The March4Justice movement started with a tweet. Just 18 days later it culminated in 110,000 angry Australians marching against gender inequality across Australia.
Organisers of the movement are trying to keep the momentum going, supporting ongoing events including May Day marches, flash mobs and training for those who want to organise similar events of their own.
But they’ve recently faced a barrage of criticism online. Questions have been raised about how almost $120,000 of donated funds have been spent, including $1841 in office consumables. Former members have said they feel left out of the organisation, while the organisation’s founder Janine Hendry has been targeted by vicious trolls, facing rape and death threats.
Chaotic beginning
On February 25, Hendry put out a tweet. “All of us extremely disgruntled women could travel to Canberra on March 8 and form a ring linking arms and with our backs turned toward the parliament and stand in silent protest,” she wrote.
With just 895 likes the tweet was hardly viral, but it set forth an unstoppable movement. A small group chat was started, consisting of the first people reach out to Hendry. This group would later be known as the leadership team, which included NSW-based singer, songwriter, actress and performing arts teacher Claudia Zappia and small business owner Judith Treanor, among others.
The group soon moved to a Facebook page and Treanor said it “descended into absolute chaos”. People argued over how the event should be organised, what it should be named, and how donations should be collected.
It didn’t take long for the abuse to begin, too: Hendry told Crikey she has been followed in the street, logged cybercrime complaints with the police and is concerned for her son’s safety at school. Some abuse was incredibly specific and targeted, detailing personal information. Others were broad-scale death and rape threats and targeted hundreds of volunteers.
“It’s just been devastating. It was terrifying and disheartening,” Hendry told Crikey. The organisation had to hire professionals to add security to the social media accounts following repeated hacking attempts.
Volunteers also received unsolicited sexual assault disclosures from victim-survivors via the organisation’s social media channels. The volunteers referred them on to 1800 RESPECT.
Things moved quickly. On March 3, the GoFundMe donations campaign was started, amassing $119,935 in just 21 days from notable donors including Lucy Turnbull and Jessica Rudd. On March 9, March4Justice was registered as an incorporated association in Victoria.
The night before the rally, Prime Minister Scott Morrison reached out to the organisation, offering a personal meeting, which was rejected.
On March 15, the historic event unfolded, with women and allies travelling from far and wide to add their voice to the movement.
Rumblings of discontent
Despite the event’s success, some of the leadership, including Zappia and Treanor, felt unfairly treated. They’d given up weeks of paid work, worked 18-hour days, weren’t reimbursed for accommodation, flights, car travel and hotels, and at the end of it felt they got little recognition: it went to Hendry, a Melbourne-based interior designer, small business owner and single mother.
Hendry has since had promotional materials developed on the success of the movement, though Hendry said none of this was paid for through donations. The GoFundMe was closed down so donations could be managed by the organisation.
Hendry said she’s aware there are better representatives for the movement and that March4Justice is developing an advisory board with experts and community leaders. She said volunteers are featured on the website, were thanked in social media posts and in a Zoom call on the Thursday after the march.
Where’s the funding gone?
The organisation had originally agreed funds would be used to support the event, and the remainder distributed among relevant not-for-profit organisations. Three days after the march, regional team leaders made a unanimous decision to keep the movement going.
“We are seeking legal advice on the appropriate way to acquit the funds,” Hendry said.
As of April 22, $47,202 has been spent across more than 200 events including $22,812 on event management, $1841.02 on office consumables (which Hendry said related to last-minute purchases on cables, printouts and posters), and $9686 on volunteer support.
A total of $12,027 was also spent on social media campaigns, which includes a $10,000 donation from a philanthropic organisation paid to a third-party organisation.
The bulk of volunteer support funding went to paying a mediator, an organisational psychologist, to speak to volunteers who were disgruntled with the movement or who wanted to talk about receiving disclosures at a cost of $6352. Just four people attended. Hendry said no volunteers have been reimbursed for their time, accommodation or travel costs. Legal agency Maddocks is working pro-bono with the organisation.
Costs listed on the website total $122,882 — meaning, once the social media donation is factored in, there are $7053 of unaccounted-for costs, though more than half of this may be due to GoFundMe’s fees. The organisation is still receiving invoices from ongoing events.
This month, March4Justice has a new webpage and logo, all provided by volunteers. There’s a donations link, though it’s not yet activated — instead, potential donors have to email the organisers to discuss donations.
The organisation will be audited in accordance with relevant laws.
Additional reporting by Tom Ravlic. This article was amended after initial publication with additional information from Judith Treanor and Claudia Zappia.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. March4Justice are being as transparent as possible and still getting hammered, while the mob they marched against get a free pass for literally billions time and again- and that’s just the money!
This is how the left undoes itself every bloody time. Can’t get it together to fake a united front like the right does. In a fair and just world owning up to the discord would be a good thing, but that ain’t where we live.
True
United we stand. Divided, we fall.
If you are tied together like careless mountaineers it makes a group disaster more likely.
Divided we stand united we fall. .the saying is the wrong way around.
Individuals and groups must maintain their similarities and differences. If people lump themselves together in crisis the movement becomes about this and then about that according to different perspectives. Yes there are always different perspectives. But when a movement becomes about different perspectives the movement becomes difficult to define.
This is when cracks appear and momentum is lost. Clearly defining the goal considering individual and group differences in perspective allows focus on similarities and the task at hand. Wars and survival have been won and lost on this basis since the beginning of human society. This includes sexual identification due to clearly different abilities.
Blaming nature, nurture or idolising a concept we cannot confirm will not harmonise. Mind the thought, not everything animal, mineral in the broad sense or plant harmonises.
It’s a modern day puzzle we need to solve for the future of our environment. Is it the end pre ordained and inevitable or do we have some control over the future on earth. Furthermore who has pre ordained it and who has some control.
I don’t know the answer because I am but a female human.
A group is always less than the sum of its parts.
The major parties require all candidates to sign the party line – independent thought is not just anathema but a sin, punishable by excommunication aka losing preselection.
To date this is NOT the case with the Greens though the woeful Di Natale tried to force its implementation.
Only Lee Rhiannon’s courage and determination stopped it.
Which did wonders for her future chances.
It’s an admirably honest and unflinching update, which is of very great credit to Crikey/AS. I have a lot of sympathy for how the core organisers may be feeling somewhat short-changed, perhaps even sidelined, by a few more naturally egocentric figures. I’ve been there a few times. I don’t know about Hendry, but I was always wary of the prominence of only newly (and fairly self-centredly) ‘activist’ feminists such as Higgins and Tame. And of course the usual opportunistically grandstanding Labor/soft pap prog media figures. I’ve done just enough policy and stakeholder engagement work in DV to be mildly insulted – on the whole-unsolicited and doubtless unwanted behalf of multiple-decade frontline advocates – by the suggestion from some of these younger ‘faces’ that this push somehow represented the ‘first time’ such public conversations had been ‘bravely kicked off’ ‘normalised’, ‘legitimised’, etc. It’s just not so. The DV/abuse fight has been underway publicly for at least half a century. Maybe you need to be blonde and skinny, rather than have spent the last fifty years actually running shelters on a shoestring, to count in fourth wave feminism.
I know that people will think that’s just another cheap misogynistic shot. Maybe it is. But I’ve at least been consistent from the start, in expressing this wariness if not disdain for aspects of all this. And nothing yet is making me re-assess that.
Since the ‘collective high’ of this march, Higgins has scored a $250k individual book deal, met privately (and I would say cosily, and indeed helpfully, for him) with the PM (unlike the actual marchers, who held firm on principle), and now she apparently aspires to becoming a Rhodes scholar. Ok, fair enough for her. But there’s still no actual rape charge been laid. There also still is a potentially-alleged rapist out there, who will presumably remain stuck in stasis under that life cloud so long as the Federal police neither sh*t nor get off the pot. Higgins’ simply keeps asserting her rape as fact. Absolutely her right to do so.
But as a society, it’s simply not good enough to leave it there. Absolutely not good enough, for reasons that are mostly to do with other rape victims, not simply as an MRA plea.
As for Oz of the Year Grace Tame, she has since cover-glammed up/guest edited (ie mostly, peppered with egocentric eat-my-fear/abuse platitudes) a posh fashion mag, slagged off Amanda Stoker’s feminist/DV work credentials (which arguably tower over hers in substance), pointedly ignored Stoker’s subsequent attempts to engage, and – you’d hope – found some time to put fellow Oz of the Year Geoffrey Rush’s pic back on the honour wall from whence she deigned to gracelessly remove it. As with Higgins, I acknowledge her ordeal. But being the victim of a wrong doesn’t automatically make you a good faith advocate against it, nor a selflessly committed supporter of fellow victims, beyond easy rhetoric. I just would like to see what these two young, feted figures now go on to do, of substance, in this area. I suspect, not much. Hope I’m wrong.
Christine ‘suffragette’ Holgate meanwhile has engaged the same uber-pricey reputation lawyer as Porter, and is likely chasing taxpayer bucks, while the ever-dependable ALP headshed has managed to endorse yet another pale, male, stale factional hack to pick up the new safe seat of Hawke. May change. Watch this discs, I guess.
Look, I don’t know what it all means for the wider movement, that these various headline ‘symbolic’ leadership figures appear to have much less appetite/aptitude for the slog work of actually helping specific DV/abuse victims, or policy formulation, or legislative consensus-building or humdrum organisational grind, But absolutely if I were someone like Zappa or Trainor, yes, I’d be feeling slightly bemused around about now, too.
I agree that the accounting and transparency looks really bloody good, even by normal standards – and certainly compared to any other grassroots movement so quickly put together and made to work. No way in the world does any of that merit any sniping.
Sorry if I am just straying into yet more opportunistic feminist-bashing. I am honestly trying not to. It’s just that collective idealism at such a large scale is a rare and precious thing, and it’s also very easily exploited by egocentric personalities, even unwitting, well-meaning ones. The effect of such personalities needs to be actively interrogated to avoid strategic distortions, and fragmentation.
To me, it’s not the thousands of nobodies who need to answer the question ‘so what do you intend to do next?’ IMO, it’s the handful of high individual profile beneficiaries, who got the most personally out of the march and yet who seem to me at least to already be subtly moving on from it.
It’s a really gutsy follow-up AS. I hope I haven’t taken cheap advantage of it, and I’m really sorry if it comes across like that. There’s a lot of us older men who really do vigorously support the strategic ambition of movements like #MeToo snd #Enough, but refuse point blank to insult feminism’s long honourable pedigree or its contemporary dignity by patronising the current debates with easy platitudes. It can make us sound like unreformed, patriarchal misogynists. I don’t know anymore if I am or not, but regardless, IMO it’s those glib men who’ve spent the last few months fawning and gushing over some of these younger – invariably attractive and media friendly – new ‘leadership’ figures, on (so far anyway) not much actual feminist substance, who are much more guilty on that score. Chrs.
And by the way, I mean no ill will towards Ms Higgins. None at all.
But if we are to insist on ascribing lavish praise of ‘system changing bravery’ etc to victims of sexual assault, maybe we ought look first to those like the anonymous survivor of Jarrad Hayne’s. I’d argue she’s done an even more courageous service to the cause of systemic and attitudinal reform than whatever Higgins’s proves to have been, by enduring two gruelling actual trials, under genuinely frightening social circle pressures, her word up against that of a famous, adored athlete with an aggressive (and co-ed) Praetorian guard, receiving little public support, virtually no soft pap prog meeja ‘duty of care’, and certainly no prospect of a book deal and a private meeting with the PM afterward.
It’s not a competition and I don’t think ‘bravery’ is a very useful or appropriate concept in these conversations, anyway. But if any survivor is a truly powerful and unambiguous by-example leadership figure for the #Enough movement, it’s her. So I wonder if she will be embraced as warmly by the bien pensant elite as Higgins, Tame, and Porter’s equally anonymous accuser have been.
She isn’t quite ‘one of us’…so perhaps not.
Glad you followed up your unfinished thoughts JR. Sleep well. I’ll think about your perspective before I answer with substance.
Looking forward, Jennifer, and thanks.
It is not about the media focus on the pin up girls; the multitudes are the “headline” did see the numbers; lots of women of all ages…. the system is rotten and the fact a liberal poster girl is a victim too even though she’s playing “the game” by filling an expectation; a brief if you will….well how bad is it for the “witches” ….Yes that is how older( women over 35 generally)….are treated.. the above comment about Ms Holgate just smacks of this inquisitor mentality- wake up she saved us collectively millions by not acquiescing to the parcel post privatisation push by the board aka govt benefactors so the real story goes… wake up Australia
Thank you. This is thoughtful & there is much to consider in your post.
Thank you, Penny.
well “Jack” Jack and Jill went up the hill together boy… and you fall down and Jill comes tumbling after.. now those boys running this pandemic on behalf of gas, high vis and hard hats need to explain the front line faces
Who down votes “thank you”?
1 -Hayne’s victim does not live in Canberra 2- the correct procedure was followed – complaint laid to police , police investigated properly unimpeded 3 -Enough evidence was found to put together a brief of evidence 4- the court was convinced the evidence reached the criminal standard , beyond reasonble doubt.
…and 5 Haynes’s ‘blame the victim’ support gang really does blame the victim, but it is also genuinely frightening, including physically. And so, far more of an intimidating prospect for privileged, upper-middle Information Class keyboard warriors to push back against. It’s also problematically intersectional, with poor Fijian and Lebanese-Australians, and Anglo Sydney western suburbs underclass women like his mum, among Haynes’s victim’s most vicious attackers.
Heaps more comfortable I guess to aim your ‘blame the victim’ potshots strictly at faintly gormless, middle-aged white blokes in your own upper middle Information Class, whose most objectionable ‘gender war’ transgression is in truth probably subconsciously reminding you of your mildly reactionary, over-bearing square of a dad…
I’m glad you got that off your chest – I’d really need to have some time to digest your thinking to answer.
I agree with a lot of this. Many of us have seen how community campaigns become so weakened by certain individuals who just don’t get the collective nature of these endeavours – and who see them as a forum to play out their own personal agendas and self-interest.
We know that the strength and success of such campaigns and movements is so much bound in being able to see the work as ultimately selfless – and where all is dedicated to the advancing of a consensually understood cause. There are always be debates and disagreements about goals and methods – that’s inevitable and right. An understanding of the collectivist nature of these activities though seems to be an essential first condition for any kind of success.
I think though its got harder and harder on this front when our culture is so obsessed with the cult of the individual, and when media seems to have no other way of reporting and describing these hopeful phenomena than through the experience and ‘hero journey’ of the single personality. This sadly, is the deal that the opportunists can’t resist.
So agree with much of the Jack treatise, though the talking up of the Stoker feminist credentials and contribution ahead of Tame etc. is just a bridge too far. She ain’t an activist; she’s a professional politician – and a pretty nasty and sneering one – and that’s an entirely different story.
Possibly fair enough, Tom, and Stoker is also doubtless adroit at passive-aggressively playing up the ‘she won’t talk to me’ angle. We’d need to interrogate the actual depth and tenor of the pro bono legal work for DV survivors she claims to have in her CV, I suppose. Tactically at least, I have to say, it feels ominously to me at least like the Morrison government’s faux ‘family values’ agenda may end up reaping more benefit out of this than the movement’s authentic equity/sexual violence reform one. I always get wary when the Murdoch press gets behind social issue movements, as it has done so effectively with #LetHerSpeak. Maybe I’m just gunshy.
But your take on the growing collective action/individual ‘hero journey’ gulf is absolutely bang on the money. It’s an act of the most nobly progressive – and incredibly, incredibly powerful – sustained willpower, for good, talented human beings to subjugate their natural personal ambitions and egos to a collective cause.
It’s also by the way the single idealistic human act of agency that most scares the living sh*t out of corrosive individualists like Murdoch. Murdoch’s brand of ‘masculinity’ simply cannot comprehend anyone who subjugates their own selves like that; it frightens that kind of man, and they set out to destroy it. Sadly, a media empire – with its alluring capacity for individual transmogrification (and all the baubles that flow from ‘fame’, including BTW book deals and fashion mag covers) – is a very powerful weapon with which to seduce the natural leaders of any collective into becoming the seeds of its own destruction.
Back in the day I spent a year as Bill Hayden’s military PA. Biased, of course, but I still maintain that the moment the in-Parly-for-five-minutes, born-narcissist Hawke nicked the PM-ship from him, was the moment the ALP as a hard-arsed, genuinely progressive collective electoral powerhouse began to crumble. The party in its wisdom chose celebrity over solidarity, messianic rock star culthood over grinding teamwork and anonymous brotherhood.
And here we all now are.
Feminism at its most effective has always avoided celebrity like the plague; that the best way for the real do-ers to get things done is to keep your names out of the limelight, and make sure others get the credit. Usually it’s the narcissistic, self-regarding but barely competent types – male and female – whose egos you tend to need to salve and sop, to keep out of the way.
Chrs, Tom, thanks for the kind consideration, and that killer key insight. I think it’s time to destroy ‘celebrity’ as an admirable social marker, and make collective anonymity sexy again.
PS… lordy, but not anonymity in the epistemological or authorial sense!! I mean the ‘credit anonymity’ of a collective endeavour rejecting the ‘hero journey’ narrative in entirety.
Gawd knows I bang on about using our real names when we speak/comment. But refusing to play the media’s individualising game – refusing to be politely domesticated into a mass meeja info pigeonhole – is an act of agency we can all choose, tactically. It’s why I like to swear and be so unforgivably long-winded and rude here, Tom. Pretending to be crazy is another good way to stay under the radar!
The drover’s dog moment – “…the moment the ALP as a hard-arsed, genuinely progressive collective electoral powerhouse began to crumble“- ain’t that the Truth!
As per Morag, yes, a great insight, Jack. Hayden truly was the great PM we never had – not Beasley, who is often granted that title. He was too caught up in his windbag rhetoric, and liked tanks too much. Always very limited too these second (or third) gens in the family political dynasty.
I was a young fart at the time, but remember Hayden as a kind, thoughtful, self-effacing leader. It was these qualities, especially the last, that he was slayed for. He had to cop that most withering of put downs – dull. And as you say at that point, we entered the whole new paradigm – just as celebrity-ism was becoming one of the great commodities in the new capitalism. (I wonder where you’d see Whitlam in the pantheon – perhaps patrician-ism rides above Hawke-style populism?)
But it is such a challenge for political activism today. Its not just the media’s way of reporting activism- its also all the digital affordances there for individuals to curate their own fame on social media. (I checked out the J. Hendy site – and felt a bit ill – sad to say – despite all the original good and seemingly uncomplicated intentions). I was involved in a community campaign a few years back to save a local swimming pool. The biggest challenge – and drag on things – was not dealing with an intransigent council, but reining in the pains-in-the-arse who were running their own shows on their facebook pages – claiming personal credit for any successes, and pissing off a lot of people along the way. Things only worked when we managed to sideline these people – and do some smoking of the peace pipe with some of the disaffected elderly ones in the group. But a lot of needless energy went into all that. And though the pool got reopened, there are some who won’t speak or even make eye contact – on warm days splashing around in the shallows:)
And then there’s trade unionism and solidarity – that the younger generations barely get – but that’s another story.
But who can blame them – see your spot-on comments about Murdoch etc.
Tom, love the line of thought, gets at the heart of the dilemma for progressive collectivism. Celebrity, individuality, the ‘me, me, me’ of modern conversational currency, is such a corrosive force when it comes to maintaining tribal intent and equity. And to resist it has to be an active choice, you really have to decide to fight hard against what is the modern mass media’s relentless – systemically inherent – hunger to individualise the world’s information flows (the better to commodify it). Journalists are actively taught: personalise the story, individualise it, find the ‘symbolic’ one that illuminates the narrative whole, make them stars, shift units.
Fame kills fairness.
People often overlook the fact – in my view, anyway – that the much-lauded Accord, so fundamental to keeping Hawke’s ALP in the ‘middle class’ electoral sweet spot for so long, also came at the ultimate cost of union solidarity and efficacy. Entire generations now have no idea of ‘the point’ of unions…because that era blunted it away.
Flat wages for a decade now and repulsive neo-feudal working conditions for the young/gig underclasses. How quickly we regress…
Spot on. Methinks – the only hope left is to get the young unionised, or better for them to unionise themselves. Not sure who’s going to do that – although I know good work is being done in the hospitality industry.
But before the solidarity idea gets any traction, the young ‘uns are going to have to be persuaded – I think – to ramp down some of the identity obsessions. All the stand alone stuff – allegiance to this identity or that identity, which makes it difficult to find common ground, and then actually becomes the source of irreconcilable differences. And of course ultimately ends with a supreme focus on the ‘me’. Alas, intersectionality, as some allegedly unifying position and strategy, just starts looking like some kind of supermarket selection of causes.
Once all these issues, crucial as they are – black rights, women’s rights, migrant rights – were once fought under the larger banner of the union/labour (with u) movement eg. our migrant women workers fighting for equal pay. This laid the foundation for a credible and sustainable women’s movement throughout the 60s and 70s – as well as better economic and social conditions for all. Which all takes us back to many a-point you were making in your first first post. Cheers.
Like the Irishman under the jammed guillotine who sez, “hey, I see the problem!”, I feel compelled to point out that anyone who uses the phrase “..the hospitality industry” – except as a perorative – is, like his stay at home cousin who, asked the way to Tir-na-Og replies, “weel, I w’na start o’ here”.
I have never lauded the Accord.
It, along with PJK’s other neolib nonsense. from privatisation to gutting the civil service,paved the way for the Rodent.
He would not have had the courage – see his previous ‘career’ – and certainly not the clear run to destroy the country we once were had it not been for those class traitors, from Hawke, PJK, Richo-me, Kelty, Jack ‘the Artless Dodger’ Dawkins, down to the very abyss, wherein Peter Walsh writhed and plotted.
Hayden’s lifelong graciousness about Hawke’s ego-saturated ambush ought to be a standing rebuke to the current crop of petulant, selfish, destructive factional heads. Political Hyacinth Buckets, if they don’t get a toastie buttered exactly how they like it at their monthly circle jerks they chuck the sh*ts, walk out, split anew, and leak their displeasure immediately to their Murdoch feed.
Hayden would I think have grown into a fantastic PM. Mostly ‘coz he didn’t ‘want it’ enough. Talk about a prodigious appetite and capacity to grind out progressive policy and consensus solutions. I often wonder what the country would look like today if Rogan Ward had got up in Flinders in ‘82, instead of Peter Reith. You know, if the popular member for Wills and his powerful Vic union mates had really got in there and stumped hard for the team…
Few recall his Trojan efforts at Budget repair in the DireYear 9175 – it would have remade this country using the Rex Connor Buy-Back plan and massive social development.
He even worked out a constitutionally legal way – with the commercial banks, FFS! – to carry on sans Supply for the short period before the Razor’s mangey Senate solidarity burst out in pustules.
Not only was the greatest PM we never had in my lifetime but he would have been our best Treasurer en route, had the public not proved so pliable , gullible and concupient.
…oops, apologies to Zager & Evans (unsung singing prophets, from when the scene/world was young), “…in the DireYear 1975“.
So, so true about Hayden and Hawke. I always saw him as the silver budgie – all colour and noise, very little substance. Somewhat like the ALP now…
You may have thought him a budgie but his maaates called him the ‘silver bodgie‘, among other, less printable. sobriquets after his session on the triangle at Terrigal.
(Think that was the sly point of Gary’s punning little dig, Morag!)
I met Hawke only a few times, only incidentally – he was gone from Canberra by ‘93. I do vividly remember being repulsed on one non-public occasion, watching him (from up close, conversation circle) chest-puff and oily-ooze and peacock all over a twenty-something intern/political groupie, who was eventually impressed enough to hand over her home number (pre mobile days).
A reasonable segue via which to return to the article/thread theme, actually – a wee bit embarrassed, apologies for the meandering, AS. But it is perhaps apposite, it turns out. It’s hugely illuminating to me that the Ros Dillon rape allegations about Bill Landeryou (and Hawke’s unconscionable and IMO utterly plausible, indeed, ‘in character’ response)… sank so fast and completely, ignored and ‘disappeared’ by the #MeToo/Enough/Four Corners cohorts. If the allegations against Porter are worth the post #MeToo new feminist spotlight, surely…
Ah, but Hawkey, obviously, is a progressive untouchable. And of course, Landeryou was critical to the Labor-changing narcissist’s hijack, and – naturally – his (IMO) equally grubby son is now hitched to…current factional operative Kimberly Kitching. No way in the world an ALP otherwise perfectly happy to cynically exploit these abuse/gender issues will ever poke about in that bit of (IMO) especially toxic past.
Final note: Through sheer bloody minded will power and parliamentary consensual and legislative grind Bill Hayden got single mums onto a decent living pension, a stellar achievement in turn so critical in giving so many serially bullied and battered ones among them an escape route, at last, away from violent grubs.
Four decades later it was Julia Gillard who (effectively) kicked many of them off it.
These younger, passionate next wave feminists really do need to read a bit more political history. This isn’t a ‘new’ fight, one kicked off just by their dazzling moment in the sun. It’s been underway for a long, long time. And the progressive heroes aren’t always who they may presume.
Chrs as always for the space and time, Crikey, and Crikerians. Terrific piece, and wonderful discussion.
As if the current lot would “read a bit more (?any?) political history” – if’n it ain’t on boobtoob, it don’t exist.
Off hand I cannot think of anything more depressing, during a political discussion – or any other – than “you can find more on Utoob”
The White Clown of Fahrenheit 451 would be disgusted.
There is always hope they will prove us wrong…the light doesn’t go out until the last true believer leaves the building.
There hasn’t been a light on in the black Lubyanka of SussexSt since Richo sicced his thugs onto Peter Baldwin, circa 1980.
Always a light. One little match will do.
Thanks Jack for all of yours comments! I have enjoyed reading them and dissecting some of my less formed thoughts.
As a person who donated to March4Justice who was not able to March because of a disabling spinal injury, I felt well represented by those who marched, and felt that perhaps Ms Higgins was heading towards an important advocacy role. The book deal definitely stuck in my craw. As a great admirer of Grace Tame, I do think it is important to acknowledge that she is a middle class (or higher?) woman who has had access to many more supports than other child sexual abuse victims. No one, not one single child should ever suffer sexual abuse, and this covers every human.
I despair of this LNP & ALP Two party system ever managing the support for all of those most vulnerable people in our society.
If we do not care for our most vulnerable then what does that say about our humanity?
Yes, your and Tom’s instincts on Stoker both apparently better than mine. I see she’s publicly stirring up the abortion issue just now, always a cynical political move no matter genuine the private/conscience views.
Your last sentence is one of my lifelong moral touchstones, Vic. Go well.
Thanks Tom, I agree with Jack too, except about Stoker so this sums that part up nicely
The first item of the agenda of most activist groups is the schism.
Then the backbiting, betrayals and traducing.
If the shell survives, it will be in the control of the usual types – those never in the vanguard, always safe from the smoke & shrapnel of the fray.
I think you’re right, though that typical trajectory is well rehearsed, and so can and should be actively resisted. It’s super important what those now-high profile media figures do next, they are angrily passionate and charismatic. Let’s see if they have activist stamina and commitment, too, and can inject some policy substance into their speeches and conversations going forward.
Unfortunately IMO this movement has been saturated from the get-go with condescending, self-serving platitudes and intellectual deceits from too many over-excited feminist tyre-kickers, many of them the usual brand of glib ‘progressive’ men. Let’s see what those gobbier blokes do now, too. Maybe having reportedly helped Higgins negotiate her big individual book deal, Peter Fitzsimons will vacate his acres of column space for her. Maybe Sky After Dark will give Grace Tame Paul Murray’s gig. Maybe the ALP will endorse Rosie Batty as the Hawke candidate, if she’s up for it. Perhaps Rupert will finally retire Paul Kelly and install Nikki Savva as Holt Street resident ‘sage of the nation’, and maybe the ABC will put even bung Amanda Vanstone in David Speer’s Insiders chair.
What thinks you, morag, any of this actual substantial gender equity and reform action likely to feature on that agenda?
The most effective feminist advocates and anti-sexual violence campaigners are blunt, tough and very unsentimental on issues like DV, sexual crimes, systemic legal reform and what misogyny really looks and sounds like. Although I would add that last bit, wouldn’t I. This latest feminist wave really has left me just wondering if maybe I’m just another patriarchal misogynist, after all.
A lot of the passionate anger has been no more than about two inches deep and, I think, counter-productively mis-directed at the naturally sympathetic.
I became quite light headed and a new Sun seemed to shine when reading your replacement suggestions – not sure about Manny Vanny but I’d welcome an empty chair if it meant Spearsik slunk back to his true home at SKY.
Then reality intruded, as is its wont, and I grimly nodded at your last paragraph.
Yep, that’s the size of it – beware of the skin-deep.
Come the dawn, they’ll be off on a new chimera hunt, failing which they’ll retreat to their well furnished bunkers and await the Next Thangy.
I respect Vanstone, she’s never been a sook or taken a backward step internally with the sexist boofheads in her own party, while not getting self-indulgently public and look-at-me with it. That was Gillard’s mistake, IMO, with that ill-disciplined, grossly over-rated (shamelessly diversionary) speech, playing strictly as it did to those whose vote was never going to land anywhere but in her lap anyway. Gained Labor no votes and cost a bundle in the seats they need to swing. In main party politics, your first obligation is to win government, something Labor’s various ID lobbies and constituencies need to be reminded about in no uncertain terms.
I’ve heard a few insiders say Vanstone was a bit lazy as a minister, and she’s certainly stuck her snout in the usual post-politics troughs (with the Italy gig spesh). But she’s a smart, open-minded, moderate conservative with solid broadcast experience now, and I think she’d work hard to be even-handed in the Insiders chair. No idea if she’d want it, mind, just musing. And on similar idle wish-list lines, I actually do reckon Tame would be a smart Sky hire. Be good if our media landscape could start lobbing a few bombs ‘against the prevailing grain’ in key outlets/culture war camps. ABC Newscaff to its credit is really widening the on-camera field, lots of new faces and a-typical backgrounds getting a run now.
Imagine if Alan Jones’s and Bolt’s audience got a deftly thought-out and persuasively targeted Tame spray each night?! No point advocating to fellow travellers/friends alone, is there…reckon it would rate, too..
I think the suggestion of Tame fronting a show on Sky, or any other for that matter, is a little ill judged Jack.
The promotion of single issue victims to positions beyond their ability is a recipe for disaster – witness Rosie Batty’s burnout from the Luke Batty Foundation, which is no longer in existence.
Burnout of the committed is often ably assisted by the 3rd level skulkers, biding their time to take over (any given) community or collective inspired by an ideal.
The only commune that I ever saw survive (50yrs ago) did so because all the members were strong & successful in previous lives, not whiney wankers & wannabes.
Lot of ’em about, unfortunately.
Yes, was being a wee bit facetious. But the intellectual and electoral-political principle – advocate most passionately and thoughtfully to those who disagree with you most passionately and thoughtlessly – is really important to reinforce right now, I think. We’re all retreating to echo chambers.
I think, barring a few exceptions, the capacity for us to engage ‘passionately and thoughtfully’ with those we disagree with is very near impossible.
Having many times attempted to raise the not insignificant issues of due process and the presumption of innocence in relation to both the Higgins and Porter allegations, I can assure you such attempts inevitably result is either being blocked or referred to as a sexist bigot and rape apologist.
The echo chambers you refer to have facilitated the ability to cancel/block anyone whose views do not align with yours – I’m sure you know the drill.
Welcome to the future.
Yup. But all anyone can do is refuse to play that game, keep stating one’s views clearly and with kindness and love of all mankind as the only ideology…and trust that the best that’s in everyone might respond in kind.
It’s the true belief thing, I suppose. Keep living like an idealist as a chosen act of agency and will – one which includes living as if everyone else is an idealist, too – until you die.
The worst aspect of canx is that the range of topics expands exponentially, not organically.
The progenitors of this idiocy, the boomers’ come-uppance is just around the corner.
Charlie Chaplin below is on the money. The march was a success and the movement is rolling. They are doing their best to be upfront with everyone and sort everyone’s issues. This is good, even if not wholly successful. Meanwhile the LNP is deep into secrecy and robbing taxpayers to pass on billions to billionaires who only ever pay as much tax as the feel like, normally not much.
The billionaires get richer, people trying to do the right thing get death threats.
Dont vote LNP.