Nope, we’re still a mystery to them

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Now that the halls of Fairfax have been cleared of the talented old hands, political writing is left to a mixed bag of experience and some utterly bewildering choices. One of those left behind, Mark Kenny, wrote a piece for the Melbourne Age yesterday about the now heroic battle for Indi and the reaction to Sophie Mirabella’s apparent loss. Here’s part of his article below:

“It is said there’s a special place in hell reserved for those who stand by while others commit bad deeds.
Less recognised is the hellish place, in the here-and-now , set aside for women who play the political game as robustly as men. These may be our new secular witches.
To the case of Julia Gillard can be now added Sophie Mirabella. It is immaterial that they come from opposite ends of the field and that neither would be happy in the other’s company. They’re certainly not directly comparable, the latter communing with right-wing fringe-dwellers brandishing abusive ‘‘ ditch the witch’ ’ signs regarding the former.
Nonetheless, the virulence of the reaction to Mirabella’s electoral denouement is surprising.

News that she has lost her seat to a fellow conservative, Cathy McGowan, has disproportionately delighted people across the political spectrum. The left is understandably cock-ahoop that a smug warrior of the right, and one of Tony Abbott’s senior frontbenchers, has been taken out. But in the Liberal and Nationals parties, few tears are being shed for the pocket dynamo whose adversarial style invited uncharitable comparisons with pit-bulls , crazed wolverines, etc. Mirabella’s characterisation as ‘‘ political terrorists” her Liberal colleagues who opposed the mandatory detention of asylum seekers, was hardly subtle… Much of it is pure schadenfreude , of course. But it still feels unnecessarily pointed…”

Kenny concludes his article with this …”

The qualities seen as admirable in a man seem to sit less comfortably in our view of women. Many will not even concede that gender was an issue in the interpretation of Gillard , so will regard as nonsense the idea that Mirabella is being treated with extra venom, due to an underlying patriarchy.

But with relatively few cases of female political leaders, the question remains to be legitimately debated. Is it possible that women are subconsciously judged more harshly when they seek to exercise power? ”

So, you see, we’re all being jolly mean to Ms Mirabella and probably jolly well sexist, too. Except Mark Kenny has completely missed the point. It’s not sexist to criticise the behaviour of a person. If you say a woman can’t make decisions because she’s barren or she should be home looking after her family or you ask her to fetch you a glass of wine when you’ve just been introduced, THAT’S sexist. If you criticise a person because she doesn’t listen to her electorate, that’s NOT sexist. That’s just talking about behaviour, not personal attributes.

Yes, Mark Kenny is right in that women are consciously AND subconsciously judged more harshly than men in public life, but that is not what’s going on in Indi. Mirabella was not in touch with her electorate and she wasn’t very good at listening. That was the problem.

Perhaps next time, politicians in electorates like Indi will pay a bit more attention to their constituents. And if democracy is lucky, we might also see the rise of a wave of independents who care deeply about their own communities and the issues which truly matter to them. Journalists will wail and rend their keyboards at the thought of the old political model getting out of hand and causing confusion. Those journalists who analyse politics in Canberra and who are the rump of the Press Gallery might have to look again at their perceptions and the glib, lazy assumptions they make on a daily basis in our newspapers.

Second Class

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On Saturday last, I opened my eyes, opened my iPad and began downloading the digital version of the Melbourne Age. I subscribe because I’m a Melbournian who is often away from home and because The Age is as close to a real newspaper as you can get in Australia. On Saturdays it has real sections with stuff in it you might actually want to read. More about the newspaper in a minute, but first, to the act of downloading. IT TOOK 5 MINUTES to download. Why? Because I was using a 3G modem in a region far, far away.

The previous week, in a city, downloading the Age probably took me 30 seconds, maybe a bit longer. But not out here. Here, if you exclaim and expostulate about download speeds and second class citizenship, people just smile and shrug. Regional Australia is resigned to being treated as second class citizens. The likes of Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott understood this when they backed the Labor government’s NBN. It has a sense of the visionary about it. The NBN promises – if not equality for regional Australia – then at least the chance of a catch up with its metropolitan mates. Anything less than the NBN is once again consigning regional Australia to the second or third rank. Regional Australia gets forgotten in the debate about telecommunications. Here, we have little choice, and Telstra has an effective monopoly, delivering a poor and expensive service. And bad luck if you live in one of the dreaded “black spots”. No one is truly prepared to address those. Oh, and don’t buy an iPhone. It probably won’t work very well, especially if you live in a metal-roofed house!

Meanwhile, back to The Age. There are two versions available online. The direct newspaper download allows the reader to see the paper as it was printed. The app for the iPad is another matter. It started as a gorgeous glossy clever app. It’s still good to look at, but oh, the subbing, oh the mistakes and oh, the number of articles sourced from blogs and other online mags. Nothing wrong with that as long as we’re also getting the sort of good journalism you expect from a Fairfax paper, but sadly, that’s no longer the case. The Age app looks pretty, but it seems emptier by the day.

What’s the point of snidey journalism?

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Have a quick read of this…

“Last summer, I went to a friend’s wedding and arrived early to find four Middletons – James, Kate, Pippa and Carole – sitting in the empty church, like beetles wrapped in silk. The first thing I thought was ‘They seem so excited’. And the next thing I thought was ‘They’re really excited’. As in fizzing with hysteria. Going to a friend’s wedding was not only the highlight of their lives, but an object of frothing fetish. It’s just what you do if you are a Middleton and it’s a Saturday”

This is actually an article about Carole Middleton, mother of Kate, grandmother of the poor little new heir to the British throne. In just a few lines, we know exactly where this is going. I’m sorry I called it journalism in the title. I lied. It’s not. It’s mean, nasty, envy-laden and pointless. What does anyone get from writing something like this?

The article appeared in an Australian Sunday newspaper I don’t normally read. I won’t read it again either, unless I want something to despair about. There is a lot being written about the fate of real journalism just now and it’s easy to see why. News papers (with actual news in them) are a dying breed. Online journalism is still not entirely mainstream and those newspapers and magazines which still churn it out are now dominated by opinion pieces, magazine articles and gossip. As a result of what we read and see on the telly, Australia has become a radically nastier place in the past few years – a racist, mean-spirited, greedy, grasping culture.

A few weeks back I saw an elderly woman parked in a disabled space accidentally accelerate forward instead of backwards in her car. Her car crashed into a concrete barrier. Several people near me laughed. it was the mentality of the mean kid in the playground, the perpetual taunter. it seems that snidey journalism plays the same role. You find someone you can’t bear to see succeed and you taunt them. I can’t begin to guess this author’s motivations or those of any number of gossip columnists in our papers and magazines, but I suspect they demonstrate that same kind of playground viciousness and our media gives it plenty of room to play. How bloody sad.

Game on

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So this week in good old democratic Australia has been a strange one. One day soon, commentators will be comparing our political landscape to Italy’s and that will be embarrassing. This week we dumped Julia Gillard, our first female Prime Minister, because she looked like losing the Federal election and we put the other bloke who used to be Prime Minister back because Mr and Mrs Bogan in western Sydney seem to like him more and might, just might, vote for him over the bloke with the ears who doesn’t like anything much.

What have we learned from the first female Prime Minister’s term in office? Well, nothing new. We are a misogynist country. Most men ( and many women) resorted to dealing with Ms Gillard by demeaning her appearance or her voice. Any female in public life – newsreaders, broadcasters, politicians, etc.etc. – knows that’s how it goes. Nobel prize? Jolly good, but your hair it’s awful. Walkley award winner? Splendid, hate your glasses. And so it goes. It seems that we are pathologically unable to hear what is being said by women. We can only see who is saying it and make small minded judgements accordingly.

By all accounts, the Gillard years with a vicious hung parliament and a vicious, vapid press have been the most effective legislative years in the short history of Australia. Congratulations Julia Gillard. Incredibly impressive. Now move along for the hearty vengeful bloke please.

By observation, I’ve decided that the way we can judge how highly women are regarded is by watching panel shows on television. Here’s a sample: QI has 6 panellists. If you’re lucky, one of them will be Jo Brand. Otherwise, 6 utterly hilarious chaps telling sexist jokes to male host Stephen Fry. ‘Would I Lie to You?’ has 6 panellists and on a very, very good night, 2 of those will be women. Usually it’s 1 and a male host.

Channel 10’s clever ‘The Panel’ has 1 woman to 3 or 4 men. You can see where I’m going. Feel free to try this test at home…

When I can turn on my television or radio and be informed or entertained by just as many women as men, then I might think we’re getting somewhere. In the meantime, the panel show in Canberra just got a whole lot worse.

ENOUGH!

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Actually, I don’t care about polls and whether Julia Gillard is less popular than Kevin Rudd, or that Malcolm Turnbull is four thousand times more popular than Tony Abbot. When did popularity alone become the thing by which we choose our politicians? What has happened to us that popularity matters more than policy? Partly it seems to be a product of the unrelenting, exhausting ‘news’ cycle – which sends previously self respecting ‘journalists’ rushing for the shallowest question ( you win, Howard Sattler), the least thought out glib summary. There is so little of what we used to call ‘news’ in our papers and televisions and radios. There isn’t much more online. Journalists, with a few notable and excellent exceptions, are merely reporters now. And they report crap. They may be sent out with orders to report crap, but report it they do. Whose business is it that the Prime Minister’s partner has a caravan on a private piece of land way out in country Victoria? Why is that any of our business? It’s not, but the Melbourne Age made it front page news with photo. Not news. Every day our papers are filled with not news and their many accompanying opinion pieces.

Policy matters. Vision matters. Economic management matters. Education matters. So do debates about misogyny and racism and the culture we are becoming – selfish and thick. But every Monday, it’s the polls we hear about. Shut up about them, Australian newspapers and leave us alone to worry about the proper, democratic poll on Election Day.