Tracey Spicer’s career reinvention a liability to #MeToo
Tracey Spicer has spent years trying to lead the crusade for discriminated-against Australian working women through the #MeToo movement. She appears to have achieved little while the issues remain the same.
Confidential
Don't miss out on the headlines from Confidential. Followed categories will be added to My News.
She cast herself as a great champion of the discriminated-against Australian working woman.
Yet to date the local #MeToo movement has probably served the personal interests of its self-appointed local ambassador Tracey Spicer — 2018 Order of Australia recipient, 2019 Peace Prize recipient, 2019 NSW Woman Of The Year and 2018 Walkley Award winner — than it has womankind in general.
And lately it hasn’t served Spicer all that well either.
For two years Spicer’s name has been synonymous with the floundering Australian #MeToo movement which, to date, has made a lot of promises, created a lot of headlines but been most notable for making defamation lawyers and their celebrity clients (men all) richer.
It has done little else to further the cause of women locally and may even have set it back thanks to the efforts of some blundering crusaders.
No senior executives have been outed or exposed by Spicer’s actions and serial pests like Rolf Harris and Don Burke had either been identified prior to #MeToo or had so little power to wield in the industry at the time of their exposure to hardly count as effective scalps for the movement (although for a few electrified moments Burke would do).
Former Ten newsreader Spicer had been looking for platforms to vent her apparently consuming frustration and anger at the male-dominated TV industry since losing her job as a newsreader at Ten in 2006.
As a result of her dismissal, #MeToo was always going to resonate with Spicer and hundreds of other women shed brutally and unapologetically from jobs in the TV industry — and other industries — without cause.
MORE FROM ANNETTE SHARP:
Real reason Sonia Kruger returned to Seven
Party post has gay identities in a dither
She didn’t lose her job because she wasn’t smart enough or professional enough or aggressive enough to keep it, but because someone upstairs simply decided her number was up and she was expendable.
At 39, it’s possible one of her bosses no longer found her pretty enough — and that must have hurt.
Her “f...ability” — the term popularised in the local TV industry in 2008 following Nine Network reporter Christine Spiteri’s unfair dismissal case against Nine and its then news boss John Westacott — would have been in question after having a baby two months earlier.
“F...ability” has long been a benchmark for women in TV jobs, and babies have long wreaked havoc with a woman’s perceived “f...ability”.
There is no known formula for this that I’m aware of.
Men in executive positions in TV it seems just have less spontaneous erections fantasising about a woman if she has given birth.
Angry about this injustice, Spicer went to war and spent years looking for opportunities to highlight the unfairness. Then the #MeToo bus came lumbering along and she jumped on it.
As soon as she did, my phone started ringing.
There are many who have retrospectively attempted to shed new light on Spicer’s dismissal from Ten, for which she eventually won a settlement from the network.
They argue her relationship with Ten was already on the rocks in response to waning popularity with viewers before she fell pregnant.
Her second pregnancy brought the matter to a head. After being sacked while on maternity leave she launched legal action.
When she left Ten Spicer took her anger with her — ultimately using it to try to propel the Australian #MeToo movement.
The trouble with anger is it can blur both perception and reality.
With the best intentions a person can make poor decisions. This was highlighted in recent weeks following the distribution of raw preview footage from the ABC’s new series, Silent No More, which Spicer helped produce, and which carelessly identified some of the frightened women who reached out anonymously after being victimised by men in power.
It’s an unforgivable mistake, yet we should not let the recent media vilification of Spicer, the media pile-on, cloud the fact that it is men in power who continue to discriminate against and sexually harass women in the workplace. They are the real villains here, not Spicer.
Spicer, in my view, has repeatedly made poor calls after being raised up and prematurely celebrated — and handed one award after the next — by what passes today as the nation’s intelligentsia, those sitting on once-lofty learned committees handing out meritorious awards in the belief they’re maintaining historic standards of excellence.
She was unprepared for the job she took on — but that makes it no less valid a cause.
annette.sharp@news.com.au
Twitter: @InSharpRelief
Originally published as Tracey Spicer’s career reinvention a liability to #MeToo