This close to an Australian election, I’m as surprised as anyone to learn the government is staking out campaign space on the issue of equality in women’s sport.
This isn’t because Australians don’t like sport – we do! Or because there are no women here – there are plenty! Just look at all the ones who marched around the country last year!
The political demands of those marches were for properly resourced anti-violence services, safe workplaces, pay parity, action on underrepresentation of women in decision-making, improved care infrastructure, job security in heavily feminised industries … and a little respect.
They have not gone away. Yet Morrison and the Liberal-National Coalition have made meaningful commitments to none of them.
This contextualises the rather conspicuous slide of the prime minister’s electoral approval with this not-inconsiderably-sized voting bloc. Pollsters have been warning the Liberals about their dire women problem for a year.
So one can see the pressing need of the Liberal-National Coalition to improve their standing with women voters without having to admit to their old rhetoric or to own their past mistakes. Alas, one can now all too easily imagine the panicked campaign brainstorm meeting: “Maybe … sport? Do chicks like sport? Is chicks liking sport a thing?”
Now, we are here.
Australian sport is certainly a realm with massive and obvious gender inequalities. Government has a crucial role to play in addressing them. There’s the issue that government money flows into professional sporting associations in which the leadership and decision-making structures heave with overrepresentation from men. There’s the ongoing issue of a huge gender pay disparity that denudes women’s opportunities for professional development by obliging their work as part-time. Women’s sport doesn’t get equal media interest as men’s, nor comparable sponsorship opportunities. There have been failures of oversight that facilitated women’s harassment and even, allegedly, sexual abuse.
Problem is, the current policy intervention into women’s sport that Scott Morrison claims is “terrific” isn’t about ANY of these things. It’s not even a meaningful apology for how the pretext of funding women’s sporting facilities was exposed as another form of government pork-barrelling in the “sports rorts” affair. The rugby league club that got $500,000 for a unisex change-room upgrade despite not having an above-12 female team sticks in the mind.
No, the campaign conversation the Liberals want to have is a private member’s bill proposal from Tasmanian senator Claire Chandler that would empower sporting clubs to kick transgender girls and women out of women’s competition. What the prime minister claims is “terrific” is a policy informed not by science, medicine or the professional standards that already govern everyone’s competitive sporting participation, but on the stale political practice of using myths of danger and threat to create divisive demons within an already marginalised community. The Liberals are using this bill to front active discrimination and pretend it’s got something to do with women’s equality.
Even the senator was unable to name a single sporting club in her home state that had actually asked for the ban. With access to the full resources of government, she’d know that the government authority Sport Australia has identified that the tiny percentage of transgender Australians are seriously underrepresented in Australian sport already, at all levels. She’d know, too, that the sporting regulations and codes that administer everything from weight classes for competition to whether someone has recently taken an aspirin exist precisely to ensure sporting opportunities are fair for everyone.
The dissembling, of course, occurs in the wake of the Liberals’ failed “religious discrimination bill” to legalise spurious discrimination against transgender Australians as demanded by a hard-right religious lobby. As Labor, various cross-benchers and rebels from the Liberals’ own ranks successfully scuppered that legislation, the likelihood of success for the new bill is zero.
The point, of course, is not to win the bill but to satisfy the ideological purity tests of an apparently transphobic hard right disappointed with the last bill’s failure, at the same time feeling out a potential fracture point within the powerful alliance of women arraigned politically against them.
It’s not about sport, and it is the opposite of anything to do with equality. It’s about an ancient electoral ploy to attach fear and suspicion on to an already marginalised community that a significant number of Australians don’t know much about, in a place they’re unlikely to encounter them, just to whip up fear and division.
That’s not sport. It’s not even politics. It’s just cruelty.
