Inflation is when there are more dollars, but each one of them is worth less. Over the past years, accusations of misogyny have fallen victim to inflation.
That became apparent when a brothel-owner paid for trucks to drive around Melbourne with a “Ditch the Witch” billboard targeting Victorian Labor Premier Jacinta Allan. The gendered billboards were condemned by Labor and Coalition politicians. My first thought was how stupid they were. There is plenty to criticise about a government that presides over the indebted, sclerotic and crime-ridden state of Victoria, and the premier who leads it. But gender is irrelevant.
For all the ire raised by Allan’s predecessor, Dan Andrews, there was always something more on-point to say in protesting his leadership than “Flick the Dick”.
In the past, outrage over the billboard might even have benefited Allan by raising a modicum of sympathy for an unpopular female leader. But it quickly became apparent that we are no longer in the past. There was a brief expression of anger in the media and online, where former prime minister Julia Gillard – the last target of the “Ditch the Witch” slur in Australia – posted that she was saddened to see “this tired old trope resurrected”. But there was no intensity. Despite Allan’s best efforts, the headlines petered out in a couple of days.
One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, who has been called much worse, told Allan to “suck it up, sweetheart”. Gillard’s statement caused a flare-up in the opposite direction. The ongoing Tickle vs Giggle legal stoush has caused many women to question Gillard’s feminist credentials. The Federal Court has found there are no grounds to exclude trans women from spaces created for biological women, and therefore no right for people born female to have spaces of their own. The finding relied on an amendment to the Sex Discrimination Act made under Gillard’s prime ministership, which removed the biological definitions of “man” and “woman”. Victorian Liberal MP Moira Deeming threw the first female PM’s famous misogyny speech against Tony Abbott back at her, declaring on X: “I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this woman. I will not.”
It’s also hard to find a current leader to accuse of misogyny. Allan’s main rival, Liberal leader Jess Wilson, doesn’t fit the bill. Federally, it won’t stick on the gentlemanly leader of the Liberal Party, with a clever, high-profile wife. Or on the humorous leader of the Nationals, who likes to emphasise his devotion to the mother of his five children, and respect for her hard work raising them while he’s on the political trail. Or on Hanson who, as well as being a woman, insists that the only one of her children who has what it takes to follow in her footsteps is her daughter – not her sons, who she “wouldn’t have anywhere near it”.
And then there’s the fact that the misogyny coin simply buys less than it used to. Its value peaked during Scott Morrison’s prime ministership, when concerns over the culture in Parliament House and a prime minister who seemed to just not “get” women were inflamed by accusations of historical sexual assault by a cabinet minister and claims that a rape in Parliament House had been covered up for political purposes. Those accusations, made by former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins, played out in as public a fashion as possible with the help of Higgins’ now-husband, David Sharaz. They gave Australia its “MeToo” moment. And the unravelling of the cover-up conspiracy claims gave Australia its MeToo backlash.
Linda Reynolds, the minister whom Higgins accused of insensitively handling and then covering up her rape, fought back on her own behalf and that of Fiona Brown, her chief of staff at the time. Both women suffered enormously as a result of the accusations, which have subsequently been categorically disproven in two landmark rulings.
After the criminal trial of Bruce Lehrmann, the man accused of raping Higgins, was terminated due to jury misconduct and a retrial was discontinued due to Higgins’ mental health, he brought a defamation suit against journalist Lisa Wilkinson and Channel 10, which aired Higgins’ claims. While it didn’t go well for Lehrmann, resulting in a finding of rape to a civil standard, the painstaking work of the presiding judge revealed that the claims of a cover-up were baseless.
This finding was reinforced when Reynolds sued Higgins for defamation. The Supreme Court judge presiding over that case found Higgins made 26 false or misleading claims during her account of events, and that her allegations of a political cover-up were false. That trial was costly to Reynolds, who took out another mortgage to finance the proceedings. It was costly, too, for Brown, who has never recovered from the stress of the accusations, and for Higgins, who lost and was bankrupted. Moreover, it was costly to the concept of misogyny, a word enthusiastically spent during the years in which the drama played out, and which has been substantially devalued.
Nonetheless, the accusations of a political rape cover-up were in some senses a triumph. They fuelled and channelled women’s antipathy towards Morrison and they played a part in his defeat by Anthony Albanese in the 2022 election. Now the Vida Fund, a group that formed last year to “support female independents”, has appointed Higgins executive director as it launches a “three-year impact agenda” ahead of the 2028 federal election. Its strategy focuses on “gender equity, political participation and responding to the growing influence of misogynistic and far-right movements in Australia”.
The fund is soliciting donations. But the question is whether the debased coin it is converting them into still has the ability to move the political middle. My sense is it doesn’t. Analysts who are fond of labelling One Nation a party of grievance misunderstand that, while it may have begun as a howl of pain, it is now an uprising against grievance culture. Mistrust outranks misogyny.
The “Ditch the Witch” billboards failed to launch a new movement against misogyny because misogyny was already overspent. Labor’s efforts to blame One Nation for a new tide of sexism and fund-raise to stop it were easily outstripped by a tit-for-tat donations drive from Hanson’s party to “Fire the Liar” – meaning Albanese. Hanson is making bank off the new hard currency in politics, while misogyny struggles to purchase a toehold. Inflation’s a bitch. And that’s not gendered.
Parnell Palme McGuinness is an insights and advocacy strategist. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.
Parnell Palme McGuinness is an insights and advocacy strategist. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. She is also an advisory board member of Australians For Prosperity, which is part-funded by the coal industry.