Misogyny tactic will backfire

THIS is a dangerous moment for Julia Gillard and Labor. The risk is that her defence of former Speaker Peter Slipper by depicting Tony Abbott as a misogynist becomes a defining metaphor for her government.

That metaphor is the blame game. Labor has become the master of blaming other people for its own blunders. Its blame-game politics have now reached an implausible, almost farcical extreme unworthy of our first woman Prime Minister.

The list of people to blame for Labor's blunders continues to mount - the greedy mining barons, the biased media, the "relentlessly negative Tony Abbott", and now the Opposition Leader as misogynist.

Labor has played the class card and now it plays the misogynist card. The narrative is entrenched: Labor thinks it can survive only by demonisation, with Abbott as demon-in-chief. Just as Abbott ruined Gillard on broken trust, Gillard now seeks to ruin Abbott on personal character.

This week's events are likely to have a contradictory impact: projecting passion and authenticity will help Gillard's personal ratings but her government is reduced to a soap opera with a Prime Minister invoking a gender war sure to diminish Labor and cast more doubt on her judgment.

Labor's euphoria about Gillard as hero of feminists and social media activists should ring the alarm: history shows when the "true believers" are turned on, a majority of Australians usually tune out.

There are two reflections on this week's drama. The first is that Gillard was being authentic. She unleashed a torrent of hostility and frustration that has been "bottling up" for many months, and such passion, because it is genuine, strikes a public response.

The second is that depicting "Abbott as misogynist" is a deliberate tactic. Gillard's evidence that Abbott hates women was a series of his old-fashioned and sexist comments. Yes, they are unacceptable. It is equally obvious they do not constitute misogyny.

This is not to deny Abbott has a women problem. But this performance will only accentuate Gillard's men problem. Beneath her passion Gillard was desperate. In truth, this was a passionate speech for an unworthy cause. Gillard's effort to keep Slipper as Speaker had no intellectual or moral foundation.

Depicting herself as a woman unfairly treated by misogynists has some truth but it risks casting Gillard as a PM recruiting implausible excuses for her political failures.

It was obvious to most observers that morning that Slipper's comments meant he could not survive as Speaker. This was a no-brainer to everybody except Labor. If Labor is so anxious about misogyny, how come it missed the most obvious misogyny?

The answer is that the misogynist card is just another tactic. Gillard's support for Slipper and condemnation of Abbott proves the point. The joke here is on the social media activists who think the political reporters missed the story. They're wrong. The reporters got it right because the real story is that Labor exploits misogyny as a tactic for its own self-interest. The real story was Gillard's hypocrisy. It was on brilliant display.