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Through the rose-coloured looking glass

By Sonia Bowditch - posted Tuesday, 9 July 2013


But 'what makes Julia Gillard's heart swell most,' notes Summers, 'is what she has done for working women.' And it's true that women who work are her focus. She calls it her 'tough love' policy and all women under this policy, including single mothers, are expected to work.

While Gillard's aim was to ensure that single mothers will 'have a life' of their own once their children are older (implying that paid work is the only measure of a successful life), those of us who watched the harrowing report on Four Corners recently, know that such women, living on $35 a day, are often only a bout of illness or an unexpected bill away from disaster. In fact the opposite of what Gillard planned can happen, whereby 'their world contracts and they can find themselves cut off from society.'

In the end, though, Summers tells us that what 'got to' Gillard most was Tony Abbott's hypocrisy, 'as if he is some convert, or someone with a real understanding about what it's like to face the world as a woman and to feel the weight of that'. This is akin to saying that men cannot hold the position of PM because they cannot truly represent women's best interests. This extreme gendered attack became typical of Gillard's modus operandi in her final months in the top job and it's what caused some to view her as a PM for women and hence her male voter support dropped.

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Summers acknowledges that the misogyny speech was a crucial mistake, as it gave Gillard's enemies - 'those who would prefer women to be either absent or silently compliant in public life' - lethal ammunition. I would contend that Gillard was not 'punished' for not being compliantly silent but rather for making unjustified accusations of a deeply personal nature.

And really, what did Gillard expect? If you are going to get aggressive and start hurling around insults of that magnitude, you have to expect some backlash from your opponents. That's politics, man – or woman. To suggest that Gillard's enemies sought to get rid of her because of this speech and the gender war it ignited is delusional and fails to adequately account for Gillard's myriad other flaws.

And yet Summers persists with her lecture on Gillard being vilified for the sin of being female. One of her examples? That Gillard was blasted 'over a twenty-year-old matter to do with a union she once did some work for'. What's that got to do with being a woman? If we are going to argue in this manner, Abbott has surely been scrutinised to a far worse extent for being a man, such as the more-than-twenty-year-old matter of punching a wall close to the face of Barbara Ramjan in his university days. Similarly, Bill Clinton had to endure the Whitewater scandal (though in the Summers interview, Gillard talks of this as though it had been Hillary Clinton's burden, somehow borne from being a female politician).

Last week the Victorian Women's Trust took out full page advertisements in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Herald Sun to put on record their thoughts on how Gillard was treated in Office. Though their open letter Credit where credit is due makes mention of some of Gillard's bad policies - 'we remain baffled by several of the Gillard government's policies – on immigration and asylum seekers, reducing economic support for single parents and the Prime Minister's position on same–sex marriage' - they bizarrely conclude that Gillard's demise was due to anything but these issues; that it occurred primarily because of her gender and society's reaction to it. Go figure.

Surely we are allowed to talk about Gillard's failings without being seen as criticising her gender? Why then, hasn't Summers mentioned the broken Carbon Tax promise or Gillard's other obvious errors of judgement: the Malaysian solution, the handling of Peter Slipper, etcetera, etcetera. Surely it would be more balanced to do so. In protecting her status as the first female Prime Minister, do we really have to blame everything on the fact that 'Australia wasn't ready for a female PM' or that from the minute she took office, men were trying to get 'back in their perceived "rightful place" as political leaders of both the government and opposition.'

At the end of the day, Julia Gillard is right. It will be easier for the next woman and the woman after that and the woman after that. Just by making it to the top job in the country, Gillard has no doubt advanced the prospects of every woman in politics, now and in the future. And though I don't wish to speak ill of the politically-dead, neither do I wish to air-brush history - even for the worthy goal of feminism.

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About the Author

Sonia is a Canberra-based freelance writer who likes to pitch her thoughts on society and culture in Australia. She has a Bachelor of Arts from the ANU and a Masters in Writing from Swinburne. Her website is www.bowditchpitch.com.

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