When is it OK to criticise a prime minister’s spouse?

Magda Szubanski, Australia’s sweetheart and most beloved netball ambassador, recently got herself into hot water when she tweeted about the Prime Minister’s wife, Jenny Morrison.

Twitter storms are best ignored entirely, but this one edged into my consciousness because it seemed to run on for so long.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and wife Jenny at a prayer service to commemorate the death of Prince Philip at St Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney.

Sky news presenters foamed about it. Szubanski went on A Current Affair to defend herself. Twitter, of course, fired up over it.

The original offending tweet was of a photo of Jenny Morrison standing and watching as her husband signed a condolence book for Prince Philip. It was unremarkable, but Szubanski added commentary comparing the photo to a “Handmaid’s Tale meme”.

This was a reference to the TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s famous novel, which depicts a dystopian world where women are the property of the state. It was not a compliment.

Many felt it was unfair to target the wife of a prime minister. As Tony Abbott was fond of saying, politicians are volunteers, their families are conscripts.

Jenny Morrison seems like a nice person. She is reportedly a warm woman who has a natural ease with people. I imagine she is probably just trying to mother her daughters and protect them from the negative aspects of being the Prime Minister’s kids.

Szubanski told A Current Affair she did not condone a pile-on over the appearance of the PM’s wife. “But,” she continued, “do I think it is legitimate to criticise her, or have a critique of her? Yes I do.”

It was that proposition that got to the nub of the thing – is that true? Can we criticise the wife of a prime minister or is that off limits? What if a prime minister brings his wife into the political realm? What if she is influencing policy?

Unlike the United States, we do not have an official “First Lady” role in Australia. The wife (and once, the male partner) of our prime minister does not have a defined role and the Australian public and the political system has never been very sure of what to do with them.

In the media we like to maintain there is a boundary between a politician’s personal and private lives, and we do not generally venture into the territory of the latter. But in reality the border between public and private is not hard; it is porous and fluid.

Anyone observing Canberra over the past few months has been bashed over the head with that realisation. As ABC journalist Leigh Sales has recently mused, the longstanding convention of not reporting on the private lives of politicians has perhaps had the effect of protecting the powerful from being held to account.

There is undoubtedly public interest in politicians’ wives. They feature on the cover of magazines and they liven up photographs which otherwise feature grey-haired, grey-suited men. For many, they are more interesting to read about than their husbands.

Perhaps one reason wives are of interest is because there are few women in senior positions in politics.

If we are interested in assessing how our Prime Minister relates to women, an important piece of information is how he speaks about his wife and seems to view her.

Is she an equal? Does she have a more traditional, supportive role, or is she an unofficial adviser? Does she give counsel to her husband and share opinions which then wend their way into his policy positions? Or does she support him but stay silent on matters of state?

Political wives (and their children) soften their husbands, show their human side, their caring side and their capacity for nurture. In loving her husband, a political wife reflects a positive view of him to a wider public. But that only works if we get glimpses of their relationship, if their love is on display for us in some way.

This is why political campaigners engineer the appearance of wives and families very consciously, with photo opportunities, careful engagement with charitable causes, Women’s Weekly profiles and so on.

The upshot is the women in politicians’ lives often end up semaphoring for the public that their husbands possess certain traits more associated with the feminine – empathy, compassion, tenderness.

Why else is Jenny Morrison pictured with her husband as he signs a condolence book for a prince, and not when he’s signing a trade treaty?

But there is something troubling about making the wife account for the husband’s political sins, and assuming her motives when she is not able to defend herself.

We may not know exactly how to treat prime ministers’ wives.

But we have absolutely no idea how to conduct ourselves when it comes to prime ministers’ male partners. Julia Gillard’s partner, Tim Mathieson, was the butt of jokes for his profession (he was a hairdresser), and one radio host asked Gillard on air about a rumour that he was gay – an indignity it is impossible to imagine a male prime minister suffering.

Ditto the show At Home With Julia, broadcast by the ABC, which mocked the couple and even referenced their sex life.

This week, across the world in the US, we saw another First Husband in action – the spouse of US Vice-President Kamala Harris. Doug Emhoff was in the chamber for US President Joe Biden’s first joint address to Congress. His wife was positioned behind the President, and the television camera homed in on Emhoff watching her. He caught her eye, blew her multiple kisses and tapped his heart as he smiled at her. The internet lit up in appreciation.

All of politics, not to mention Twitter, could do with more of that sort of love and grace.