Rare is the job that comes with a failsafe cheat code, yet the Australian prime ministership has one. It is asking yourself “Would Scott Morrison do this?” and then absolutely not doing that.
Anthony Albanese won the top job from the aforementioned in 2022 essentially by holding a big invisible sign reading “I am not the other guy” while Morrison careened around the country body-slamming children, being weird and saying tin-eared, patronising things about women.
That’s precisely why it was such a shock this week to hear him describe the sexual violence survivor and advocate Grace Tame as “difficult” when asked to describe her in a one-word-answer segment of an onstage interview.
Outrage has spread. It’s not merely because “difficult” is a gendered term that has been used to delegitimise women who enforce boundaries or demand standards. Nor is it because anyone who remembers the Morrison era can too easily imagine him saying it.
It’s because forgetting this context of the word – even under the pressure of quick-fire questioning – is positively Morrisonesque in its political dopery and suggests alignment between past and present PMs at a desperately inopportune time.
Tame herself has remarked on the resonance, sharing posts from satire site the Betoota Advocate that brutally married the two.
Albanese apologised, saying he meant Tame “has had a very difficult life”. That did not help, even if he added: “She deserves great credit for turning that into a benefit for others.”
Tame retorted: “Both men … have used ‘she’s had a difficult life’ as a condescending justification. Get some new material boys!”
One conjectures the “difficulty” symbolised by Tame is that the popular and influential campaigner Albanese praised as a “powerhouse” when she was the 2021 Australian of the Year was filmed chanting “globalise the intifada” at protests against the visit of the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog in early February. In the wake of the Bondi terror attack, Tame is now placed within Australia’s difficult and necessary democratic conversation about where the lines lie between acceptable comment and what causes harm.
It’s precisely because words do matter that women have reacted so fiercely to Albanese’s all-too-familiar epithet.
“Difficult” is a term used to write women off as emotional, unpleasant and unworthy of resources. There are entire books written about “difficult women” activists scrubbed from history because the rule-breaking behaviour that made them successful was deemed socially unpalatable. A recirculating 2018 piece from the journalist Virginia Trioli explains the sad tradition of women self-suppressing their experiences of harassment and abuse in the workplace for fear of earning a career-killing “difficult” label.
There is no better illustration of this phenomenon than a devastating season five episode of BoJack Horseman in which two producers casually destroy the career of “difficult” female actor, Gina, after she has experienced a traumatic incident on their set.
Rejecting the term isn’t to say that women are too holy to be difficult. Maybe Grace Tame is. I am and my mum was, because women are – yes – consistently as stubborn, obstructive, recalcitrant, challenging, argumentative, arrogant, frustrating and unreliable as men.
What we are saying is that when the description comes from someone in authority, we recognise an old, sexist pattern in which the problematic woman is diminished, extinguished and removed.
Forgetting this resonance is what the prime minister should apologise for – quickly, loudly, with humility, – to set himself apart from Morrison, because if there is a threat that may just cut through his electoral majority it’s the thought-terminating cliche of major-party interchangeability pushed by the populist right.
True to an international playbook, One Nation leans heavily on “duopoly” and “real opposition” language to deliberately obscure the significant ideological and practical differences between major parties.
The real danger of Albanese’s difficult moment with Tame is that his government’s tangible, signature outcomes for Australian women - like paid parental leave reforms, increased funding to frontline services, domestic violence leave and gender parity in the cabinet are all being overshadowed by a thoughtlessly dumb-arsed one-word remark.
Can Albanese turn this around? Confronted by his own gender-clumsiness, Morrison infamously implied that Australian women were lucky they weren’t met with bullets.
A compensatory gesture from Albanese is now required. It should be, conspicuously and comprehensively, not that.
Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
