an apology he made for bullying two female constituents.
“In this climate – I willingly apologise – I didn’t even know what for at 4pm when I did it,” Andrew Laming wrote on social media, adding three tongue sticking out emojis and a heart eyes emoji. It was later revealed Mr Laming had photographed a woman at a workplace from behind when she bent over. He has since gone on medical leave and is “considering his future”.
Mr Morrison may shuffle his cabinet in a bid to quieten the storm. A poll conducted for The Australian newspaper earlier this month gave his party its worst rating since the 2019 bushfires.
Critics say the scandals have laid bare a culture of misogyny in Australian political and public life. The prime minister has been identified as part of the problem, after clumsy handling of the issue.
In his press conference, Mr Morrison said Australia should now have a historic reckoning against misogyny – across the country as a whole.
“These events have triggered, right across this building and indeed right across the country, women who have put up with this rubbish and this c--p for their entire lives, as their mothers did, as their grandmothers did,” he said.
It may be a hard sell for a man who has not shied away from embracing his country’s image as a plain-speaking, easy-going paradise. In a previous job as Australia’s head of tourism, Mr Morrison, who has the laddish nickname ScoMo, wooed visitors with an advert peddling every cliché of life down under, including the catchphrase: “Where the bloody hell are ya?”
Most Australians argue that the country has largely moved on from the macho image sold to the world in the 1980s. However, many believe that sexist attitudes persist more than in most other Western nations. Dr Jasmina Brankovich, a consultant who runs response programmes addressing sexual harassment, said female visitors from western Europe and Canada had expressed shock at the misogyny they had encountered from Australian men.
“I think it has a lot to do with the particular type of colonial patriarchy that was imported here,” she said. “And those attitudes are connected to the incidents of violence.”
Differences appear to be particularly
‘Women have had to put up with this rubbish their entire lives, as their mothers and grandmothers did’
marked in the country’s political discourse, where insults that would be deemed unacceptable elsewhere have long been tolerated.
Mr Morrison has alienated protesters by commenting that in less democratic countries, they might have been “met with bullets”.
Dr Brankovich is unconvinced by his vows for change, including his pledge to consider quotas to increase female representation in the Liberal Party. Too much of it, she suspects, is about “saving his own a---”. She added: “You can’t have this situation where people just save their own backside and they’re not changing anything.”