Opera House drama was about the dignity of women
WE have a problem with respect for women, and we’re also in the midst of a reckoning about sex and gender. Alan Jones’ raging at Louise Herron was bound to spark backlash, writes Claire Harvey.
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THE Sydney Opera House is not, in any way, sacred ground.
It was built with money raised by a lottery. It is a functional building; a convention centre with fancy tilework; host to events both high- and lowbrow, just as it should be. It’s beautiful. Everyone recognises it. It’s public ground.
But the raging drama this week over whether or not a horse race should be advertised on its sails was not about the holiness or otherwise of the building.
This is really about the dignity of women.
Alan Jones, the 2GB broadcaster, has rightly apologised for his treatment of Opera House boss Louise Herron in which he lambasted her for failing to comply with Racing NSW’s wishes for the promotion (to which she had already agreed) to include the barrier-draw numbers and horses’ names, rather than just jockeys’ colours.
During the Jones interview, he told Herron: “Louise, I’m sorry I think you’re out of your depth here,” and “if you can’t come to the party, Louise, you should lose your job.” He also said: “Who the hell do you think you are?”
Premier Gladys Berejiklian subsequently overrode Herron’s objections, prompting a protest by several hundred people who used torches to disrupt the display.
I struggle to care whether or not the Opera House shows ads. It is a fundamentally commercial space, with expensive restaurants and bars serving a crowd who have often paid hundreds of dollars for tickets. There’s nothing wrong with ads, by the way. I grew up in Canberra, which feels like Pyongyang with its blanket ban on billboards and visible commerce in the suburbs, where the dirty work of capitalism is confined to “the shops”.
By comparison, Sydney has always felt more vibrant precisely because it’s a city at ease with the idea humans buy and sell things.
But I do care very much about the way women are presented, and are spoken to, in the public domain.
I’m the last person to cry sexism. I don’t feel I’ve ever suffered discrimination in my work or private life. But I do think Australia has a serious societal problem with respect for women, their lives and their choices, and when women are still being slaughtered in domestic settings, the way we treat women in public really, really matters.
Most women, like Herron, who are in leadership positions have got there despite the fact our economy overwhelmingly expects leaders to conform to a 1950s family structure where there’s a wife at home running the household, freeing the man up to spend all his time in the office.
Every company in Australia is (or should be) struggling with how to involve women in decision-making while also acknowledging they are the ones who physically bear children and are usually their primary caregivers. I want to be part of my children’s lives; to be their mother in every sense. But I also want to be professionally respected. I’m lucky — my work enables me to balance my life in ways many occupations do not. Most organisations have few or no female bosses at the very top, and thousands of highly able women relegated to positions way below their capabilities because their bosses can’t grasp their need for flexible, modern working arrangements.
That’s why this issue exploded.
That’s why the sound of an angry man asking a woman “Who do you think you are?” makes us recoil.
In his apology, Alan Jones said, inter alia, the interview “was tough stuff on a tough issue … men and women are treated equally on this program and I hold myself to that standard.
“I don’t believe my words or actions qualify as those of a bully or a misogynist but there are clearly many people who do … So to Louise and to those people who have been offended, if we are offended that was not my intention, I do apologise.”
Jones has always been respectful when I’ve dealt with him, and on air he’s an equal-opportunity rager who’s happy to lambaste men or women alike. Jones also does much good work for charities and the individuals whose causes he champions, from little old ladies battling a power company to farmers fighting the banks.
He has ripped apart plenty of male politicians and bureaucrats, just as he ripped apart Herron.
But it’s 2018 and the world is in the grip of a reckoning about sex and gender; a new wave of women’s rights activism akin to the female suffrage movement of the early 20th century and the sexual revolution of the 1970s. Fiery conversations between men and women are heavy with meaning in a way they weren’t just five years ago.
A horse race is still just a horse race.