“The cost of speaking truth to power” is how Grace Tame described what happened when she called out the recent platforming of Pauline Hanson by Jessica Rowe.
It is a case study in silencing, the process which is a key structural support of the system which enables, protects and forgives perpetrators of violence and violation.
Tame is Australian of the Year, awarded because she is “an outspoken advocate for survivors of sexual assault” who has used “her voice to push for legal reform and raise public awareness about the impacts of sexual violence”.
Tame tweeted her opinion on Rowe’s decision to give Hanson a soft-ball interview on her podcast series, in which they chatted about everything except her racism and bigotry. As Tame put it:
This is how discrimination and hate is subtly enabled and normalised.
Everyone’s entitled to their own views, but not all views should be valorised by promoting their source.
[Hanson] doesn’t need help to be heard, but those whose oppression she’s both driven and reinforced do.
She would have expected to be trolled for it, and has been, viciously. Rowe folded under the public pressure, deleting the podcast, and another chapter in the cancel culture debate was written.
Then came the sermon from the mount of the The Australian, delivered by Janet Albrechtsen. “No joy,” she began with a parsimonious sigh, “comes from reminding Grace Tame …” and away she went.
Tame’s crime was that she politicised her position — surrendered it to “dirty politics”.
The thesis goes like this: “Tame was made Australian of the Year for her tremendous work to highlight the scourge of sexual abuse and fighting for women to be heard. As Australian of the Year, she was perfectly placed to use that privileged platform in a non-partisan way to unite the country around these important issues. That is how you bring power to a cause. Instead, Tame is dividing the country.”
How? By her “increasingly political interventions”. Albrechtsen singles out comments made by Tame about Prime Minister Scott Morrison (that he lacked a moral compass by promoting Christian Porter to acting leader of the House), Porter (by calling for an independent inquiry into the rape allegations made against him — claims Porter has denied), and Amanda Stoker (by expressing her view that Stoker was a poor choice as minister for women).
Stoker has said that while “[Tame] should be heard, that doesn’t necessarily make her right”. Albrechtsen agreed, saying Tame was “entitled to join a censoring mob [with regard to Hanson] but she was wrong to do so”.
Wrong? I am constantly confused by the free speech warriors. That statement makes no sense whatsoever.
Anyway, Albrechtsen’s main point was that it was a bad idea to make Tame Australian of the Year because she is a “fiery and passionate activist who may end up dividing the nation, rather than uniting us”.
Because, you see, she cannot express opinions about the decisions, policies or behaviour of politicians without being a political partisan. As Australian of the Year, her job is “to unify the country around important issues”. On Albrechtsen’s thesis, she may not talk about politics, which includes anyone involved in politics, because that is politics.
And yet, Tame is Australian of the Year because she talks about being silenced. That was her experience as a sexual violence survivor, and she is a passionate advocate for an end to the silencing of survivors.
In relation to Porter, Tame was speaking specifically of the political silencing of a deceased alleged victim. In relation to Morrison, she was speaking specifically of the protection and promotion of an alleged perpetrator and the message that sends to survivors. She has also spoken specifically of the actions and inactions of Morrison and other members of his government in relation to the silencing of Brittany Higgins.
In relation to Stoker, she was speaking of the promotion of a minister who has actively supported men’s rights activist Bettina Arndt and her controversial “fake rape crisis” universities tour. Again, the message to survivors could not be clearer.
Tame has also spoken of her disgust at Morrison’s words to her after she talked about the abuse she suffered as a child at the Australian of the Year ceremony. “Well, gee, I bet it felt good to get that out,” Morrison said to her backstage.
Albrechtsen’s message to Tame is simple: shut the fuck up. Know your place. Speak, by all means, that’s your assigned role, but only on subjects and using words which will change nothing and scare no one. Your “youthful exuberance” renders you at risk of being like Greta Thunberg,“prone to saying patently silly things”. Got it, child? Sermon — after some closing quotes from Arthur Miller, John Stuart Mill and Shakespeare — over.
The good news is that that one thing Tame has learnt through all the silencing she has suffered, is everything that is in the bag of tricks of the protectors of institutional power. She won’t be silenced again.
Michael Bradley’s new book System Failure: The Silencing of Rape Survivors, part of the series In the National Interest, is out now from Monash University Publishing.
Great writing Michael – thank you.
I wrote a comment below a Crikey article yesterday to the effect that as an 80 y-o Australian woman I am very thankful for the courage of younger women such Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins. For JA? – no thanks at all.
As a 78 year old, I am also impressed with her. I do also, though, acknowledge the right of the third rate commentators in the third rate publication you mentioned. I just don’t understand why anyone would pay to read them.
The 3rd rate physical publications are mostly a waste of money only of use for wrapping the rubbish to be thrown in the garbage bin.
I like to follow Doug Cameron on Twitter, he often does very brief summaries of Oz tripe, so we can be sure that rag has not yet developed any ethics…but even the free summaries often make me gag..!!
Powerful thank you Michael. What planet does JA hail from? Can we send her back please?
It has been common practice here, for a couple of years at least, to cleanse both comments which have long been published but suddenly are deemed to be ‘not acceptable’.
This includes the archives, sometime going back months.
Winston Smith would die of exhaustion stuffing the memory hole.
For all it general gutlessness and tooth achingly PC prissiness, at least the Grauniad leaves on show the handle of someone who has fallen foul of the offence seekers.
This way it allows others to wonder what a commenter might have said,especially as if often the case with a long term commenter who normally sails thorugh and receives copious uplikes.
Even there not always though, it often happens that entire slabs of BtL comments are retrospectively removed – the reason given being that there were generatedby a forbidden thought which slipped through the Blue Stocking/Pen brigade.
Free speech?
Only if you can afford.
Yup…usually I’m sanguine when my longer, more tedious rants get axed. (Often grudgingly grateful, even…we all have ‘injudicious moments’, huh Mods.) In the end it’s Crikey’s site and we’re all guests (at still a way-too-cheap price, I might add – for the umpteenth time, lift your subs, Crikey, you’re worth it).
But on this occasion, I am genuinely a bit dismayed and quite perplexed at the retrospective edit, which disappeared not just my earlier contribution, but the handful of responses to it, including critical/discursive exchanges. Seems a wee bit foot-shooting, in a debate about ‘silenced’ voices? And – believe it or not, all you Crikerians who just can’t stomach my ranty bilge, and cheered this one’s excision – my main concern is that…well, it makes Crikey look a wee bit fragile and daft, I’d have thought.
On this topic, Jack? Alas I missed it. I’ve taken to reading Crikey a few days late so I can enjoy the comments. Didn’t think that left me in danger of missing some expurgated comments.
It’s a bit unusual Dogs’. Usually if my endless rants are beyond the pale even by my standard the Mods bin ’em straight up. And nah, you didn’t miss much. Plus the world won’t ever die from lack of Jack prose. This topic in partics does seem to tend towards the ‘hair trigger’ end on the moderation spectrum – I get the sensitivities involved. I imagine someone took exception well after the fact. Grizzling about the ref not my style and I get more than a good go, despite my best efforts to annoy the bejesus out of the typical readership. I do think it doesn’t serve the debate well to be overly protective of a figure like Tame, if that’s what it was about. Frankly it’ll make #TamePunk a better advocate if she’s not allowed to cocoon herself in only uncritical worship. Michael Bradley, too, FTM – presumably he’s not scared of being told that some of us think he’s occasionally just wrong, without an ideological axe to grind.
My main concern as I noted is that in a blarney specifically about ‘silencing’, it just plays into the whole counter-productive round-and-round re: competing victimhoods/censorships, etc. No biggie.
Hope you’re well, btw.
Yeah, nah.
I’m not prepared to pander to the lowest common denominator.
Good luck on the Ship of Fools – it is preferable that it founders on the rocks of rationality than lie becalmed off the storm tossed coasts of Bohemia.
Crikey might have received a legal threat. They might have felt “fair comment” applied but they could have received a communication that made it seem that costly litigation would follow if they did not at least delete discussion around your criticisms of Tame.
Yeah, I get that (although, geez, if so, what does that say about the ‘Let Her Speak’ riff…). Like I said it’s Crikey’s site, and they can moderate as they need/please. And absolutely there’s oodles of extra tip-toeing around this sort of stuff, post the Laming stuff. (He seems to be working his way methodically and lucratively through the entire ‘upskirt’ brigade, as we speak.) And the Porter stuff just doesn’t want to die/be let go, either, and thus partisan bastardry being what it is, that will doubtless probably kick off some tit-for-tat poking about in say Sarah Hanson-Young’s donations for her legal action against David Leyonhjelm, and then there’ll likely be other murky little corners on the Parly trusts front…meanwhile I think the Dutton/Tweet ‘rape apologist’ case is still burbling away, too. And in other Victim Politics news, I see that JA is onto the Lisa Wilkinson ‘pay gap’ tizz now, with Sam Maiden and Brittany Higgins (trial pending, regardless) and #TamePunk unable to resist their two bobs’ in that unedifying mini-Festival of Narcissus, too. Showing only that there’s plenty of mileage to be got from this ‘No, I’m the most wronged’ elitist game, right across partisan and issue lines.
And I do often find myself inclined to launch a public campaign of my own: #PleaseGodShutThemALLUp.
She comes from Planet Janet. I wish we could send her back.
Grace Tame is a bl**dy legend*. It’s such a breath of fresh air to have an AOTY that is so fearless in calling out bullsh*t when they see it. I hope she knows (I’m sure she does) that despite the cacophony of wailing and bleating from Albrechtsen et al., many of us think she’s doing a first-class job as AOTY.
* Censored out of fear of the auto-mod.
Perhaps we should be having a few more younger Australians who aren’t sportspeople getting this type of exposure.
By golly Janet, it must be uncomfortable to have a privileged position challenged.
The poor, the downtrodden and those who make up the base of society thought that had a champion in Hanson. But all they got was a political grifter.
Grace is champion for them. Let’s hope they can raise their heads just that little bit higher to see that.
Hanson is far too busy cozying up to racists and misogynists to be bothered fighting for “the little person”.
JA has always been a highly vocal advocate for free speech. Only problem is, what she promotes is conditional speech and, while the conditions vary from time to time, in relation to JA herself, two conditions seem constant. One must not disagree with JA and especially, one must not have a bigger megaphone that JA. GT seems to have transgressed on both of these conditions.
Follows more the Brandis and/or IPA type of Orwellian ‘free speech’ which is more about the right to promote negative and nasty political nativist agitprop…..
JA really only speaks for the middle class white woman from a good family who has had a lucky life, because if she was a survivor of sexual abuse of any of its iterations she would not write such rubbish.
Grace Tame speaks for a lot of women who have suffered sexual assaults and who did not report the assault/s because they knew that their entire life and their parent’s would be stigmatized, whilst the chances of conviction if a prosecution was commenced was very low.
I am one of those women and I wish that JA would be quiet and listen to what Grace Tame has to say.
I do not want to even try to understand how a person can rise to the position of PM and yet, need to consult his wife for an empathy lesson which commenced with “Think about this as if she was our daughter”.
As for being divisive, JA is doing all the things she accuses Grace tame of doing.
By attempting to justify Christian Porter’s promotion to “Leader of the house”, instead of calling for a judicial review into his fitness to hold a cabinet position at all, she has in effect said “I don’t care if we have an accused rapist in cabinet and I don’t care if he is a fit and proper person, at all.” A bit like Peter van Onslow and Scott Morrison saying “I know and like Chris and I don’t believe the accusations, the substance of which I have not read.”
The statistics are pretty stark regarding rape and as one of those silenced, I now know that I don’t have to be.
As for our Pauline, I don’t really care if your son is a violent male or not. We should not be changing the legal system to make you feel better.
I am a “middle class white woman from a good family who has had a lucky life” and I can assure you that JA does NOT speak for me! I hope the media continues to give Grace Tame opportunities to voice her opinions and concerns well after she finished being AOTY.
You really have no right to make yourself the arbiter of who has or has not been sexually assaulted. I dislike Ms Albrechtson with a passion. However I would not presume to judge whether or not she has ever been sexually assaulted based on her politics or her support or otherwise of Ms Tame. People have a right not to out themselves as victims of sexual assault just to satisfy the prurient sticky noseness of those who think nothing should be private.
spot on