Why Liberals still don’t understand women’s anger

Amid the unedifying displays in Canberra last week, as the Liberal Party relentlessly pursued Minister for Women Katy Gallagher in the Senate, drawing on Brittany Higgins’ leaked text messages in order to claim Gallagher and her colleagues actively conspired with Higgins to “weaponise” her rape allegation — and then engaged in corrupt conduct to ensure Higgins received a handsome payment for her trouble — I had a clarifying moment.

There, lined up in the front row of the opposition benches of the Senate, the usual suspects — a phalanx of female Liberal senators — were called upon, once again, to do the Liberal Party’s dirty work. Some have called them “crumb maidens”, others “the handbag brigade”. One by one, they stepped up to politicise a woman’s alleged sexual assault.

First Michaelia Cash, then former minister for women Marise Payne, and then Sarah Henderson. But it was Payne’s complicity in the line of attack that was most galling.   

This is the same former minister for women in the Morrison government who remained silent about the impact the pandemic was having on women. In July 2020, I analysed the minister’s social media posts since the start of the pandemic and found that just 16.5% had anything, anything at all, to do with women — and less than 5% had anything to do with the impact of COVID on their safety and economic security.

This is the same former minister for women who was famously chased through the halls of Parliament on the day of the Women’s March by the then-political reporter for Channel 10, Tegan George, who asked, “Can you understand why Australian women feel disappointed and let down by you?”

It was particularly disappointing that Payne, having been complicitly quiet all that time, chose last week, amid a line of questioning directed at Gallagher based on the illegally leaked text messages of an alleged victim of sexual assault, to at last pipe up.

After the myriad of ways the Liberal Party has actively undermined women’s safety and economic security over the past decade — a heap of kindling just waiting for someone like Higgins to come along and set aflame — the political calculus (if there was any) behind the attack was bizarre. It appeared likely to backfire and would only serve to further entrench the party’s “woman problem”. 

The Liberal Party seems incapable of understanding the source of women’s anger, the role it has played in stoking it, or that anger’s potential power. Even now, a little over a year after women’s rage delivered the Liberals the lowest female representation in Parliament since 1993 and threatened to consign it to the electoral wilderness unless it could regain ground with women voters, the party seems fundamentally incapable of insight.

Many in the party are living in an alternate reality if they truly believe that Labor’s (supposedly successful) “weaponisation” of Higgins’ claim politically wounded it and is solely to blame for its 2022 election loss. Those wounds were entirely self-inflicted. Blame Scott (“ask Jenny” and women should be happy they are not being “met with bullets”) Morrison. 

Remember *that* hard-headed budget that disproportionately benefited men at the height of a pandemic that was disproportionately impacting women’s ability to work, earn and save? Despite the fact that the budget allocated $500 billion in spending, only a shameful $240 million was put towards realising the aims of the budget’s “Women’s Economic Security Statement”. That’s a measly 0.048%.

Not to worry, the women of Australia were told. In among the high-level message that the budget “wasn’t gendered” (seems the Liberal Party had never heard of “gender-responsive budgeting”), a personal favourite was when Senator Anne Ruston said women would “enjoy” driving on all those roads built with infrastructure spending.

Then there was the appointment of Senator Jane Hume as Australia’s first minister for women’s economic security, a role that should have been rebranded the minister for women’s economic insecurity. At the time of her appointment, Hume was famous, or infamous, for a 2018 appearance on the ABC’s Q+A, where she rejected quotas and said women should “work harder” to get into Parliament.

In addition to blaming women’s poverty and growing homelessness on the women themselves because they were “financially illiterate”, Australia’s newly minted minister for women’s economic security backed the notion that women fleeing domestic violence should fund their own escape by accessing up to $10,000 of their super on “compassionate grounds”. Hume persisted with the idea for three years, until the Morrison government was forced into a humiliating U-turn in 2021 when the scheme was dumped because the necessary safeguards to protect against financial abuse could not be implemented.

At the end of the day, the Liberal Party can’t run from its record. A recent report from the Monash Centre for Health Research and Implementation found that Australian women are now poorer and less healthy than they were a decade ago. And after a decade of the first National Plan to End Violence Against Women, rates of domestic violence remained unchanged and rates of sexual violence increased. This all happened on its watch.

Some Liberals may think they are terribly clever and will extract a high-profile political scalp in the form of Gallagher, but all the women of Australia see is self-serving political point-scoring and a party — still — completely uninterested in delivering justice to women who allege sexual assault or grappling with its own record on women. Our memories are long. And we kept the receipts.