Andrew Bolt: ABC expose paints strong women as victims
This week the ABC claimed the Liberal Party has a “women problem” yet only one of two people involved in a “completely consensual” affair got the pity, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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I’m confused. A married mother, who is so tough she’s the press secretary of a Morrison government minister, has an affair with her married boss.
Yet even this woman is still presented on the ABC’s Four Corners as the victim of male culture. Powerless.
I don’t get it. Are we back to assuming that women are the weakest sex, and can always blame men — never themselves — when lust goes wrong?
On Monday, the ABC produced Rachelle Miller as evidence the Liberal Party had a “women problem” and was rife with “sexism”.
Three years ago she’d had an affair with her boss, Alan Tudge, now the acting Immigration Minister.
The ABC admitted this affair was “completely consensual”. But, said reporter Louise Milligan grimly, she’d “lived to bitterly regret it”.
Well, no wonder. Her marriage is over.
Tudge would also have bitter regrets. His marriage is over, too. And now he’s got the national broadcaster publicly humiliating him.
Yet only one of these two adults gets the ABC’s pity, and — big surprise — it’s the woman. It clearly asks us to assume that Miller is the victim.
Miller seemed to have no trouble filling that role, telling the ABC: “I lost a lot of self-confidence because I didn’t feel I had any power at all to be able to stand up for myself.
“I was just exhausted, you know, really exhausted.
“So what I’m trying to do by speaking to you is stand up for myself and say ‘this isn’t OK.’”
Let me define “this”. “This” is a married mum and her married boss deciding — completely consensually — to have sex. Which means both said “yes”.
Nowhere in that program did Four Corners suggest Miller had been forced or bullied to do something against her will.
And most politicians’ press secretaries I’ve met are tough.
True, it’s now reported Miller has officially complained Tudge subjected her to “belittling” and “humiliating” behaviour.
Example: he’d criticised her work in front of colleagues. Er, and?
So far, then, the only victims I can see in this business are two women that neither Miller nor the ABC mentioned.
One is the wife of Alan Tudge, whose marriage is over and must now endure what’s probably a very painful airing of her family’s trauma.
And there’s the former wife of another minister, Christian Porter, who Miller helped to out as an alleged canoodler of a woman not his wife.
“When we were at the bar I noticed that Minister Porter was with someone in the corner, and they were clearly very intimate,” she told the ABC.
“They were cuddling, they were kissing. It was quite confronting given that we were in such a public place.”
Quite the moralist, after all.
But it struck me Miller would find fault with such men, given half a chance to feel some victimhood. On this bizarrely sanctimonious ABC program, Miller told the nation Tudge was also a louse for asking him to walk by her side — her in her glamorous red dress — as they entered a journalists’ ball at Parliament House, rather than have her trail in behind him.
“I have a feeling that my appearance had a bearing on why Alan would want to walk in with me on his arm,” she complained.
“And I felt at that time a lot like an ornament, and that I was being used as an ornament.”
Can a man win here?
If Tudge had told Miller to walk behind him, he’d be treating her like an embarrassment. Like trash.
But if he asks her to walk with him, he’s a sexist who is treating her like an ornament. And this after she’s dressed to impress.
Whatever hid, Tudge would be the sexist, and Miller the victim.
Look, I don’t know what went so wrong between the two of them, and it’s not my business.
But it is my business when the taxpayer-funded ABC reflexively presents a professional woman as the victim in an illicit affair, as if she had no will of her own.
It’s a sexist and demeaning stereotype.
It takes two to do more than tango, and I’d start from a non-sexist assumption: both are equally to blame.
But so far I’ve heard just one of them apologise to the other, and for the “hurt it has caused my family”.
That was the bloke, of course. Manning up. As we still expect of men, right?
Some sexist roles have proved so very hard to shake, after all.