Nations think nothing of directing their rage at women, particularly non-compliant women. This is because they still think they own them. Recently that rage was directed at Grace Tame, a young activist and 2021 Australian of the Year, for failing to perform the required etiquette around the hallowed presence of power, the Australian prime minister. As is often the case with women, the nation and the government both misunderstood Tame’s moment and how it symbolises women’s state of rage right now.
When the Australian government resumes parliamentary sittings this week, it will find itself in a stand-off with Australian women. It has already been in this impasse for some time, and as it has with almost every social issue, it lurches from disorientation to impetuousness to performative compliancy and then back to its signature approach to women: belligerence.
In its few moments of clarity, the government thinks that the battle with women is one of attrition. All it has to do is wait us out or stare us down. Eventually we’ll be distracted by the host of other social justice issues that society deems is the burden of our gender: in our Covid context these are aged care homes, access to health services, care of the vulnerable and inclusion of the marginalised in our decision-making as we deal with an ever-evolving pandemic. Anyone who doesn’t think that women carry the overwhelming burden of responsibility in these areas need only look at who are the foot soldiers at the frontline.
For this impasse to be resolved and for that rage to have any redemptive value, it must have a tangible outcome that empowers women. Right now, that outcome must be the Australian sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins’s Set the Standard report. The report found a culture of inequality, bullying and sexual harassment and detailed the litany of gendered practices that disempower and diminish women in the Australian parliament. To reform that existing toxic culture requires the adoption of all 28 recommendations outlined in the report.
The government has in fact committed to the Jenkins recommendations, announcing in December its intention to implement the report’s first two recommendations before parliament sits this week. On Friday, it announced a multiparty leadership taskforce had been established to oversee the implementation of the recommendations and had met for the first time on Thursday. The taskforce had apparently discussed making a statement of acknowledgment, which was the first recommendation of the Jenkins review, and the establishment of a parliamentary committee.
It is crucial to ensure that the government follows through with its commitment to implement all of the commissioner’s recommendations even as it fails to fully comprehend the stand-off it’s in with women.
The government’s political stratagem of media managing women’s issues only further enrages women. It is impossible to tally all the actions that have produced the impasse we’re in. There are decades of neglect, failure to protect, and refusal to provide the policy context or deploy programs to facilitate and create the social conditions in which women can thrive.
And yet, for all that has happened: the sexual harassment allegations, the harassment of female parliamentarians, the alleged rape and white-anting of former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins, the denigration and undermining of Tame as she time and again questioned the prime minister’s stated commitment to furthering the status of women. One cannot help but wonder if the government’s choices are less a failure of understanding and more a compulsion to silence women who exercise the power that they are given.
It is not only that the government seems unable to understand that its relationship with women has changed; it’s angry. The entitlement synonymous with privileged white masculinity cannot be assumed any more. It cannot simply act in its self-interest.
Commissioner Jenkins’s recommended reforms are often justified on officious grounds. She has stated that the recommendations aim “to bring parliamentary workplaces into line with the standards expected of all modern Australian workplaces”.
But the report matters beyond that. It will protect the safety of women and the wellbeing of those in parliament and commonwealth parliamentary workplaces (CPWs). Significantly, its importance for ordinary women will reside in its ability to test in a demonstrable way whether those who govern us can live and work in an environment that does not subject women to violence and inequality as a matter of daily practice. Are those who are used to exercising power able to accept it has its limits? Are they able to conceive of women as absolutely their equals? If this sounds like hyperbole, note that Jenkins repeatedly brought attention to the misuse of power as being “one of the primary drivers of misconduct”, that interviewees stressed that those who engaged in misconduct were very often rewarded, and that lack of accountability and culture of entitlement and exclusion reigned.
Parliament is not only a concentration of power, it is also designed to rely on a critical disempowered mass, and that mass is women. The report notes “the privilege of some groups of people, and the marginalisation and exclusion of others”. Parliament does not mirror the society it governs, it creates it in its own image; it privileges power, masculinity and racial homogeneity.
Women’s rage represents how they will no longer be diminished nor languish unprotected on the periphery, and this impasse will not resolve until that rage is taken seriously.
• Joumanah El Matrah is a PhD student at Western Sydney University. She is a former CEO, researcher, community worker and advocate for migrant and Muslim women’s issues
