Teals can’t resist playing the gender cardJanet Albrechtsen The...

Teals can’t resist playing the gender card

Janet Albrechtsen The Australian October 8, 2024

Some so-called teals spend too much time thinking about sex. Their sex. Two recent episodes show female teal MPs using sex whenever the political wicket gets a bit sticky. Adroit politicians would realise that, when used wrongly, the gender card is a weapon prone to backfiring. All it does is invite scrutiny of what they mean by gender equality. And it’s not a pretty picture.

Many teals have an absurd gender equality manifesto that goes something like this: I demand you treat me equally. But if you treat me equally when it doesn’t suit me, I will scream you have treated me differently because I’m a woman.

But first things first. It’s long overdue that we replace this “teal” word. At the risk of ruining my next gin and tonic, I’m renaming them the limes because they vote mostly in lock-step with the Greens.

Parliamentary library research reported in this newspaper last month reveals the seven poorly labelled teal MPs voted with the Greens between 73 and 81 per cent of the time over 27 months to August 22. Independent? Hardly.

Across 234 divisions in parliament, when they were all in parliament, they voted as a bloc 83 per cent of the time. Many of them join a chorus line of gender shenanigans too.

Last week the lime member for Goldstein, Zoe Daniel, issued a longwinded media statement telling “male reporters at the AFR” to “update their attitudes to women in leadership”.

Why? Phil Coorey had run a story about one of her workers asking the Australian Financial Review to remove Simon Holmes a Court from its list of Australia’s most covertly powerful people. It was a good yarn, but it wasn’t a big one (apologies, Phil). Until Daniel made it big by turning a story that wasn’t about her into one that most definitely was.

Prior to publication, AFR’s power list is a tightly held secret. Decided by a panel of industry leaders, the unpublished covert powerbroker list included Climate 200’s Holmes A Court, the guy who financially backed the limes. He didn’t want to be on the list and his office told the AFR as much. Too bad. The list is the list.

The list was still secret when someone working for Daniel rang the AFR and asked that Holmes a Court be removed from the list. Fellow lime MP for Wentworth, Allegra Spender, apparently made the same request when she dropped into the AFR’s parliamentary press office before the list was published in late September.

Given the list’s secrecy, reasonable people might think Holmes a Court, or someone on his behalf, had a word to these limes about his preference not to be on the covert power list. And off trot Spender and Daniel’s worker to ask that his name be removed.

When Coorey wrote an essay accompanying the Power List’s publication, mentioning the behind-the-scenes shenanigans about Holmes a Court, Daniel drew her gender weapon.

Daniel had come under a spot of pressure after former Liberal MP Jason Falinski made a silly complaint to the federal anti-corruption body about the phone call by one of her workers.

But Daniel turned it into a bigger story by releasing a statement claiming it was a “sexist trope” to suggest Holmes a Court “holds a position of male power over the female community independents on the crossbench”.

Spencer wrote a letter along similar lines. Daniel added that male reporters at the newspaper should “update their attitudes to women in leadership”.

Talk about over-reaction.

Neither Coorey nor the panel suggested that Holmes a Court’s covert power came from controlling the limes in federal parliament. But that didn’t stop fellow lime Zali Steggall, from the federal seat of Warringah, chiming in about a “boys club” at work.

One rule of politics the limes appear to have missed is that silence can be a virtue. The irony of their intervention about the secret list is that some people may now be more prone to thinking lime MPs were doing the bidding of a rich man. And that a story about Holmes a Court’s covert power hit a nerve.

Some will say if the shoe fits. Their own goal is their problem. However, when women in parliament play the gender card so breezily, it becomes our problem.

Gender discrimination should be a serious matter. Their antics risk turning it into a laughing stock. If you cry wolf about sexism at the first hint of criticism, it’s bad for all women. It’s not exactly modelling good behaviour for young girls either. It’s infantilising.

Then came a second confirmation that it can be scary seeing inside the mind of a lime politician. North Sydney MP Kylea Tink claimed in her submission to the Australian Electoral Commission that abolishing her seat in the upcoming redistribution of NSW federal seats was a case of gender bias.

When she ran out of other arguments, Tink wrote that abolishing her seat – alongside moves in Victoria to abolish the Labor seat of Higgins, held by another woman – would “make it less likely that the House of Representatives will reflect the principle of gender equality”.

Seriously, with the divine right of kings gone, are we to be governed by the divine right of women now? In another application of the lime version of gender equality, Tink seems to be saying that, in the interests of gender equality, the AEC should give special treatment to women, and if they don’t, it’s a terrible case of gender inequality. Worse than Tink’s flawed logic is her misunderstanding of the AEC – and of democracy.

It would be improper for this body to have regard to the impact its redistribution decisions might have on particular members, let alone on particular members of a specific gender.

That would amount to them interfering improperly with the electoral process. Nowhere is it part of the AEC’s remit to look at the gender of sitting MPs, the gender breakdown of parliament, or indeed the individual characteristics of any member of parliament. That’s for voters to decide.

When Tink insisted to the AEC that it’s imperative parliament “accurately reflects the Australian population” she misunderstands democracy too.

Representative democracy means every single person gets an equal vote, regardless of their sex, religion or race, regardless of their class, where they school, or what they eat for breakfast. The beauty of democracy is that simple: an equal vote for every person.

It doesn’t mean parliament must reflect the sex, religious, race or class features of our society, and it most certainly doesn’t mean the composition of parliament is imposed by diktat from above by some all-knowing figure.

We, the people, choose who fills the seats in parliament. Some of us choose values and competence over gender and identity politics. Under Tink’s muddled representation model, we would need representation for all society’s subgroups, including specially reserved seats for stupid people.

The limes might say they are concerned about integrity and all that jazz but when you get a close glimpse, there’s nothing special about them.

When they play these most ridiculous political games, using gender as a weapon, they reveal their thin skins and, worse, a very poor understanding of democracy.