Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said something dumb. Paid parental leave was about giving “women of that calibre” flexible life choices, he said. Fairly innocuous, but dumb. Labor, cleverly, summonsed the forces of social media to fuel widespread (and overblown) outrage.
Or at least that’s the take from The Australian‘s national affairs editor David Crowe today, who tries to tell us Labor was “mobilising its supporters against” Abbott.
“When news.com.au reported the remarks, Finance Minister Penny Wong used them against her opponent … That message was retweeted by MPs including Steve Gibbons, Michelle Rowland, Claire Moore, Deborah O’Neill, Richard Marles, Julie Collins, Andrew Leigh, Mark Butler and Catherine King.
“More than 100 other Twitter users, including union officials such as Michael O’Connor, sent the message on. NSW Labor and Victorian Labor Women also retweeted it.”
David, nobody was retweeting the MPs. We count some 1600 tweets using the hashtag #womenofcalibre as of this morning — whipped into a frenzy all on their own.
Social media, certainly, is a new and increasingly powerful political battleground, especially in an election year. Smart political operatives can harness it, to some degree, for their own advantage — something both major parties in Australia have failed to do.
Yesterday’s outrage as a clever Labor plot? If only they were that clever.
Saying something dumb for the paid parental leave only seems appropriate.
At last it is dawning the the incompetent leader is proposing a levy that can’t collect the amount required. He wasn’t smart enough to work out the effect of dividend imputation.
An unfunded commitment for an inequitable policy that is wide open to rorting ( I can just see husbands with their own business suddenly employing wives at the highest salary so they can collect the maximum) topped off with the inane “women of calibre ” comment
Abbott is a fool and incompetent of the first water
A rather more useful analysis would have been to see how many of the #womenofcalibre outraged would ever vote for the Coalition in a blue fit anyway.
It’s a given that a PPL will cater for the average working Mum, but Abbott’s scheme, like it or not, goes a lot further than the average Mum. It covers those Mums who are well educated women in top executive roles and who would lose substantially more salary than other Mums. That’s why Abbott referred to women of calibre…my dictionary says “calibre” can mean level of ability. Anything wrong with that?
Don’t like the fiscal implications though.
Sorry to be pedantic. Please look up the difference between “summoned” and “summonsed”.
Good to see that we have not been dumbed down quite to the degree LNP/MSM would like. We recognise the flash of the ‘true colours’ of LOTO speak when we hear them.
There is no doubt he is elitist and used the word in an elitist sense, any benefit to the average working woman would be viewed as ‘collateral damage’ to this party of social recidivist’s