As previously reported in A Voice for Men, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard was fired by the Labor party before the people of Australia got the chance to give her the boot in the upcoming election (Elam & Esmay, 2013).
Personally, I thought that Labor would stay with her for the various reasons as outlined in a previous article (Muldoon, 2013). That Rudd won 57 votes to 45, thanks to a last minute swap in allegiances by powerbroker Bill Shorten (Packham, 2013), suggests that I wasn’t that far wrong in my assessment.
Where I was correct, though, was that Gillard had no intention of placing the Labor party ahead of her own ideology. And, whatever side of politics you may sit, there can be little doubt that Labor has been the worse off for Gillard’s leadership. As I also outlined, Gillard’s rise to power was financed and facilitated by Australia’s own manifestation of Emily’s List and in many ways was an example of Feminism in action.
The real question for the MHRM is: What is to be learned from Gillard’s time in office?
If there is any doubt on the power of Feminism, we need only look at one example. Bear in mind here that Gillard was leading a minority government and Tony Abbot’s Liberal and National Coalition were attacking Gillard at every opportunity. Also remember that Kevin Rudd, who was kicked out of office by Gillard in 2010, was constantly undermining her government from within the Labor ranks (Savva, 2013), (Gordon, 2013).
Also, and try not to laugh, but the main stream media are also supposed to hold our elected officials to account.
On Febuary 7, 2013, Gillard made a video for Eve Ensler’s feminist campaign “One Billion Rising” (Gillard, 2013). This video starts with Gillard making the claim “One billion women will be raped or beaten in their lifetimes.” She urges us to “Let that sink in,” before repeating the claim.
The claim is absurd. The statistic evolved from the WHO 2002 World Report on Violence (World Health Organisation, 2002), that cites an Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) study in 1996 which claims that one in three women will experience some form of violence in their lifetime (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1996).
Back in 2012, Ensler gave an interview in Australia during which she claimed that one billion women would experience “rape or violence”. The interview is a classic, if you consider feminist stupidity entertaining, and was exposed in A Voice for Men at the time (Muldoon, 2012)
These forms of violence do include beatings and rape, but the ABS also count threats, grabbing, pushing, sexual touching, stalking and more as violence.
The study justifies its own definitions of violence by citing that these categories would constitute violence in a legal sense. However, given that the women answering the questions were selected at random, there can be no confidence that these women understood the legal complexities associated with those definitions. Effectively, it was violence because the complainant said so.
Doesn’t that sound familiar?
So, how much of this “one in three” were actually raped or beaten? There is nothing in the ABS report which indicates how this violence is broken down for the lifetime figures. There are figures on a 12 month period also used in the study. This indicates that in 1995/96 of all the women in Australia 0.5% (one half of one percent) claimed to have been beaten.
There is no category of rape within its definitions of sexual violence.
Let that sink in.
The national 1996 Women’s Safety Study done by the ABS, requested by the Office of the Status for Women, did not get a definitive number of how many women were raped. Perhaps they were afraid that the number would be small. Very small.
In other words, the claim that Gillard made is a wild exaggeration of the result of a feminist driven dodgy study. And yet no one from the Opposition called Gillard out for making claims she couldn’t possibly substantiate. Not Abbott, nor anyone from his party, nor the right-wing conservative media pundits. No one.
And Rudd? Not a word.
And let’s be clear about this. It’s not just that she got the number wrong. This raping and beating is not the work of just one man. Give or take the odd serial offender, this is the work of roughly one third of the male population.
To paraphrase Gillard in the video, the accusation is that your father, your brother, or your son will be beating or raping a woman in their lifetime. Because that’s the sort of rotten things men do.
Let that sink in.
One third of the male voting public being falsely accused of rape and serious violence and no one wants to make political capital on it.
Not. One. Bit.
So, on face value, Gillard’s demise, at the hands of Rudd, won’t really make any difference to the feminist governance in Australia. Even if Abbott wins in the next election, these types of feminist lies will go unchallenged.
Nonetheless there are three reasons, at least, for the MHRM to be cheerful.
The first is that feminism has ventured out into the open and failed.
Whatever your politics may be, you can’t deny that Gillard failed as a leader. So dismal was her leadership that the party who subsidised her, supported her and defended her from misogyny everywhere, threw her out because they believed (let that sink in: they, not me, believed) that she would bring the party its worst defeat in decades. Words like “electoral annihilation” and “political suicide” were being used to describe why she should not be leading them to the next election.
This is not to say that women should not be world leaders. It is just that, to have good leaders in the tough world of politics, you need politicians who can rise through the ranks on merit rather than loading the dice.
What failed here was the social engineering inherent in Feminism.
The second and third reasons concern the reactions to Gillard’s claims of victimhood when things started to go sour for her in the polls. She sought the cover of victimhood, claiming that any stance against her was misogynistic. This claim reached its pinnacle with the “Misogyny Speech” (ABC News, 2013) in parliament and continued through the “Blue Ties Speech” (Women For Gillard, 2013) until the very end in her “Goodbye Speech” (The Guardian, 2013).
The first speech made her the toast of the Cultural Marxists all over the world. In Australia, the press were more excited that Gillard’s speech went viral than they were interested in what she actually said.
However, there were two things to note. The first is that the bounce in the polls that the publicity gave her didn’t last for long. The second was that many leftists in the media, and that means against Abbott, could not bring themselves to call Abbott a misogynist. For them it was too step too far (Cox, 2013).
In her “Goodbye Speech”, Gillard significantly tones down the misogyny claims after the issues of the “Blue Ties”speech, and tries to imply victimhood rather than make any definitive claims.
In other words, the second reason for cheer is that there are limits to the Feminist rhetoric. The general public will only take so much.
With the “Blue Ties” speech, Gillard was not just crying misogyny and victimhood, but also claiming that a vote for Abbott was a return to Patriarchy. This time the response was not simply a lack of lasting bounce. Pundits were estimating that half a million male voters rejected Gillard as a direct result (Atkins, 2013).
It even led The Australian to give an editorial entitled “Julia Gillard’s clumsy and manipulative gender war (The Australian, 2013).” The main stream media outlet felt the need to criticize Gillard for her claim that a vote for Abbott would “banish women’s voices from our political life.” The Australian had this to say, “Voters looking for facts to substantiate this assertion will search in vain.”
The next day, the Australian described Gillard’s Feminism as being the opposite of promoting women as independent adults. Instead, for Gillard and those like her “women are a breed apart, susceptible to insult, easily offended and in need of affirmative action. (The Australian, 2013)”
Let that sink in.
Feminism is the opposite of promoting women as independent adults (I’m sure I’ve read that somewhere else, JtO).
What exactly happened must be examined further, but it is clear that something about the speech and its aftermath caused a significant swing in the voting public. It was enough to cause a mainstream news outlet to not only mention, but criticise Feminism. It also played a major part in Gillard’s eventual downfall.
For a brief moment, at least half a million Australian men felt the rage. Understanding what nerve was touched, and how it may be brought into consciousness, would be a significant step forward for the MHRM.
And that has put me in a most excellent mood.
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