Teal candidate Nicolette Boele’s ‘poor attempt at humour’ excuse is pure hypocrisy

Nicolette Boele and the teals’ benefactor, Simon Holmes a Court.

Teal candidate Nicolette Boele offered a lame apology on Monday for making that strangely sexual remark to an unsuspecting 19-year-old hairdresser, the incident divulged at length by 2GB’s Ben Fordham on his morning radio program.

“It was a poor attempt at humour and I’ve apologised,” Boele said. “Everyone deserves to feel respected in their workplace and I’ll do better.”

Yes, do better. Do more. We’ve heard these from Boele before.

Boele’s sin, for anyone who missed it, came amid her praise for the stylist after a supposedly climactic hair wash. Boele allegedly said it “was so good – and I didn’t even have sex with you”.

Funny, racy or asinine, this unwelcome sexually-determined remark should’ve been out of bounds for Boele, particularly when this budding politician has made a such a loud point of speaking against sexual harassment in all its forms, and especially in the workplace.

We’re thinking of a video she posted to social media platform X on February 9, 2022, the same day Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins addressed the National Press Club and spoke, as Boele put it, “about the relationship of unequal power”.

Boele said in the video that she, too, had been “sexually harassed and bullied in Parliament House” during her 20s.

Tame and Higgins, she continued, “made me realise just how much gender-based violence I’ve experienced in my life”, most of which Boele said she had chosen to ignore.

“I’ve always argued it away. But the conversation that these women has helped bring to our nation has injected me with the courage to stand up and call out injustice and where I see unequal power in those relationships that exist,” she said.

Which is a laudable sentiment, until one perpetuates those same lopsided power dynamics by blurting out a bit of casual harassment in the middle of a hair salon to a teenager.

It’s not the joke – it’s the double-standards.

And it can’t be helping Boele’s candidacy that she’s been black-listed from the salon or that it’s located in Bradfield, the seat she’s hoping to represent in parliament from next month.

Especially when Boele implored upon us, in the same video, what she intends to do about sexual harassment if she’s eventually elected to public life.

“I will be that leader that takes accountability and I will not walk past these injustices,” she said.

But isn’t that exactly what she’s done by issuing a two-line apology dismissing this all as just a crap joke that bombed? Onwards the campaign marches. Loopy norm violations are foundational to Boele’s dotty political persona.

It’s why she’s spent the past three years calling herself a “shadow MP” and cosplaying as a member of parliament, turning up to Canberra wearing a “visitor” tag and why, by concerning extension, she opened a brick-and-mortar office in Bradfield with her face plastered all over the windows, like an actual representative.

Plus, this bad joke isn’t the first time Boele has put a foot in her mouth. There was another gaffe just a few months after the last election. It’s been scrubbed from the internet, but the mea culpa remains online.

“I am horrified that I inadvertently perpetuated an anti-Semitic trope, and for that I apologise,” Boele wrote.

“Please keep holding me to account. I promise to do better.”

Do better … do better …

And here we are.