Live and let live, and let the blokes have their clubs

If you expect power from an Australian Club membership, you have the wrong address.

Prominent businessman and philanthropist Geoff Cousins quit the Australian Club after it refused to allow female members. Picture: John Feder

Here is a simple exercise for journalism schools to put to their students. Listen to Fran Kelly’s RN Breakfast interview on Wednesday morning with Sydney businessman Geoff Cousins. In 500 words explain how Kelly employs journalistic curiosity to explore issues surrounding the decision of the Australian Club to exclude female members.

Students will struggle to pull together 15 words, let alone 500, because there wasn’t much curious journalism during that interview. A woman who can ask searching questions when it suits instead chose to ignore arguments as to why a private men’s club in Sydney might choose the status quo.

Offering membership to women is a legitimate point of view. Personally, I regard the idea of secretive, private clubs “inviting” only men as members as past its use-by date. But that doesn’t warrant the confected drama paraded this week.

Cousins’s reasons for quitting the Australian Club were first reported in this newspaper. When Kelly later interviewed him on air and he repeated his claim to be fighting for big social issues, a curious journalist might have pointed out that we live in a free country where another big idea remains as relevant as ever. It’s called freedom of association.

That simple yet fundamental idea means that citizens in a free country have the choice to join together in groups of their own making, setting their own ground rules so long as they don’t break any laws. The deal in a free country is live and let live. Women are free and equal to create, or join, a club that excludes men. And they frequently do. If a bunch of men, mostly old, mostly conservative, want to hang on to their male-only history for a bit longer, that is their right.

That’s what happened on Tuesday morning when 700-plus members turned up to the Australian Club to vote on whether to admit female members. Sixty-two per cent voted for the status quo and 37 per cent voted in favour of change. One per cent abstained.

When Cousins said he couldn’t imagine anything more boring than spending time at a male-only club, Kelly could have reminded Cousins that he had been a member of the male-only Australian Club for a few decades. Just because, belatedly, he has crossed the Rubicon doesn’t mean others are on the same timetable.

Self-righteous grandstanding is not the best way to convince Australian Club members to change the rules. When Malcolm Turnbull, another longstanding club member, was asked how he voted, he said he was a “lifelong feminist”. It invited obvious questions: Just how lifelong? Didn’t joining a men-only club seriously offend his feminist principles?

On Thursday night, ABC journalists and producers at the 7.30 program put together a silly and salacious piece of campaign journalism that featured Turnbull’s daughter, Daisy, and Cousins, again. Taxpayers, those who pay the wages of these journalists, are entitled to expect that, by the evening, our ABC could have located two articulate people with different perspectives.

Malcolm Turnbull arrives at the Australian Club's female membership vote.

If proponents of the Australian Club opening its doors to women are genuinely interested in principles of gender equality, they would want to get rid of all single-sex clubs. But what fascinates them, and drives their agenda, is power. And fair enough.

To her credit, Turnbull’s daughter was honest about this. “There is so much power tied up in that organisation,” she told 7.30. “And they’ve made an active and very clear choice to exclude women from that power.”

In other words, if this was about a bunch of male plumbers banding together for camaraderie, not interested. But a gentlemen’s club formed 183 years ago is surely a bastion of male power and must be brought to its knees.

Like a local offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the change agents have Macquarie Street in their sights. But this obsession with power at the Australian Club is almost as outdated as the club’s membership rules. Maybe Turnbull Jr imagines that her father is still a very powerful man, ergo other men at the club must be powerful too. That’s sweet, but wrong.

The “private gentlemen’s club” on Macquarie Street is not a powerhouse of anything. In this hushed atmosphere, a very narrow cross section of society, mostly older men, ex-this and ex-that, mostly retired or on their way out, spend time among other men of similar experience. Older blokes can hear better at these quiet clubs.

One anonymous member told a newspaper during the week that “you won’t get a better steak or oysters anywhere in Sydney”. Bless him. When club members travel interstate or overseas, they enjoy reciprocal rights at other well-located clubs with a similar atmosphere that suits them.

Power at these private men’s clubs doesn’t extend beyond their rules for this and that. You must wear a jacket, to look proper. You mustn’t talk about business, that’s too naff. And do not pull out a pen from your pocket to write a note. I was told off for that once. And never returned.

Daisy told The Sydney Morning Herald: “I’d hate to be a member trying to explain to his daughters why he believes only their brothers are good enough to be a member of the club.”

That’s wonderfully dramatic. But the truth is more quotidian. Women are not rendered lesser human beings, or less powerful, by Tuesday’s vote. If you’re expecting prestige and power from an Australian Club membership, you have the wrong address.

You are better off mixing with the cliquey women’s networks, especially in Sydney. That’s where private deals are done, where women and their “useful idiots” known as Male Champions of Change quietly arrange jobs for other women on the basis of sex chromosomes. Notice that these people think sex discrimination is naughty only when it excludes women. Are they shameless, or just thick?

On Radio National, Kelly was worried that “from the outside, it looks concerning”. Parroting Cousins, the ABC host worried that there are men inside the Australian Club who, in their working lives, have to make decisions about women, like judges. Is she suggesting that a member of a men’s-only club is unable to make fair decisions that affect women? Does Kelly’s concern extend to female judges who might be members of the exclusive and single-sex Queen’s Club?

Ignorance about these clubs is no reason to sneer at them or to imagine malice from members. Some men like to shoot the breeze, in their private time, with other men similar to them. Just as a yoga-loving runner who writes, reads and walks her dog may choose to spend some of her time with women of similar interests. Period.

Cousins is right that, following Tuesday’s vote, some male chief executives will come under pressure to cancel their Australian Club membership. That doesn’t mean the pressure makes sense. A male boss can believe in gender equality in the workplace and still, logically, be a member of a private men’s club. There is a difference between sex discrimination at work and at private clubs. No one forces you to join a club. So they can set their own rules provided they don’t contravene any laws.

But people must work, and that’s why we have laws that prohibit sex discrimination in the workplace. Alas, simple logic appears hard for virtue signallers to digest, let alone defend.

Kelly was so worked up about the Australian Club’s vote that she asked Cousins why those opposed to change shouldn’t be named. And presumably shame them, too, given that’s the modus operandi of naming someone for doing something you think is reprehensible.

Naming, shaming and mocking members of a male-only club may feel good. But doing good, and being fair, requires something else. It’s called tolerance, acknowledging that people are different, they have different views, and make different choices, and join different clubs. Sure, some members will resign from the Australian Club in disgust. Spitting the dummy can make for a quick headline. Others will stay to be part of change. It’s only a matter of time, even at 165 Macquarie Street, before they choose change.