Andrew Bolt: Former Australia Post Christine Holgate is wrong to play gender card

Despite being powerful enough to head up Australia Post, Holgate presented herself to a Senate committee as another fragile victim of toxic masculinity.

Christine Holgate was treated terribly by Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Yet she lost me this week when she blamed sexist bullies for her fall.

Seriously? Here’s a strong woman who earned as much as $2.5m a year as head of Australia Post before being forced out for giving four executives Cartier watches.

Yet this week Holgate, wearing suffragette white, presented herself to a Senate committee and on the ABC as another fragile victim of toxic masculinity.

She’d been “humiliated” by Morrison, she claimed, in “one of the worst acts of bullying I’ve ever witnessed”.

She’d been treated unlike “any male public servant”.

She’d been “bullied” by her lying chairman, too.

Holgate was on a roll: “It is partly a gender issue” that she was forced out, leaving her so traumatised that she took tablets for insomnia and felt “suicidal”.

Most outrageously, Holgate claims her critics had smashed her for saying the watches weren’t paid for by taxpayers, “when it would be perfectly OK to abuse women”.

What outrageous hyperbole. Name one of Holgate’s critics who thinks it’s “perfectly OK to abuse women”.

Former Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate appears before a Senate inquiry

I don’t deny Holgate went through an ordeal that was horrible and shows up Morrison as a panicky opportunist — and Labor as grubby hypocrites.

Labor last year pounced on a leak and got Holgate to admit she’d given four executives each a $5000 watch for sealing a deal with banks worth $220m to Australia Post.

It was the kind of bonus for exceptional service you’d see in almost any business. Indeed, Holgate’s own contract with Australia Post gave her a base salary of $1.4m, plus performance bonuses of up to $1m or more. So a $5000 watch was no big deal, and was approved, says Holgate, by her then chairman.

But Morrison panicked as Labor attacked and talkback Australia fumed. He told parliament Holgate should stand aside or “she should go”. The Australia Post board then showed her the door.

(Get this: Labor, which last year called for Holgate to go, now slams Morrison for being too mean! How two-faced.)

No, what happened to Holgate was not fair. I understand only too well the stress she was under after being publicly smeared and belittled.

Who hasn’t had trouble sleeping at such times? Who hasn’t, in the sleepless 3am, when thoughts are their darkest, had suicide flash through their mind?

But where’s the evidence that Holgate was the victim of sexism? What doomed her was not that she was female but that the watches were Cartier.

Holgate complains that no man would have been treated as she was, yet some men might well complain that Holgate was equally brutal with them.

Former CEO of Australia Post Christine Holgate (centre) during a Public Hearing at Parliament House in Canberra Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

After she took over Australia Post, there was a mass exodus of executives of both genders, including deputy chief financial officer Paul Urquhart. Holgate also clashed with her executive general manager of corporate services, former Victorian Labor minister Phil Dalidakis, who abruptly quit.

Sure, we may wish that Holgate was treated with more courtesy, but, again, this cuts both ways.

Does Holgate wonder if Morrison, too, may now have suicidal thoughts after she abused him as a sexist and the worst bully she’d known?

Does she wonder how Australia Post chairman Lucio Di Bartolomeo is getting through the nights after she called him not just a sexist but a bully who’d “lied repeatedly to the Australian people” and should resign?

Or is being brutal actually fine by Holgate, as long as it’s a woman bullying men?

And much as I prize civility, should Morrison really have thought he’d better go easy on Holgate in case she became sleepless and suicidal?

If so, where do we draw the line?

Must Morrison also temper his criticism of Anthony Albanese, in case the Labor leader gets depressed?

Should Albanese show more love to Morrison, so the Prime Minister won’t feel so humiliated?

Should the journalists now smashing Morrison for his “appalling treatment” of women be less appalling in their own treatment of a leader just trying to do his best in a thankless job?

Answer: no. There are too many billions of dollars and too many jobs at stake to play nice and not test people.

Government is not a business for the weak. That’s why we pay so much for people to take on jobs that would frighten the sane.

Holgate should have calmly explained why Morrison was wrong to demand she go.

The rest of her complaint is self-pity, more likely to harm us than help.