“Oh dear, Penny, settle down.”
“I thought you might like to hear a man’s voice.”
“They might accuse you of being sexist.”
Sadly this isn’t script plucked from Mad Men. It is script taken from a Senate estimates hearing yesterday and those sentences were thrown around by political leaders including the Attorney-General George Brandis.
Welcome to Australia in 2015 where sexism isn’t just everywhere; it’s becoming ever more brazen.
Describing the treatment of Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs as sexist will no doubt form a lightning rod for criticism.
I’m just playing a card! She’s only being treated like this because she’s bad at her job! It’s because she’s blatantly biased! She obviously has a personal vendetta! Sexism doesn’t exist! Sexism is only a problem for angry women who men don’t like! She’s playing the victim! She can’t handle the pressure!
In reality, it is some of Australia’s most powerful men who cannot handle the pressure. This government cannot handle a woman who refuses to be silenced. A woman who refuses to follow their directions, bow to their demands and submit to their rules.
In some cases an assertion like this might be hard to substantiate but not in the case of Gillian Triggs. We know that the government, potentially illegally, offered her another job to step aside. The gravity of this cannot be overstated.
If Triggs had resigned, as they wanted, perhaps she would have been spared the public skewering. She might have been rewarded with another job.
For a lawyer of Triggs’ standing and integrity, the inducement itself was repugnant. If she had known how ugly and vicious the alternative was to be, perhaps she would have considered it. And would you blame her if she did.
It is bitterly ironic that her personal integrity and professionalism is being so determinedly undermined when, in fact, her integrity withstood the ultimate test. A person of lesser veracity and resolve may have bowed to the pressure.
Had Gillian Triggs accepted George Brandis’s offer of another job she would have escaped the government’s wrath for being biased. But she didn’t, so she is being attacked.
The hypocrisy is as blatant as the sexism is.
Whilst it’s impossible to say with certainty that a man in Triggs’ shoes would be subject to the same treatment, it is impossible to deny that gender plays a role.
The sexism in Senate estimates yesterday wasn’t even thinly veiled; it was bold and brazen.
“I thought you’d like to hear a man’s voice,” Senator Barry O’Sullivan exclaimed.
Had 30 seconds passed without the sound reason of man? I can only imagine how anyone might have coped.
“You might have been accused of sexism, Senator Macdonald,” Senator Brandis quipped.
Imagine that! A member of the current government being accused of sexism? Preposterous!
Sadly not. This is a government that has been consistently sexist.
Think a cabinet comprised of 18 men and single woman.
Think Matthias Cormann describing equal representation as a “side issue” or calling Bill Shorten a “girlie-man”.
Think Christopher Pyne explaining that women “will not be able to earn the high incomes that say dentists or lawyers will earn.”
Think Eric Abetz linking breast cancer with abortion.
Think Tony Abbott.
But indirect sexism that is perhaps the outcome of an unconscious bias against women, is not where it ends.
This is a government with form when it comes to denigrating powerful women; Julia Gillard, Peta Credlin and Gillian Triggs are proof of it.
Yet no one in the government seems aware of it.
The Immigration Minister Peter Dutton today weighed in on claims the government’s treatment of Gillian Triggs is sexist.
“I presume that the same people levelling these sorts of claims would be out defending [Mr Abbott’s chief of staff] Peta Credlin but of course they’re not because they’re hypocrites,” he told Fairfax Media.
If anyone in the government read Women’s Agenda they would know that we are as consistent in disparaging sexism in all of its guises as the government is at dishing it out.