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tammaiyaI am very, very sleepy, but today was momentous enough that I can't really let it go without an LJ post, especially since I've let so much go by without commenting on it in recent times.
Today (well, yesterday now), Australia got its first female Prime Minister. And given that it's already the next day in the east coast timezone, I am definitely late to the post-writing party by this stage and I'm sure the vast majority of you have all heard about this from some other source by now, probably another Australian on your flist. XD
As you might have gathered, it all happened very suddenly. There have been rumblings about leadership challenges for a while now, but most people I knew weren't taking them very seriously. Last night there were reports on the news that Gillard and Swan had gone to the PM's office to "tap him on the shoulder" and ask him to stand down, and a site my brother linked me to was giving up to the minute updates on the whirrings of the political machine, but nothing was confirmed until suddenly, at around 11pm, At The Movies experienced a lot of technical glitching and we were thrown into a press conference where Rudd was announcing there would be a leadership ballot at 9 in the morning. Shocking! And yet I stayed up so late that by the time I went to bed I was almost too muddled to remember this was happening in mere HOURS; when I rolled out of bed at midday I came out to Julia Gillard giving a speech on television and turned to my mother to say, blankly: "...Is she the Prime Minister?"
Anyway, the reason I am posting this late-- and the reason I am so tired-- is that I have had a fairly long (but fun!) day. After I got up and watched the new PM's first press conference for a bit, I went out to lunch with law friends, briefly came home, met Mari and Jen at Woden, came briefly back to my place with Mari, went out to dinner with school friends, dropped Mari home and stayed there for several hours.
As someone who doesn't usually go out much, let alone to multiple things in one day, let alone to multiple restaurants, I am basically exhausted. (Okay, also I was sleep-deprived.) The relevance to this post is partially because it's not just political blogging, it's also my personal blog, but also because, in every single one of these groups, not to mention with every single one of my family members I talked to today, politics took centre stage. It wasn't the only topic discussed by far, but it was certainly a prominent topic, even with friends usually less politically aware (for example, my law friends are always going to be up to discuss politics; Mari and Jen, less so).
It's a big topic for a number of reasons: one, it was big, sudden, shocking news; two, probably all of these people, men included, were feminists, and the first female PM is a big deal; and three, it was interesting to discuss the ramifications for policy shifts, public opinion and the inevitable upcoming election.
What I should say first is that I come from an intensely political family. My father is an ALP lawyer, and knows a lot about many of the members of the current government, sometimes having personally had dealings with them, sometimes by political osmosis; my mother and brother have degrees in political science to go with their law degrees. Not to mention the fact that my father is unhealthily addicted to news and the rest of my family isn't much better. Plus, I tend to find that law students are almost inevitably opinionated about politics.
So there is a lot of ALP support going there. Obviously, there are a lot of people who voted for Rudd, the former PM, both among my family and friends. So first I'm going to talk about the purely political side, before I focus on the feminist side.
I voted for Kevin Rudd, and though I've been severely disappointed in his performance over the last few months, I have not for one moment regretted that. Not just because the alternative was yet another term of John Howard, a rather spine-chilling thought; because he achieved some great things in office. He was the first PM to ever say sorry to the indigenous peoples for their treatment by the white settlers, and in particular the stolen generation. He stopped the inhumane treatment of asylum seekers that had been perpetrated under the reign of the Howard government (though there was starting to be a backwards trend there in recent months, it was still nowhere near what happened under Howard). He ended Work Choices. He reopened the issue of VSU. He got us through the GFC without a rescession.
Many of those things, other ministers obviously had a hand in and certainly supported. The new PM, Julia Gillard, was the former Minister for Industrial Relations. The new deputy PM, Wayne Swan, is also the Treasurer. But you can't discount Rudd's achievements. And even on the ETS and climate change, I think a lot of people fail to recognise the political deadlock he was in, between the Liberal party, the Greens and Senator bloody Fielding. When your Senate is controlled by the opposition, who is apparently diametrically opposed to doing anything on climate change and isn't even fully convinced it exists, a far left party who is all for stopping climate change but won't pass anything unless it meets their ideal standards (I am personally not knowledgable enough on the topic to know whether the Greens' proposal was truly economic suicide, the country actually cannot survive this level or not, so will leave that aspect to one side), and an independent who is a fundamentalist right-wing Christian who doesn't believe in climate change, you can't actually make everyone happy. In fact, screw making everyone happy, you can't make enough people happy to actually pass a bill with any meaning, and that's the important bit. He could have called a double dissolution to dissolve both Houses of Parliament, and if he had, I suspect he would still be PM now without a looming election on the horizon. In hindsight, it is highly likely it would have been the best political choice for him. But he didn't believe it was in the best interests of the country. People don't like double dissolutions. It's nice to have the option entrenched in the Constitution for emergencies, but people really don't like them. When you elect representatives for a number of years, you expect them to stay there. (Except for Senator Fielding, who was somewhat of a mistake involving the Victorian branch of the Labor Party getting pissed off at the Greens and unfortunate allocation of preferences, but let's not go there.) What happened to the ETS wasn't necessarily Rudd's fault, but he handled it very badly, and he lost the faith of the public.
However, he made a lot of mistakes. For a guy who used to be a diplomat, he turned out to be surprisingly bad at dealing with people. He was often bullheaded and stubborn where he should have been conciliatory and persuasive. He couldn't stand to compromise, and it seemed to be more the general principle of the thing than any specific principle he believed in and stood his ground on. This is why the Australian public stopped listening to him; this is why his party got frustrated and fed up with not being consulted or sometimes even informed before major decisions were taken; this is why the mining companies took him down in a flaming wreck. He was too confrontational, and he got people's backs up. Nevertheless, I would have continued to support him if not for some truly terrible policies coming out of late, most notably the internet filter and the internet usage ISP-monitoring proposal. What the FUCK. I don't want to live in a society heading alarmingly close to George Orwell's 1984; I thought the trade-off to letting stupid sheep mentality elect the country's representative was supposed to be freedom and liberty. This left me in somewhat of a voting quandry, because there is going to be an election in some six months or so and my options for the ruler of the nation were the guy championing these ridiculous internet policies and... Tony Abbott.
To put it frankly, I was not and am not going to vote Liberal, because hell will freeze over before I vote for Tony Abbott. If he becomes the next PM, I'm moving to Japan. You may think I'm joking; believe me, I'm NOT. The man is a rabid fundamentalist who stands for everything I hate. Maybe I'd toss over the major parties and vote for the Greens, but I don't completely support their policies either; in theory it sounds good, in practice I think some of their ideals aren't really supported by realistic plans for actualisation. (It's times like these you miss the Democrats.) If push came to shove, I might write nothing on my ballot paper but vitriol about how I feel the democratic process is currently failing for a reasonable choice. For someone like me, who believes in the democratic vote despite her frequent irritation with how the system often encourages herd mentality, fear-mongering and all-around blatant stupidity, that's a rather extreme step. (Well, in theory. In practice I'm in what may be the safest Labor electorate in the country and my vote won't change anything either way.)
Now, we have a new PM, and it's a whole new ballgame.
Julia Gillard promises to be a very different leader to Kevin Rudd. The Labor Party covers a fair range of the political spectrum, from centre right to fairly far left-wing. Rudd was from the right of the party; Gillard is from the left. It's actually fairly amazing that figures last night put support for her at 50% of the left of the party and 60% of the right. When I listened to her speech today at the press conference, I heard words like "negotiation", "compromise", "discussion". I heard political mastery where she announced an end to government advertising about the mining tax, an entreaty to mining companies to do the same, and an offer to negotiate with an open door if the mining companies will step up with an open mind. She put the ball firmly back in their court; she sounded every inch the Prime Minister who would use words to persuade and lead, not to order and bludgeon recalcitrant opponents and supporters alike.
And this is where we trend over into the feminism. Because you know what? I'm not going to vote for Julia Gillard just because she's a woman. If she fails to deliver over the next few months, if we still have this ridiculous internet filter hanging over us, I'm going to be very disappointed, and I'll probably do the same thing I would have done if Rudd had stayed PM.
But right now, I think she can be a good PM. I think she can be a great PM. And I'm excited, because finally a woman who deserves the job is getting a chance to do it. Some man on the radio today - not a talkback caller or a jockey, someone in some position or other, I forget who - complained about how all the feminists "gloating" sickened him. To that I'd like to say, you know what, it's not about the fact that a woman is PM. It's the fact that a capable woman has had the chance to be PM. I would not be happy if a woman I thought wasn't up to the task had gotten into the job, whether it was by virtue of reverse discrimination or not, because I don't want a female figurehead or an incompetent woman PM who less enlightened men can point to and say, see, this is why women can't rule. I'm celebrating because I think, first and foremost, that Julia Gillard has what it takes to be a PM I can really support-- and because she's the first woman to ever do it. I have been really privileged in my life, and have rarely come up against serious discrimination on the basis of my gender (sexuality is another matter). I went to an all girls' private school; I've always been told I can do whatever I want with my life, and that I have just as much right in the world as any man. But the fact of the matter is, despite all the improvements over the years, things are far from equal. Out of 48 High Court Justices, only four have ever been women; out of 27 PMs, it took until the 27th, and she hasn't had to face an election yet. We've never even had a female Leader of the Opposition. There have been 79 women in the House of Representatives in its entire history-- please note that, at the present at least, it has 150 members total and a 110 year history. About a quarter of the Senate is female, which is a big improvement on what it used to be. Just this week there was a big scandal about a CEO of David Jones being forced to resign over allegations of sexual harrassment. A female PM is still somehow controversial and worthy of heated discussion. But it's not like you can just enforce a 50/50 ratio of everything; reverse discrimination against men is hardly any better than where we started. What we want is the people best qualified for the task; we want a meritocracy. In the past, we haven't had one, because approximately half of the population was eliminated by their gender. Now, it's the long hard work of decades to come to remedy that; for every person who retires, there should be roughly a fifty per cent chance that their replacement will be a woman. We're fighting against the perception of women being appointed to roles simply because they're female and it's "politically correct"; what's worse is when that's true.
Let me just say now, no feminist is actually happy when that happens, despite what anti-feminists may believe. And let me also say: that's not what's happened here. Julia Gillard was the deputy PM. She challenged the PM because he'd lost the support of his party, of his electorate, of the country of Australia. And that was really sad. I feel sorry for him. It's a horrible way to crash out, ironic in the way it mirrors what happened to Malcolm Turnbull mere months ago, and I'm glad I missed his speech this morning because I hear he was breaking down in tears and that would have been terribly hard to watch. But I honestly believe Gillard did what she believed was best for the country, not just what she thought would get her party elected; I've never had any doubt about the strength of her convictions, and I think she will be a truly strong leader.
Despite what I said above, I think we need to be reminded of how far we have come. Today, the female Governor General swore in the first female PM; there may only have been 4 women on the High Court of Australia in over 100 years of history, but three of those women are sitting on the current bench. We may still be a long way from gender equality, but we're getting there-- and I feel privileged to have the opportunity to elect a woman to the highest office in this country who, at this stage at least, looks like the best option I could have hoped for in a long time.
... oh my god, so much for being tired. Talk about tl;dr - I'm sorry, I don't know where all that word vomit came from. I swear I'm done now! orz
Today (well, yesterday now), Australia got its first female Prime Minister. And given that it's already the next day in the east coast timezone, I am definitely late to the post-writing party by this stage and I'm sure the vast majority of you have all heard about this from some other source by now, probably another Australian on your flist. XD
As you might have gathered, it all happened very suddenly. There have been rumblings about leadership challenges for a while now, but most people I knew weren't taking them very seriously. Last night there were reports on the news that Gillard and Swan had gone to the PM's office to "tap him on the shoulder" and ask him to stand down, and a site my brother linked me to was giving up to the minute updates on the whirrings of the political machine, but nothing was confirmed until suddenly, at around 11pm, At The Movies experienced a lot of technical glitching and we were thrown into a press conference where Rudd was announcing there would be a leadership ballot at 9 in the morning. Shocking! And yet I stayed up so late that by the time I went to bed I was almost too muddled to remember this was happening in mere HOURS; when I rolled out of bed at midday I came out to Julia Gillard giving a speech on television and turned to my mother to say, blankly: "...Is she the Prime Minister?"
Anyway, the reason I am posting this late-- and the reason I am so tired-- is that I have had a fairly long (but fun!) day. After I got up and watched the new PM's first press conference for a bit, I went out to lunch with law friends, briefly came home, met Mari and Jen at Woden, came briefly back to my place with Mari, went out to dinner with school friends, dropped Mari home and stayed there for several hours.
As someone who doesn't usually go out much, let alone to multiple things in one day, let alone to multiple restaurants, I am basically exhausted. (Okay, also I was sleep-deprived.) The relevance to this post is partially because it's not just political blogging, it's also my personal blog, but also because, in every single one of these groups, not to mention with every single one of my family members I talked to today, politics took centre stage. It wasn't the only topic discussed by far, but it was certainly a prominent topic, even with friends usually less politically aware (for example, my law friends are always going to be up to discuss politics; Mari and Jen, less so).
It's a big topic for a number of reasons: one, it was big, sudden, shocking news; two, probably all of these people, men included, were feminists, and the first female PM is a big deal; and three, it was interesting to discuss the ramifications for policy shifts, public opinion and the inevitable upcoming election.
What I should say first is that I come from an intensely political family. My father is an ALP lawyer, and knows a lot about many of the members of the current government, sometimes having personally had dealings with them, sometimes by political osmosis; my mother and brother have degrees in political science to go with their law degrees. Not to mention the fact that my father is unhealthily addicted to news and the rest of my family isn't much better. Plus, I tend to find that law students are almost inevitably opinionated about politics.
So there is a lot of ALP support going there. Obviously, there are a lot of people who voted for Rudd, the former PM, both among my family and friends. So first I'm going to talk about the purely political side, before I focus on the feminist side.
I voted for Kevin Rudd, and though I've been severely disappointed in his performance over the last few months, I have not for one moment regretted that. Not just because the alternative was yet another term of John Howard, a rather spine-chilling thought; because he achieved some great things in office. He was the first PM to ever say sorry to the indigenous peoples for their treatment by the white settlers, and in particular the stolen generation. He stopped the inhumane treatment of asylum seekers that had been perpetrated under the reign of the Howard government (though there was starting to be a backwards trend there in recent months, it was still nowhere near what happened under Howard). He ended Work Choices. He reopened the issue of VSU. He got us through the GFC without a rescession.
Many of those things, other ministers obviously had a hand in and certainly supported. The new PM, Julia Gillard, was the former Minister for Industrial Relations. The new deputy PM, Wayne Swan, is also the Treasurer. But you can't discount Rudd's achievements. And even on the ETS and climate change, I think a lot of people fail to recognise the political deadlock he was in, between the Liberal party, the Greens and Senator bloody Fielding. When your Senate is controlled by the opposition, who is apparently diametrically opposed to doing anything on climate change and isn't even fully convinced it exists, a far left party who is all for stopping climate change but won't pass anything unless it meets their ideal standards (I am personally not knowledgable enough on the topic to know whether the Greens' proposal was truly economic suicide, the country actually cannot survive this level or not, so will leave that aspect to one side), and an independent who is a fundamentalist right-wing Christian who doesn't believe in climate change, you can't actually make everyone happy. In fact, screw making everyone happy, you can't make enough people happy to actually pass a bill with any meaning, and that's the important bit. He could have called a double dissolution to dissolve both Houses of Parliament, and if he had, I suspect he would still be PM now without a looming election on the horizon. In hindsight, it is highly likely it would have been the best political choice for him. But he didn't believe it was in the best interests of the country. People don't like double dissolutions. It's nice to have the option entrenched in the Constitution for emergencies, but people really don't like them. When you elect representatives for a number of years, you expect them to stay there. (Except for Senator Fielding, who was somewhat of a mistake involving the Victorian branch of the Labor Party getting pissed off at the Greens and unfortunate allocation of preferences, but let's not go there.) What happened to the ETS wasn't necessarily Rudd's fault, but he handled it very badly, and he lost the faith of the public.
However, he made a lot of mistakes. For a guy who used to be a diplomat, he turned out to be surprisingly bad at dealing with people. He was often bullheaded and stubborn where he should have been conciliatory and persuasive. He couldn't stand to compromise, and it seemed to be more the general principle of the thing than any specific principle he believed in and stood his ground on. This is why the Australian public stopped listening to him; this is why his party got frustrated and fed up with not being consulted or sometimes even informed before major decisions were taken; this is why the mining companies took him down in a flaming wreck. He was too confrontational, and he got people's backs up. Nevertheless, I would have continued to support him if not for some truly terrible policies coming out of late, most notably the internet filter and the internet usage ISP-monitoring proposal. What the FUCK. I don't want to live in a society heading alarmingly close to George Orwell's 1984; I thought the trade-off to letting stupid sheep mentality elect the country's representative was supposed to be freedom and liberty. This left me in somewhat of a voting quandry, because there is going to be an election in some six months or so and my options for the ruler of the nation were the guy championing these ridiculous internet policies and... Tony Abbott.
To put it frankly, I was not and am not going to vote Liberal, because hell will freeze over before I vote for Tony Abbott. If he becomes the next PM, I'm moving to Japan. You may think I'm joking; believe me, I'm NOT. The man is a rabid fundamentalist who stands for everything I hate. Maybe I'd toss over the major parties and vote for the Greens, but I don't completely support their policies either; in theory it sounds good, in practice I think some of their ideals aren't really supported by realistic plans for actualisation. (It's times like these you miss the Democrats.) If push came to shove, I might write nothing on my ballot paper but vitriol about how I feel the democratic process is currently failing for a reasonable choice. For someone like me, who believes in the democratic vote despite her frequent irritation with how the system often encourages herd mentality, fear-mongering and all-around blatant stupidity, that's a rather extreme step. (Well, in theory. In practice I'm in what may be the safest Labor electorate in the country and my vote won't change anything either way.)
Now, we have a new PM, and it's a whole new ballgame.
Julia Gillard promises to be a very different leader to Kevin Rudd. The Labor Party covers a fair range of the political spectrum, from centre right to fairly far left-wing. Rudd was from the right of the party; Gillard is from the left. It's actually fairly amazing that figures last night put support for her at 50% of the left of the party and 60% of the right. When I listened to her speech today at the press conference, I heard words like "negotiation", "compromise", "discussion". I heard political mastery where she announced an end to government advertising about the mining tax, an entreaty to mining companies to do the same, and an offer to negotiate with an open door if the mining companies will step up with an open mind. She put the ball firmly back in their court; she sounded every inch the Prime Minister who would use words to persuade and lead, not to order and bludgeon recalcitrant opponents and supporters alike.
And this is where we trend over into the feminism. Because you know what? I'm not going to vote for Julia Gillard just because she's a woman. If she fails to deliver over the next few months, if we still have this ridiculous internet filter hanging over us, I'm going to be very disappointed, and I'll probably do the same thing I would have done if Rudd had stayed PM.
But right now, I think she can be a good PM. I think she can be a great PM. And I'm excited, because finally a woman who deserves the job is getting a chance to do it. Some man on the radio today - not a talkback caller or a jockey, someone in some position or other, I forget who - complained about how all the feminists "gloating" sickened him. To that I'd like to say, you know what, it's not about the fact that a woman is PM. It's the fact that a capable woman has had the chance to be PM. I would not be happy if a woman I thought wasn't up to the task had gotten into the job, whether it was by virtue of reverse discrimination or not, because I don't want a female figurehead or an incompetent woman PM who less enlightened men can point to and say, see, this is why women can't rule. I'm celebrating because I think, first and foremost, that Julia Gillard has what it takes to be a PM I can really support-- and because she's the first woman to ever do it. I have been really privileged in my life, and have rarely come up against serious discrimination on the basis of my gender (sexuality is another matter). I went to an all girls' private school; I've always been told I can do whatever I want with my life, and that I have just as much right in the world as any man. But the fact of the matter is, despite all the improvements over the years, things are far from equal. Out of 48 High Court Justices, only four have ever been women; out of 27 PMs, it took until the 27th, and she hasn't had to face an election yet. We've never even had a female Leader of the Opposition. There have been 79 women in the House of Representatives in its entire history-- please note that, at the present at least, it has 150 members total and a 110 year history. About a quarter of the Senate is female, which is a big improvement on what it used to be. Just this week there was a big scandal about a CEO of David Jones being forced to resign over allegations of sexual harrassment. A female PM is still somehow controversial and worthy of heated discussion. But it's not like you can just enforce a 50/50 ratio of everything; reverse discrimination against men is hardly any better than where we started. What we want is the people best qualified for the task; we want a meritocracy. In the past, we haven't had one, because approximately half of the population was eliminated by their gender. Now, it's the long hard work of decades to come to remedy that; for every person who retires, there should be roughly a fifty per cent chance that their replacement will be a woman. We're fighting against the perception of women being appointed to roles simply because they're female and it's "politically correct"; what's worse is when that's true.
Let me just say now, no feminist is actually happy when that happens, despite what anti-feminists may believe. And let me also say: that's not what's happened here. Julia Gillard was the deputy PM. She challenged the PM because he'd lost the support of his party, of his electorate, of the country of Australia. And that was really sad. I feel sorry for him. It's a horrible way to crash out, ironic in the way it mirrors what happened to Malcolm Turnbull mere months ago, and I'm glad I missed his speech this morning because I hear he was breaking down in tears and that would have been terribly hard to watch. But I honestly believe Gillard did what she believed was best for the country, not just what she thought would get her party elected; I've never had any doubt about the strength of her convictions, and I think she will be a truly strong leader.
Despite what I said above, I think we need to be reminded of how far we have come. Today, the female Governor General swore in the first female PM; there may only have been 4 women on the High Court of Australia in over 100 years of history, but three of those women are sitting on the current bench. We may still be a long way from gender equality, but we're getting there-- and I feel privileged to have the opportunity to elect a woman to the highest office in this country who, at this stage at least, looks like the best option I could have hoped for in a long time.
... oh my god, so much for being tired. Talk about tl;dr - I'm sorry, I don't know where all that word vomit came from. I swear I'm done now! orz
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no subject
Date: 2010-06-24 07:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-25 04:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-25 09:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-25 08:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-25 09:04 am (UTC)It comes with the territory. You want to study law, you either already have an interest in politics or you develop one incredibly quickly because all those bits and pieces of legislation you cram into your brain were passed by some political party in parliament.
Also, this to pretty much everything. ALP internet policy needs to be dropped or at the very very least made opt-in before I can vote for them, and as for the Mad Monk NO. FUCKING. WAY.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-25 12:31 pm (UTC)