This week, entertainment and sports manager Ralph Carr was publicly named after a jury found him guilty of two counts of rape and one count of sexual assault.
His identity had been protected by a suppression order for almost three years, granted on mental health grounds after psychiatric evidence was put before the court. The woman he raped had no such protection.
On a podcast discussion, Sam Newman with Wayne Carey, said he “wondered what sort of evidence they had about him raping her other than the fact she might have had buyer’s remorse.” Carey did not challenge Newman. The statement sat there, unchallenged, on a platform with a substantial audience and now part of the news cycle.
It is worth being precise about what that phrase does.
“Buyer’s remorse” reframes a jury verdict, reached after evidence substantial enough to convict, in a legal system where rape convictions are notoriously rare, as a matter of a woman’s second thoughts after the fact. It is one of the oldest and most effective ways to undercut a survivor’s credibility without directly calling her a liar. And it is also worth noting that Carey is not a neutral bystander in these conversations about violence against women.
He has a long and publicly documented history of his own, including a 1997 guilty plea for indecent assault and a 2007 incident in which his then-girlfriend told police he smashed a wine glass into her face. The AFL itself cited that history last year when it blocked Carey from being honoured as a legend in the NSW Hall of Fame.
More than 40 women have already been killed by violence in Australia this year, depending on which tracker you use. Femicide Watch, Counting Dead Women and the Red Heart Campaign each count slightly differently, and none of them are an official government count, because Australia still does not have one. What every count agrees on, is the underlying driver for family violence is gender inequality, and the attitudes that treat women’s bodies, choices and credibility as up for negotiation.
Which is why the conversation about Victoria’s new government Cabinet this week matters. New Premier Ben Carroll was sworn in, and in his reshuffle, Deputy Premier Gabrielle Williams picked up the Portfolio for Women and Gender Equality, folded into an already large portfolio covering Education, Skills, Training and First Peoples.
I wrote for Women’s Agenda back in April, when Victoria created its first Minister for Men and Boys, that the State needed a dedicated Minister for Gender Equality and the Prevention of Family Violence, a role with an explicit mandate to address the drivers of violence, not just its symptoms. A standalone portfolio, in my opinion, would not be a matter of optics, but a matter of what actually gets funded, tracked and reported on.
A genuine gender equality portfolio, done properly, could do things that scattered responsibility across a dozen ministries cannot.
It could set targets for women’s economic participation and pay equity and be held accountable for hitting them, the way Treasury is held accountable for a budget. It could fund and evaluate primary prevention programs — the ones that work with boys and men before harm occurs, in schools, workplaces and sport — with the same rigor we would expect of a health portfolio, rather than as a goodwill add-on. It could give family violence services a single Minister to lobby, rather than diffusing responsibility across women’s affairs, community services, police and health, where accountability tends to evaporate. And it could put someone in Cabinet whose explicit job is to ask, of every policy that crosses the table, what it does to the gap between men and women’s power, safety and economic security because gender inequality is not just a women’s issue it is a whole of society issue.
None of that fixes what happened on a podcast this week. But it is related. A political system that treats gender equality as one line item among many, rather than the structural issue driving a national death toll, is part of the same culture that lets a comment like Newman’s air unchallenged and stay online.
Believing women is not just an attitude problem for individual commentators to fix. It is a policy and cultural problem, and it needs a portfolio with the mandate, budget and accountability to treat it as one.