Four Corners and the Canberra boys’ club: a dispiriting tale

Federal MP Alan Tudge arrives at the 2017 Mid-Winter Ball in the company of Liberal staffer Rachelle Miller, with whom he was having an affair. She later revealed the relationship on Four Corners.

When we look back at the Federal Coalition’s reign in Canberra in terms of gender relations, we will note several words that have entered the lexicon thanks to the behaviour of some of its highest office bearers; words now encapsulating the tone of the party. “Bonk ban” and “manterruption”. Thank you, kind sirs. For these dispiriting little monikers sum up the state of affairs when it comes to the Libs and their women right now.

Watching the recent Four Corners program on the Canberra boys’ club, I was struck once again by what men really think of us. That women are not seen. For who we really are. There were examples of gasp-inducing misogynistic behaviour and allegations of an affair where the more junior female staffer involved lost her job in the aftermath – while of course the man advanced unpunished.

The appalling revelations were capped off the next day in an illuminating scene that could have come straight out of Hollywood. Minister for Families and Social Services Anne Ruston was asked by a journalist to share her own perspective on parliament’s culture. She managed just a handful of words before the PM interrupted and drowned out her unfinished sentence. The classic manterruption made astonished headlines, cementing the tone of this government, again, on the world stage.

This is all about men colonising women’s spaces, unthinkingly. Ignoring them, silencing their voices, not seeing them. How depressingly familiar it seemed for so many of us women; we who’ve known this type of man all our lives. Been taught by them. Led by them. Been talked over in meetings by them, laughed at and diminished by them, disappeared from their landscape of success. As Malcolm Turnbull said on the program, “The attitudes to women, the lack of respect of women, in many quarters in Canberra, reminds me of the corporate scene 40 years ago. It’s just not modern Australia.”

As a young woman I could never tell men around me that what they were imposing upon me felt like fraud. All the rules they were expecting us young women to adhere to, what they expected us to be, to look like. Someone else. Many seemed to be trying to subtly change us, quieten, meeken. This wasn’t me. Yet I could feel the soft pressure of it like a frog rolling in warming water. Growing up I learnt, as all women do, the rules to be followed. Mainly, an adherence to the rules of the “second best” club, otherwise known as the woman’s lot. The expectations: you must not upstage a male, nor question; you mustn’t show off or dominate.

Virginia Woolf wrote almost 100 years ago, “Men are all in the light always: with women you swim at once into the silent dusk.” The expectation is to accept that silent dusk, in some quarters still. “As I write,” Woolf declared, “there rises somewhere in my head that queer and very pleasant sense of something which I want to write; my own point of view.” The world is now getting our own point of view. And it’s not pretty. We’re often condemned for it but our voices are getting louder; we persist.

The day before the Four Corners program Kamala Harris spoke as the freshly declared US vice president-elect – oratory for the feminist history books, and a striking contrast. A confident, articulate, highly intelligent woman of colour claimed the world stage with dignity and grace. “While I may be the first woman in this office,” Harris vowed, “I will not be the last, because every little girl watching sees that this is a country of possibilities.” Women wept. We felt seen. Joe Biden’s embrace of the modern world, in choosing a black woman as his sidekick, was a testament to the man’s character. It felt like a world away from the Liberal Party of 2020. That’s a tragedy for all of us – but for our girls, our young women in particular.