In the matter of Peta Credlin v Julie Bishop, the minister wins

The men of the Abbott cabinet and Julie Bishop.

In the competitive marketplace of outrage, the aim is to label an ­opponent with an ism or a phobia of such opprobrium as to ­destroy their credibility. And quickly, damaging someone’s reputation before reason may prevail. So it was this week when two old favourites, racism and ­sexism, were flung carelessly at targets that varied wildly, from a bar of Dove soap to Australia’s Foreign Minister. In each case the outrage backfired and the accusers looked silly, proving that this choose-an-ism outrage machine is a blow to clear thinking.

Last week Unilever, the maker of Dove, released a social media promotion of its soap. ­Imme­diately the political correctness police ran the ruler of identity politics over the advert, condemning it as racist because it features a black woman turning into a white woman. Summing up the case for the PC prosecution, a twit on Twitter compared the advert with “a vintage racist soap ad”.

If you watch the advert for a few more seconds, the black woman who becomes a white woman then becomes an Asian woman. But when the self-­appointed morality police scan­ned for potentially racist repro­bates, they deliberately ignored that. And the truth didn’t stop Dove apologising for causing ­offence, granting the outrage ­machine ­another win and allowing it to move on, emboldened, to the next target.

Truth is the biggest victim of this dishonest ism-driven outrage industry that has intensified in the era of identity politics. In a 7000-word essay for New York magazine last month, Andrew Sullivan explores how the default human experience of tribalism has morphed into something ­unhealthy, fracturing society and undermining the search for truth.

“One of the great attractions of tribalism is that you don’t actually have to think very much,” writes the conservative political commentator and former editor of New Republic. “All you need to know on any given subject is which side you’re on. You pick up signals from everyone around you, you slowly winnow your acquaintances to those who will reinforce your world view, a tribal leader calls the shots, and everything slips into place.

“When criticised by a member of a rival tribe, a tribalist will not reflect on his own actions or ­assumptions but instantly point to the same flaw in his enemy.”

Sullivan’s thesis of the unthinking tribal slugfest played out again last week after Julie Bishop made some remarks at the annual The Australian Women’s Weekly Women of the Future Awards. Speaking on a women’s panel, the Foreign Minister said it was lonely being the only woman in a 19-member cabinet. She recalled that when she raised ideas, they were sometimes overlooked, only to be then raised by a man and praised by other men at the table. When more women were appointed to cabinet, Bishop decided that women should do what men did: praise each other for their contributions. Bishop mentioned a “little deal” with a few female cabinet members along these lines, cracking a joke about it that evening.

If humour is the first casualty of tribalism, nuance is the second. Members of the Tony Abbott tribe immediately cranked up, with ­Andrew Bolt accusing Bishop of “rank sexism” and Peta Credlin declaring the Foreign Minister “diminishes all Liberal women”.

The tribal-led determination to fit Bishop’s comments into some kind of sexism grid was as ham-fisted and untrue as trying to stitch up the Dove advert as racist. ­Inquirer spoke to Bishop as the ­furore unfolded. She was more ­bemused than surprised by the ­attacks, recalling that, as the only woman in Abbott’s 19-member cabinet, she raised some of these issues with Credlin, who sat in cabinet meetings as the prime minister’s chief of staff. “I used to tell her, did you notice this? I wasn’t embarrassed to say it, it was true. It wasn’t a secret.”

It takes a certain kind of tribal absurdity to suggest that Bishop — who eschews feminist labels — has joined the ranks of left-wing feminists by pointing out that men often support each other around the table: “They naturally do this brotherly thing, where they say to each other ‘great idea, great idea’, and speaking up for other women in cabinet in the same way is simply a way of supporting them in the way men do.

“Of course, the Abbott people are going to use it, but give me some credit. I’m not saying if Kelly O’Dwyer came up with an idiotic idea I would say that’s fabulous. Of course I’m not. Every matter is judged on its merits.”

Let’s hope so because O’Dwyer has done some idiotic things as a cabinet minister.

Bishop speaks to Inquirer between a phone call with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, meetings with New Delhi’s head of mission and the Singaporean foreign minister, and flying off to South Korea’s demilitarised zone for briefings with the UN command to discuss North Korea’s Rocket Man. It contrasts with the more common schtick where women miraculously raise the gender card when their careers are nosediving.

As prime minister, Julie Gillard resorted to wild accusations of misogyny only when her leader­ship was on the rocks. Sexism apparently kept the queen of faux ­feminism, Hillary Rodham Clinton, from the White House too, with Clinton’s feminism now so ­deranged she recently ­accused women of not voting for her ­because of “tremendous pressure from fathers and husbands and boyfriends and male employers”.

Peta Credlin, left, with Julie Bishop.

As Abbott’s chief of staff, Credlin was not shy of the media but she waited until she was booted from her job before painting herself as a victim of overt and covert sexism. “If I was a guy, I wouldn’t be bossy, I’d be strong. If I was a guy, I wouldn’t be a microman­ager, I’d be across my brief,” she grumbled at an Australian Women’s Weekly event in September 2015 after ­Abbott was toppled. Perhaps Credlin was “captivated by the room” that night, to coin the prickly words she directed at the Foreign Minister on Bolt’s Monday night show.

Regrettably for Credlin’s tale of woe, her bellyache about gender-based attacks on her don’t survive the scrutiny of facts.

She wasn’t marked down by her gender; she was marked down for failing in her role as chief of staff. Rather than being an effective conduit to the prime minister, Credlin ­became a blockage to his office. Rather than bolstering the prime minister’s authority, she undermined it in weird ways by finishing his sentences and challenging his comments in front of others. Measure more claims against more facts. Since losing her powerful gig in government, Credlin has painted herself as a champion of getting more Liberal women into parliament. As she told the Australian Women’s Weekly event, “you will want to have more women like me in politics”. Lining up these convictions with her time in government, it’s odd then that no woman was appointed to federal cabinet when Credlin had ­unusually huge influence over the prime minister. It’s worth noting that not even Bishop was appointed to cabinet by the prime minister. She was there by virtue of being the deputy leader, who can pick a portfolio.

Listening to Credlin’s silly comments about Bishop this week brought to mind a recent article in The Atlantic that explored Pew and Gallup surveys showing “when women have a preference as to the gender of their boss and colleagues, the preference is largely for men”.

Exploring why some women earn a reputation as bully bosses — whether it’s the “aggressive bitch” who shouts at ­employees or the “passive-­aggressive bitch” who plays workplace games or the “tuned-out indifferent bitch” who doesn’t care about employees — Olga Khazan’s research suggests that when there are few women in a workplace, women are likelier to turn on other women as a competitive survival instinct.

If getting more talented women into the workplace is the best way to change these prefer­ences and to jettison the female bully boss phenomenon, Bishop is matching her convictions about supporting women with actions. While she alone can’t deliver gender-based parliamentary targets that she supports, the Foreign Minister has overseen the promotion of many women in the ­Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade: women make up 59.8 per cent of non-senior executive level positions and 30 per cent of division heads in overseas missions. In DFAT, 37 per cent of the most senior executive positions are filled by women and in the top leadership team, comprising Department Secretary Frances Adamson and five Canberra deputies, it’s 50-50 men and women. This is not some Labor-gal quota-driven push. It’s a case of setting targets and using merit as the measurement.

In the messed-up tribal lands of Abbott supporters, it’s probably verboten to acknowledge these facts. Perhaps that’s not surprising given that, when Abbott was prime minister, ­his tribalism was far more troubling than a conversation ­between Bishop and a few female colleagues to support one another around the cabinet table.

Abbott expected conservatives to support him no matter how much he cocked things up, whether walking away from promises, failing at basic retail politics or allowing his office to undermine his government and his own prime ministership.

Whereas John Howard respected criticism from the conservative side of politics even when he disagreed with it, Abbott assumed that conservative tribalism would deliver him unthinking support, or at least expedient ­silence. Here is Sullivan’s thesis writ large: tribalism becomes ­unhealthy in a democracy when it hinders intellectual honesty.

We have come to expect blind tribalism and crazy claims of sexism and racism from so-called progressives who march to the drum of identity politics. When it infiltrates those who are meant to be committed to honest debate and judging people and ideas on their merits, we’re in trouble. Good ideas will surely die when the messy game of tribal politics is untethered from the search for truth.