‘Queen of woke’: Commentariat loses the plot over our new G-G

Samantha Mostyn will be Australia’s 28th governor-general. The prominent businesswoman has worked with Reconciliation Australia, Beyond Blue, the Australia Council for the Arts, the National Mental Health Commission and the AFL, where she was integral to the formation of the AFLW. She also, lest you be allowed to forget, has a long history with the Labor Party.  

Unsurprisingly, the country’s commentariat is having a typically normal one in response to her appointment.

“Mostyn is the worst kind of corporate activist who campaigned against the majority of Australians in the divisive Voice referendum,” said Matthew Sheahan, executive director of right-wing activists and noted unity experts Advance. “In social media posts she has now deleted, she has argued to change the date of Australia Day, which she has also referred to as ‘Invasion Day’.”

“Someone who has so aggressively attacked the heritage of modern Australia should never be allowed to become its executive head of state,” railed the Australian Monarchist League (AML) in a typo-riddled email to subscribers this morning.

“This s [sic] but one of the media posts indicating what a divisive nomination this is,” writes AML national chair Philip Benwell beneath a link to the agenda setting work of Michael Smith News, in this case a two line blog entry about Mostyn. Smith calls Mostyn a “hard-core leftist feminist”, comparable to former PM Julia Gillard. To anyone still familiar with Smith’s contribution to the public debate, that lands as a serious insult.

Still, the AML’s decision to use Smith as a gauge of the national debate must have been deeply annoying to the commentariat at The Australian who expended far more words on Mostyn’s appointment than Smith. Take Janet Albrechtsen, who argued:

Mostyn reflects the worst of modern woke Australia. The same woke corporate Australia in which our biggest companies threw many millions of shareholder dollars into a referendum that sought to divide the country, using the Constitution, on the basis of race. The same woke corporate Australia that had no read on the country given the referendum failed so spectacularly.

Albrechtsen adds “the appointment of the former Chief Executive Women president is further evidence, if we needed it, that the old boys’ club has been replaced with a new girls’ club — one new group of oppressors putting the squeeze on a new group of oppressed”, which is very funny. 

Meanwhile, an anonymous Coalition frontbencher told Geoff Chambers that “this is the most political pick for G-G in a long time”, presumably longing for the apolitical, symbolism-free appointments of military men to the post.

Mostyn’s stated support for last year’s failed referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament gave culture warriors an angle other than her Labor past to hammer. 

For example, Sky News Australia proved its non-partisan commitment to intellectual diversity: rather than bring on a Liberal-affiliated talking head who hates Labor, they brought on GXO Strategies Director Cameron Milner, a Labor-affiliated talking head who hates Labor.

“She is the queen of woke,” Milner told Andrew Bolt. “But this is the prime minister’s choice, this is the prime minister’s captain’s pick. Quite frankly, Albanese’s given a middle finger salute to every single Australian who voted no to his Voice.”

Bolt, for his part, responded with that textbook combination of grievance and phrases no-one really uses anymore, in his piece, which opens, “Sam Mostyn sure has made affirmative action work for her. Demanding women get jobs ahead of men means she’s now our next governor-general.”

We must confess we share a sense of sadness at the change of Australia’s governor-general. Mainly because it means the end of the era of Linda Hurley, wife of the departing G-G. With her fondness for starting the day with a round of hula hooping and bible studies, and her now well-documented tendency to launch into accapella, self-penned songs at seemingly every public event she attends, she was the closest thing Australian politics had to a character from an early Belle and Sebastian song rendered into flesh, and she will be missed.