If someone offered me the role of governor-general, I’d say shoot me now. If someone offered me that job because I’m a woman, I’d say shoot me again, please, to be doubly sure I’m dead.
I guess some women will be celebrating Sam Mostyn’s appointment as governor-general as a clenched-fist moment of empowerment. Just quietly, women of that ilk will also be celebrating that someone called Samuel Mostyn would not have had a snowball’s chance in hell of even being short-listed.
“Sam Mostyn is an exceptional leader who represents the best of modern Australia,” Anthony Albanese said when announcing her new role. Each to their own.
I’d tweak this slightly to read Mostyn reflects the worst of modern woke Australia. The same woke corporate Australia in which our biggest companies threw many millions of shareholder dollars into a referendum that sought to divide the country, using the Constitution, on the basis of race. The same woke corporate Australia that had no read on the country given the referendum failed so spectacularly.
This is the same modern Australia in which gender equality means corralling women into jobs they may not want so executives and board members can all feel good that the workplace is 50-50. This is the modern corporate Australia that believes in every kind of diversity and inclusion except intellectual diversity, where corporate boards have become chorus lines of agreement on woke shibboleths and dissenters are cowed into silence.
So let’s just settle on acknowledging that Mostyn’s appointment is the crowning achievement for one of the country’s most outspoken quota queens. By the way, what happened to Linda Burney? Wasn’t there talk of Burney getting this role after the failed voice referendum?
The real headline should read: Australia’s wokest woman appointed to yet another cushy job. What is there to celebrate there? The appointment of the former Chief Executive Women president is further evidence, if we needed it, that the old boys’ club has been replaced with a new girls’ club – one new group of oppressors putting the squeeze on a new group of oppressed.
Mostyn is no business heavyweight. She had a modestly successful career as a lawyer and then as a corporate communications, HR and government relations executive, rising as high as group executive, culture and reputation at IAG.
As far as one can tell from her public profile, she has no track record running an actual business or taking P&L responsibility.
She does, however, have history as an ALP staffer working in the offices of Paul Keating, Bob Collins and Michael Lee. Her main skills appear to be gender advocacy, networking and being a quota queen, with a helpful side order of ALP connections.
Mostyn was obviously sufficiently user friendly and politically astute to fill the gaping need for female board members, driven by the quotas she and her fellow members of the golden skirts club had advocated for so vociferously.
Those who froth about a few old men’s clubs in Sydney and Melbourne are the same mob who are happy to impose a girls’ club on corporate Australia. And this new club comes with the added punch of being cemented into place with formal gender quota rules. The result is that the same small group of women keep getting the gigs.
There is nothing to celebrate here, unless you believe that inequality is the new equality. In fact, there is much to despair about this appointment – that’s after you’d had a laugh at the utter predictability of Albanese appointing Mostyn to the role.
Her CV reads like a Disney movie about Ms Woke, winning climate awards, popping up in university sustainability programs, deputy chair of Diversity Australia, presiding over the CEW, chairing the Women’s Equality Taskforce, and sitting on multiple corporate boards and commissions.
The problem with all these appointments is that many will wonder if Mostyn, one the loudest voices for gender-based promotions, secured her gigs because she’s a woman. Maybe she’s fine with that.
If that is a sign of female empowerment, shoot me a third time. My kind of feminism, the real version where your gender is neither used against you nor as a leg-up, really is dead in the water.
Mostyn won’t be the first – or last – G-G who many might think networked his or her way into high office. To be fair, this may not matter too much except in extraordinary circumstances, such as the 1975 constitutional crisis, G-Gs are mere ciphers of the government of the day.
There is most certainly no requirement that a governor- general have a glittering business, legal, military or any other kind of career before appointment.
The main job requirement in normal circumstances is to be presentable, speak well and understand protocol. Not much intellect required – or indeed wanted. Stroppy, mouthy, political G-Gs are an abomination.
So I certainly don’t contend that Mostyn can’t do the job. Indeed, it is quite likely she will be a capable occupant of what is a mainly ceremonial role. But I gag when I am told what a highly-qualified person she is and what an adornment to our roll call of G-Gs.
If her chromosomes were XY she wouldn’t have been considered for the role. The biggest question now is whether Mostyn will be able to restrain herself from using this new ceremonial platform to preach wokeness to the unenlightened.
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