This is the third in a three-part series looking at what needs to be done to make Parliament House a safe place for all. Read the series here.
This election was a decisive reversal of two decades of gender equity decline in the Australian federal government. Female representation has rebounded 10% over the previous Parliament — women will represent 38% of the total members in the House and more than 50% of positions in the Senate.
The community independents — who really stole the show — are also largely female, as well as working mothers. Further, a large proportion of the volunteers supporting each member of the newly expanded crossbench were also women, mothers and grandmothers.
If nothing else, the results have taught us that Australians, particularly women, are sick to death of the way politics has been done for decades. They are reclaiming their voices by actively supporting and electing people who have lived experiences that might help them relate to the struggles of the everyday working Joanne.
There are 20 female first-time members heading into the lower house. They are CEOs, healthcare workers and academics. They are successful professionals. They will have to balance the demands of their families with the demands of a very exacting job — something that they are each quite practised in.
They were elected because they spoke directly to their communities, including about cost-of-living concerns such as childcare expenses. And Australians chose to say yes, we want improved gender diversity in our government, and we want people who understand our struggles and have ideas to address them.
But an increase in female representation may not be enough to force a meaningful shift in the structures of parliamentary participation. We need material structural change to make political life more family-friendly for people of all genders.
One only needs to look so far as recent chief minister for the Northern Territory, Michael Gunner, who resigned in May because the burdens of his job were too much for life as a father to little kids.
But it could. And arguably it should.
If we have learnt nothing else through the past three years of COVID and remote work, we have surely discovered that bums in office chairs do not necessarily equate to better productivity outcomes for workers or employers. A study out of Stanford University showed that work-from-home arrangements resulted in a 13% increase in productivity. There is no reason to believe the job of governing is best served by 20 weeks a year of physical attendance at Parliament House.
The technology exists to make Parliament just as remotely accessible as any other workplace. It is not “special” in that regard.
When Greens Senator Larissa Waters chose to breastfeed her daughter in the chamber in 2017, it was read by many as a feminist political statement. But in the intervening five years, has the cultural needle shifted sufficiently to say that parenting in Parliament could be if not the norm at least a norm?
For a long time, I have argued we need to refocus the way we think about gendered workforce participation. We constantly hear cries for “returning women to the workforce”, but I believe that argument is incorrectly ordered. Instead, I argue for “returning men to the home”.
Thinking about the problem of participation in this way, we can recentre the domestic as meaningful and important. As a byproduct, we improve women’s access to paid labour — or in this case, political participation — while simultaneously improving men’s access to family and domestic responsibilities. In countries with more equitable domestic arrangements, you see improved familial relationships, happier children and better mental health outcomes.
This isn’t just about improving access to political representation for women but for people with all kinds of familial and personal obligations. Real diversity. Women included.
We could put an end to the farcical mad panic when the lights flash in Parliament House to announce a vote and everyone has to run to get into the room within a limited window of time. I’m talking middle-aged (and older) men and women racing through the halls of Parliament to get into a specific room to sit in a specific chair and cast a physical vote.
They could do that from the quiet of their offices. Or even from home, in their electorates, where they are infinitely more accessible to the people they represent.
Moreover, our Parliament sits for an average of 10 hours a day, 67 days of the year, spread over 20 sitting weeks. That is a matter of procedural choice. There have been different patterns of sitting days over the course of Australia’s political history and there is no reason parliamentary sitting hours could not be rendered more family-friendly. It is a choice.
Creating a structure that allowed for remote participation, and more typical and predictable hours, would improve the participation of people of all kinds with all sorts of obligations and interests that might actually make them better and more creative problem-solvers and decision-makers.
Until we get a more accessible Parliament, we will never see true diversity of representation in our government.
I don’t doubt the sincerity or good faith of RB, Crikey and this series, but this final piece articulates so much about what has gone wrong with third wave feminism in recent years. It also reflects what is an increasingly self-absorbed ‘information sector bubble’ view of what our parliament is ‘for’, and the unrealistic, narcissistic and introspective nature of today’s gender debates. Again, I have no doubt that it’s well-meaning, but the arguments driving the series and this piece are so disconnected from the actual reality of modern era economics, workplace practices, and – I would argue – even what women, men…families…want, as to be regressive.
To avoid at least the worst of the usual Professional Feminist blowback that we older white blokes know we’ll cop anyway, whenever we have the temerity to raise a sceptical flag…indulge me for a second. I was primary stay-at-carer for the five years until our son started school (my ex being a far higher-earning professional in the information sector). Alas, our marriage subsequently failed, at the point our son headed to school, and so I found myself in the position of many women over the decades who’ve taken time out from paid employment to raise kids: having to claw/improvise my way back to work in a sector compatible with school routines, holiday caring, etc. So I spent the eight years of our son’s primary school as a night shift carer. It could as easily have been retail, hospitality, cleaning, perhaps child care, perhaps education, clerical, admin, and so on. Or I might like many ex-SAHC blokes have joined a labour hire firm, say, or picked up other ‘masculine’ piecework like furniture removal, trade work, etc. Regardless, because my focus was on parenting (as it nearly always is for working mums) all of it by necessity was/would have had to have been, in casual, piecework, short term, and ad hoc situations. Often with small businesses, some with government or quasi-government agencies…but none with permanent tenure or security and much of it with workplace vulnerabilities and exploitation, beyond the reach and frankly interest of the organised union movement. The few women (and fewer men) among parents at school who’d also done substantial stay-at-home work (ie for five years or more), but who did manage to ease back into the workforce on more substantial grounds, permanent-part-time and family-friendly, were exclusively from the professional information class sectors. Either with public service/media backstories and CVs, or with well-established records in larger private sector multinationals, with their HR and workforce capacities to ‘absorb’ a more varied workforce. But all had come from and thus could return to the kinds of policy/academia/political and media sectors where working from home, and ‘family-friendly’ work profiles, are practically feasible. And – the point of my comment here – all these are sectors/cohorts which have by design or accident come to represent the overwhelming focus of contemporary feminist reform, and even more overwhelmingly, been its beneficiaries.
The obsession with Parliament House ‘workplace conditions and culture’ in recent years is, in my opinion, the skewed culmination of this growing Info Class/feminist narcissism, a process that’s ignored the parallel worsening workforce and lifestyle conditions of most women – and men, for that matter – who work outside these sectors, while obsessively refining and improving lives of those already enjoying systemically-embedded privilege (very often only at collective taxpayer expense). The current push for universal free childcare is a good example of this, one which utterly (perhaps deliberately) fails to recognise the reality of most modern workforces, and our neoliberal economy’s structure more broadly. A universal ‘right’ to childcare – or other feminist ‘wins’, from the trivial (the cultural acceptance of workplace breastfeeding, say) to the theoretically substantial (such as ‘family-friendly’ hours) – is a great ’cause’ that looks great on a Professional Feminist’s CV or a policy document. And indeed its translation into law would beautifully suit a small percentage of working women, for whom such things would be workaday pragmatic possibilities. Women…such as opinion journalists. Such as policy advisors. Such as senior public servants. Such as ‘some’ parliamentarians, and ‘some’ senior corporate executives – ie MP’s representing geographically small, inner-city electorates, and CEO’s working for big multis that can design bespoke salary/workplace flexibility packages including from-home work, with expensive entitlements underwritten either directly by taxpayers, or via middle class welfare transfers, or absorbed (for CSR/PR/branding purposes) by shareholders. Workplaces with well-staffed support teams, operational and structural adroitness, carrying the workforce ballast that is well-established corporate financial viability. So...sure: there is no question that over the last few decades, workplace realities for this tiny rarified sub-group of women/working families – and men, FTM – have been…astounding. So, well done, professional feminists. But I’d argue that such ‘progress’ has become increasingly hollow, even mocking, for the majority of working women, two-parent-working families, and especially single working mums…because the great bulk of jobs going for such women are just not compatible with these progressive advances. For starters they’re largely unaffordable (the jobs will just disappear), but that’s not really the main point, either. And forget even about we Teh Evilz Patriarchyz oppressing Teh Poorz Womenz, and preventing them from living the lives they want to live, etc. It’s purely practical: most jobs by their very nature these days aren’t ‘family-friendly’. (Hasn’t Feminism noticed?) But especially those jobs typically available to mothers returning to the workplace. And they’re ‘family-unfriendly’ simply because….it’s unavoidable.
I’ve had about fifty different jobs over my lifetime, across a whole range of sectors, from traditional ‘masculine’ ones like flying choppers and working on boats, to ‘feminine’ ones in care and cleaning sectors(don’t even get me started on the gender-neutral ‘underclass’ gigs I’ve endured). The only work I’ve done that’s ever going to be truly ‘family friendly’, in the way this article argues the case for in our parliament, is…yes, that’s right: exactly in places like our parliament. In policy work, in parts of the media, in publishing, corporate life, academia…in the Information Classes. And only parts of it, at that. I can assure anyone who hasn’t worked elsewhere that it’s not possible, and never will be (not should it be), to create a truly ‘family friendly’ workplace along the lines RB argues for PH here in…retail, hospitality, manufacturing, the care and health sectors, labouring, domestic cleaning, education workforces, and pretty much any kind of historically ‘blokey’ sector, such as transport, trade, engineering, building, construction, labouring, fieldwork. The burden of ‘wish-list’ family-friendly progress as increasingly championed/enjoyed by the Info Classes that would hit most small businesses in particular just strikes me as simply untenable. It simply isn’t possible to contrive a workplace where a woman can (for example) breastfeed her own child…when she also has sixty beds to make in a two-hour split shift. Or for a man to cuddle his sick child while also toileting and showering twenty acute dementia patients. Or a lesbian single mum to mind her teething infant while tending to a busy phone shop all day, solo. Or a trans dad to man a creche – full of professional Info Class working women’s under-fives – conscientiously while caring for his own son, too. And so on. It’s certainly not possible to create such a ‘family friendly’ workplace where a worker (man or woman) has to dig ditches, or drive buses, or fly choppers, or nurse the injured, or cook meals, or serve drinks, or run an assembly line, or deliver letters, or collect rubbish, or sit at a public utility service window, or do the overwhelming majority of casualised, piecemeal, low-protection, minimal-entitlement jobs that most of us, and certainly most women returning into the workforce, get to do these days. It’s not a matter of intent, or legislation, or cultural-change ambition: it’s just a matter of what’s possible, and what’s not. Again this applies to men as much as to women.
And yet our public debate and dominant policy makers and information classes seem to be entirely forgetting this, the more artificially-removed from the workplace realities of most of us these debate-&-culture leading professionals contrive to make their own working lives. A workplace chasmic divide that was utterly highlighted during the lock-downs, by the way…which for most in that debate-influential cohort turned out to be barely a speedbump in their working lives – and even rather an enjoyable experience. Again, I think I can speak with authority…because by that stage I was Information Class myself, doing policy and advocacy work for a think tank for most of it. And…it was as easy and privileged and ‘family friendly’ as any ‘workplace’ I’ve ever enjoyed. While most of my old flying mates were suddenly out of their hitherto prestigious and well-paid airline jobs, like millions of other Australians, privileged or not.
So, no, RB. Not for a second gainsaying your good faith…but I do NOT want my Parliament to become any more workplace-privileged and ‘family friendly’ than it already is. Why? Because most workplaces cannot by functional definition ever look like you would have our PH look. And I’d go even further: I’d argue that there are very obvious macroeconomic and IR reasons why a privileged relative few of us have been able to remake their own workplaces in ways that, while fantastic for them, would be unsustainable and impossible for the rest of us. Those reasons are that for several decades now, these folks, our information class policy-shapers and law-makers, have imposed an increasingly casualised, fragmented, unrepresented…quasi-serfhood on the rest of our shared economy. A deeply self-interested workforce regression by which their preferred economic ‘orthodoxies’ have in essence contrived to replace more and more of our jobs (with their inherent sense of workaday structure, identity and security, set hours, days of collective economic rest)..with mere ‘work’. This has happened in various structural ways, but ultimately all with the same effect, of rendering said ‘work’ increasingly ‘family UN-friendly), increasingly incompatible with any truly civic ‘family’ routine. A profoundly disruptive and exploitative systemic revolution, which has savaged what I think ought to be the primary tenet of a truly ‘family friendly’ economy. Which I think ought to be (and do please work hard to avoid thinking I am just another sad old white bloke pining for the good old days, here) that once you have children to care for – whether as a nuclear couple, a single parent, or a gay, straight, trans parent, or a guardian, or whatever – then work (other than caring for that child) for at least one parent/parental support partner…should become ‘reasonably’ optional. Rather than the existential necessity it now is, for more and more or us, that everyone has to rush back to paid work to simply afford having a family at all. The Information Class has called this radical workforce transformation/press-ganging, such a keystone of neoliberalism, cuddly things like workplace ‘efficiency’, ‘productivity’, and ‘flexibility’…and presented the regression as mutually-beneficial economic progress for all. But that has been utter tosh. What neoliberalism has actually created is the least ‘family friendly’ society in human history: a viciously re-structured civic environment that doesn’t merely ‘allow’ us all – women and men alike – to be ‘working mums, working dads…two-parent working families’….but has demanded it, of all but the self-interested fiscal very top. Because, of course, those few neoliberal top-dwellers who are wealthy enough not to have to do paid work once they have kids – and they are all from the same Info Class cohort that collectively gave us this regression – get the only authentically ‘family friendly’ choice there really ever is.
No-one should be in any doubt that the Teals just elected all exclusively fall into that small, privileged category. They are all very apparently decent, ferociously-competent women of great intellectual and moral substance. And we should retain great hope that they can and will focus their feminist attention firmly where it’s most needed…which is on anything but furthering their own cohort-privilege still more. Their equally-privileged male partners benefit as much, even more, from that kind of narcissistic ‘feminist’ progress too, of course: this is not about gender, it’s about class. As always. But nor should anyone be any doubt, when an Allegra Spender, say, starts to argue the case for increased ‘productivity’, ‘tax reform’ and all the other standard neoliberal orthodoxies…that she is doing so from a position of lifelong-entrenched privilege, which has resulted at least indirectly from the neoliberal orthodoxies which I’d argue strongly have presented her with increasingly wide ‘family friendly’ options while regressively reducing the ‘family friendly’ options most of us have.
It’s a very long comment even for me, and it’s absolutely not meant to be a ‘culture war’ attack on anyone or anything. But if we are going to have a debate about ‘family friendly’ workplace policies that starts with our representative Parliament…let’s at least have it properly and from first principles. And thus start by asking honestly what men and women truly regard as ‘family friendly’, and thus what we all of us truly want from a ‘family friendly’ society, from our ‘family friendly’ policy shapers and law makers, from a ‘family friendly’ wider economy, and indeed from the very idea of ‘family friendly’ paid work…when we set out to start our own. Do we all want to rush back to fulltime work, or spend more time with our kids, or pay someone else to raise them, or get someone else to pay us to do so, or…a combination of all that and more? Whatever our answers, simply making it systemically easier for our Info Classes (and especially our MP’s) – men and women – to suit each themselves to bespoke perfection, at our expense…isn’t going to help the rest of us. Put it this way: it hasn’t so far. Quite the reverse, I’d say.
Chrs, RB, Crikey.
Jack, I hate to say this, but perhaps you should write long pieces more often. This is thought provoking.
One question – why would universal childcare be unhelpful? Especially if it was designed to be flexible, for night shifts, split shifts, early starts, weekend work?
I am now one of those information workers you describe, but with family and friends in more normal work. I agree that many normal jobs are inherently unfriendly to family life. But – it seems to me that parliament should aspire to lead, and match the best workplace standards.
As a young engineer 40 years ago I was exposed to pornography and alcohol consumption that would be unthinkable now, a change that filtered down from the knowledge classes and large corporations. It takes decades, but perhaps family friendly work in the knowledge classes could start the conversation about a more family friendly society.
Theoretically, Lilylulu, universal childcare sounds divine. Except that, even leaving aside the reality that it’s likely to be fiscally impossible (especially in the private sector), it also demands the sceptical interrogation: is it REALLY what parents ‘want’? If you have a fabulous, fulfilling, high status job…like fronting The 7.30 Report or attending cabinet meetings or chairing ASX200 meetings or heading up the HREOC or Emily’s List or editing Teh Guardian…then sure, I guess you’ll be keen to get stuck back into it before your brain goes all baby-gooey for good. But are we mere drone workers allowed by feminism to even ask the directly following question: do most mothers – or if more apposite, fathers – truly even want to get back to their paid drone-work, in order to earn/pay taxes to have someone else paid (presumably by inefficient circular route of the State and systemic neoliberal ticket-clippers) to look after their child? Is this fiscally sane – ‘efficient’, in neoliberal parlance – even if it were possible? What about the Escheresque absurdity of two sets of parents each paying tax on wages earned for looking after the others’ children, so each can go to work…looking after the others’ children?
Is this what most (many? any?) families ‘want’, Lily Lulu? If we are honest about family friendly State policy in the third millennium?
I know it sounds dangerously like an old white patriarch’s reactionary pining for historical regression to bread-winning power…but it’s not a gender shtick: it’s a financial, a fiscal one. I couldn’t care less who earns the family coin and who does the domestic grunt work, but I would bet a million bucks there’s no more efficient and jointly satisfying, sane and sustainable societal way to maximise family (ie child raising) efficacy that to have such split but mutually supporting familial obligations, rather than the superficially enticing but hopelessly utopian ‘ideal’ of shared near-identical roles. It can’t work, because economically functionalist jobs simply can’t practically accomodate child-railing’s minute-on-minute ‘glorious banalities’. It’s a fantasy, one only professional feminists in the Info Sector can indulge materially, that every working mum in every sector can and must be free to whip out a boob as needed, every parent free to change a nappy as part of their workaday routine.
But we really need to have this conversation as a matter of ‘wants’, not simply ‘musts/can’ts’…because during my half decade as a stay-at-home parent, the statistically near-absolute universal desire of mothers I knew – from all professional backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses – was to NOT have to work, even if they could have, at least for the infant through toddler years of their children. And the wealthier the mothers…the longer they tended to spend as stay-at-homes, IF they could fiscally afford to (which fewer and fewer can, it seems to me). It’s also – I think – a flawed assumption/assertion to make that the paid childcare revolution has made the working/family life duality more viable and amenable for most who use it. Aside from the fairly well ventilated realities of financial ‘treading water’ – you spend most of your extra wage/salary on childcare, with the tax and means testing settings usually adding extra pain – there are the non-fiscal costs, the quality of life losses and emotional stresses, the logistical hassles, the impact on kids, guilt, the employment ‘split focus’…again, a significant number of parents who used childcare a lot when I was wrangling the school years… loathed having to. Hated it. My experience is purely anecdotal – being night shift I was probably an unusually hands-on primary school parent (as a dad especially), up to my armpits in fetes, music, working bees, reading to kids etc – so I hesitate to make blanket assertions…but again: can we have that conversation from first principles, feminism – please?
Which women, exactly, are we trying to suit with our ‘family friendly’ policies? Which mothers’ views count here? Which fathers? Even if we ‘could’ establish universal child care…is that really what parents want? Why do we all have kids, families in the first place? To not spend time with them? To go straight back to sh*t paid jobs, so we can pay someone else even sh*tter money to look after them for us? My hands-on dad role will always be the best job of my life. And I’ve done just about every kind of work there is, at all pay grades. Further to that, our son’s highly accomplished Info Class mum, who worked a demanding professional job in a fairly toxic-masculine sector throughout most of his infant and all his toddler years, would almost certainly a) rather have had at least a few years at home with him herself (if it had been financially tenable for us), and b) have really struggled to let anyone but me look after him as the alternative. We never used child care, and I was always available for sick and holiday care after our marriage failed (again, why I did night shift). Again just anecdotal, but universal child care would have made zero difference to our joint child-raising preference…even after our marriage failed. We did not have a child to hand it off to someone else to raise. Sorry if that offends any working parents who either choose or have no choice but to do so, but that it what is ‘in play’ when we blithely parrot the ‘unexamined desirability’ of something like universal child care. Is that why you have or plan have kids? To have someone else raise them? Who, then? A 22 year old on $20.87 an hour? The State? Taxpayers? Why have kids at all then? There’s already 8 billion of us on the planet.
It’s typically women, of course, who subjugate their paid working lives in order to have at least one parent able to make raising kids the priority on joint parental behalf, but again this is NOT about gender, it’s about socioeconomic class. In truth, the financial capacity to be able to choose ‘one income parenthood’ – whether as a traditional nuclear family, a non traditional parental couplehood (straight, gay, trans, mixed race, whatever, who cares), a wealthy/fiscally viable single non-working parent…or even a wholly State-subsidised welfare recipient (living a sparse, sure, but tenable existence) – might just be the option ‘most of us’ would prefer. If we are honest. Some of the happiest and best mothers I’ve ever known have been lifelong welfare single mothers with zero intention of ever working; defacto employed by the State to produce and raise kids for the tribal workforce. My personal preference would in fact be to formalise that – paying mum or dad for the domestic work of homemaking and child raising – rather than the circular waste of universal outsourced child care. And if most of us really would rather parent our own children, as a human priority – I could well be wrong LilyLulu but based on my own experience I doubt it – you have to ask who, exactly, is an aspiration to universal child care supposed to be benefiting?
This one was a bit harder to follow than your usual but your life experiences explain the insightful perspectives you contribute. Thanks for sharing Jack.
yeah sorry to all, i will work harder to write shorter and cleaner. it was late and a bit lazy
I didn’t read it all but for many reasons you lost you’re sh…t on this one Jack, wrapped up in your explanation is stuff that you haven’t worked through I would Hazard to guess, I know, pretty sur essentially you’re a good bloke but to explain why you are just plain wrong would be looking into what you have divulged on a personal level, which I’m not prepared to do.
I whole heartedly agree that a 35 hour work/week should be able to support a family from one of the parents, that 4 weeks holiday should also be part of the arrangement for the family or couple.
Using women to increase the tax base, crank up profit, make it impossible for one parent to afford to look after the family while the other works/ marginalise life choices, is corrupt, if that is what you are saying it was long winded but I agree in that context.
We’ve agreed on this before, your first couple of big paragraphs misled me , sorry .
ditto, soz…see my above note chrs mate
Ah cool, Stu, sorry just saw these other two follow up comments after my long reply. Yes I recall now we have agree heartily on the essence kf my pitch. Who…yeah…was unnecessarily long winded. I tend not write tight when I’m not getting paid! It takes much longer to write short than long, as I think Wilde or someone once wrote…chrs
Chortle, that is too funny, Stu….and wearily soft pap prog predictable…. ‘stuff you haven’t worked through I hazard a guess…’ ….you do know that’s the equivalent of mansplaining to a beaten up single mum that she’s a bit ‘hysterical’ and needs to get some professional help, right? Let’s both save time in future: either don’t waste yours on mine (agree that lot was unusually long and grammatically arcane even for me, sorry for that) – just scroll down – or, if your stung soft pap prog platitudinous assumptions about gender are so brittle that you simply have to gaslight me with a patronising response, best just dismiss me as a bitter MRA outright, mate. That ‘pretty sure i’m a good bloke’ gaslighting junk would be embarrassingly transparent even if we were 13 year old mean girls in some posh high school, Stu.
Cheerfully assure you all I am just fine with my mottled old work and personal life backstory, me old crikey chinas. My use of my real lived experiences of these gender, work and family-friendly workplace realities was solely about arguing the case that feminism’s contemporary reform focus and progress are, in implementable material practice, divisively skewed towards a small progressive elite, and thus doomed to continue what’s been a counter-productive regression for the majority of working women’s’, men’s’ and family’s lives. If you don’t care for that conversation, Stuart – maybe you’re part of the small circle that has benefited disproportionately? – that’s fine. Don’t join it, but don’t assume/assert that those of who use our personal experiences are doing so out of embitterment, narcissism or ideology. Mine are in fact utterly typical and representative of most Australians who live and work outside the ideological bubble of professional feminism and the ‘gender wars’. Men have by and large been just getting on with adapting to our profoundly changed and changing gender, family and work roles for generations now. It’s a feminist ideological bondage-fantasy that’s there’s still some vast dominant patriarchy in societal control, just as it’s a rotten, deceitful act of gender betrayal both ways for Big DV professionals to drench all elite discussions of male-female interaction in a contrived coat of violence. It makes wonder what unrecognisable gender-planet some feminists live on; or at least what kind of men they choose to hang out with. The damage this unrepresentative perspective is doing to all of us – not to mention policy priorities and legal frameworks – is significant.
And it’s all about self-interested diversion from our elites. In fact, it’s Neoliberalism which has reduced vast numbers of women ABD men to exploited and functionally oppressed economic input units, in a way that has for decades rendered artificially contrived gender identities, family roles and domestic/paid work splits largely moot in many if not now most ‘ordinary Oz’ lives…and out of sheer brutal economic necessity. It’s only the economic elites who need to believe there is some Evil Patriarchyzzzz oppressing Teh Womezzz….because the alternative is to openly admit to themselves that what is truly oppressing both genders – de-humanising ‘family’ life, whatever our family looks like – is the same economic ideology that…has been enriching them.
The Gender War is, as are so many of these contrived ID politics wars of division, pure smoke screen for the same old socioeconomic…class war.
Chrs all.
Your penultimate paragraph pinged the problem perfectly.
Peeps is weird being the problem – so many love their chains solong as there seems to be someone even worse off.
When MrsT set about destroying industry & productive capacity the U/E was 1 in 7 and the many bien pissants thought this to be pre-revolutionary – forgetting that it meant the 6 out 7 in employment, however dodgy & dicey their prospects, were doing nicely, ta very mooch.
Just like someone falling from a great height – 99% of the plunge is trouble free.
The chook, having missed the roost, has now landed.
yes, and in their increasingly ruthless manouvering to avoid getting the chooksh*t all over their own nicely-elite economic lives, those who have largely gifted us this new serfdom, and benefitted mostly from it, are now proceeding to sacrifice the few remaining consolation civil structures and societal alliances most of casn still just rely on, such as some degree of mutual solidarity b/w the interdependent genders, tenable family and social networks, multicultural groupings, and even basic recreational and social expressions of humanity, whether its church, sport, art, culure…it’s as if the new post-political economic elites want to shove their guilt-ridden moralist projections into every remaining corner of our neoliberal-ravaged lives, force us to ‘love big brother’, so they can continue to rip us all off yet still delude themselves they’re acting in our interests. and we ain’t seen nothing yet. as this next vicious recession bites deeper, you watch the frenetic moralist hectoring from the Big State’s upper middle class tenured social engineers intensify, as they shriek ever louder to blame an expanding economic underclass’s victims, and their racist/sexist/homophobic/misogynist/entitled reactionsism, for their own new serfdom misery.
I have postponed placing a T/D over the last week or two because every couple of days various ‘banks’ fall over themselves & each other to offer higher & higher rates.
In the last month, 12months has gone from 0.7% to 3% with the CBA – how often are they changing their underwear?
and it’s barely even started Eps…we all need to brace for a sustained shocker..
Well I cant retract it now but yes I agree I think you have worked through it…ha.err., sorry I read it through and it was angry thoughtful and heartfelt. [Twice recently I’ve not read through articles and responses properly after beer, something needs to give.]
I also think that the original article made valid points in that the workplace the author describes could allow for greater flexibility relatively easily, that most people can’t is true but I don’t begrudge women or men having that option as part of their entitlements just because they are part of the information class.
You are right most work simply doesn’t have that kind of flexibility , but nearly all could have more, There would have been quite a few people in your aged care facility that would have benefitted from spending time with your kids, and no doubt it would have been mutual. Those places are talent pools with no or very little oxygen, particularly since Covid. Helicopter pilot not so much.
I was a crook young kid who watched his Dad work hard and lead a fulfilling life which certainly had it own challenges , while mum dealt with most likely post natal depression [after each of the 4 kids?], whose doctor prescribed “go out and get work you find engaging”. and some medication ..which really helped.
I know how it feels to feel like for various reasons parents couldn’t afford to spend much time with the kids, yet we had great foreshore camping holidays for 6 weeks a year and an idyllic childhood overall, my grand parents lived fairly close, there were trees,creeks and bits of bush.
Do I think Feminism has been played, yes very much so. When a women has a newborn child they are both very vulnerable and a young child can tell when Mum is struggling and feel partially responsible .at times. And a young women can see what they are up for.
A sense of feeling validated is the soft spot that is so eagerly and mercilessly mined for profit.
Oh and touche,
‘pretty sure i’m a good bloke’ gaslighting junk would be embarrassingly transparent even if we were 13 year old mean girls in some posh high school, Stu
i dish plenty of snark out, doesn’t hurt to get my share back…best rgds stuart 🙂
My eyebrows will grow back,..ha cheers Jack.
“…men and women racing through the halls of Parliament to get into a specific room to sit in a specific chair and cast a physical vote.They could do that from the quiet of their offices. Or even from home, in their electorates…”
Yes, they could. And obviously there are arguments in favour. But the current traditional system of voting in person inside Parliament provides a very robust way of confirming each vote was cast by someone entitled to vote and recording which way they voted. When a vote is cast from an office or someone’s home it is not so obvious who cast that vote or what was going on in that room to influence them. There are of course ways to provide some security, such as only voting through systems protected by authentication features, but these all have weaknesses and certainly will not prevent MPs sharing their authentication details with family or staff for convenience, which will inevitably be followed by accidental or malicious abuse of the system. From there, with good reasons or else just for the fun of it, there will be claims that particular votes were not legitimate and it will be the devil’s own job to prove otherwise.
My son is doing a uni exam on line at this very moment. In addition to authentication he has his camera turned on, there are invigilators just as for all exams. While there are challenges, there are solutions – fingerprint and facial recognition are now prominent for payments. Boards for large corporations decide billions of dollars in investment using virtual reality board meetings.
Here in WA the long commute to Canberra discourages many from entering federal politics, because it is awful for families and relationships. The ability to do some parliamentary sessions remotely could tip the balance for better quality representatives and better representation, not least because members will be at home in their electorates. Arguably in WA we benefit from higher quality state politicians – over here state politics is not second prize.
The integrity of voting is solvable, and the worth it for the benefits to democracy.
For something like remote participation in parliament those problems could be solved fairly easily – it would be more challenging to allow people to vote from home or from a mobile device, but outfitting their electoral offices to allow for a secure and verifiable presence by the member would be quite easy. And secure and verifiable voting from a mobile device would also be quite doable, though it’d require more work to build something that was really fit for purpose. That said, just ensuring that the member was visible on a video feed at the time of the vote would go a long way towards providing the kind of authentication that you’d want, though it probably wouldn’t be the best way to make such a system in practise.
Parliamentary votes are very different to electoral votes, and most of the issues that arise with electoral voting (things like secrecy and privacy and ensuring safety from influence) aren’t relevant. The member of parliament is going on record with their vote (even when the vote goes on the voices – their support is implicit in that case, since they could have called for a division if they cared enough about the way the vote went), making questions of secrecy moot; and they’re voting from a position of immense power, which means that questions of influence don’t come down to “was someone in the room with them forcing them to vote that way”. Since they’re going on record with their vote the question of impersonation is also moot – if someone votes in their name the member is either assenting to that vote, or they’re kicking up a stink and demanding that the vote be held again due to procedural abnormalities; again, it’s on record, they can be held to account and they know it, so the question is one of individual responsibility rather than calling into question the entire functioning of parliament. And finally, there’s a principle that can be summarised as “the vote’s over, deal with it” (and of course I can’t recall the proper term for it right now) – basically, once the vote is complete and parliament has agreed to it, the vote doesn’t become invalid if something comes to light later on that would have changed the validity had it been known at the time. This applied to votes made by members who were then tossed out due to section 44 (all the citizenship shenanigans), in fact it even applied to deliberations of cabinet when Barnaby Joyce discovered his NZ citizenship, so this is a pretty well established principle and would ensure that parliament itself would be able to proceed sensibly even in the face of cases where a particular vote turned out to have issues.
So no, there’s nothing in particular making remote voting problematic, though you’d obviously need to amend standing orders to support it and doing it all properly would require significant investment in the necessary infrastructure. The basic idea is perfectly fine, and the implementation wouldn’t be technically difficult or even procedurally complex, and it wouldn’t impose any particular risk to the legitimacy of parliament or government or even any particular vote.
ok, there are many good points there and I don’t disagree in substance with any of it, although I wonder a bit about your confidence that the government could organise a robust functional IT system for the purpose, when experience is not encouraging. However, my argument was more concerned with the perception of the vote’s legitimacy rather than the risk of it actually being thrown out. Parliament already has a bad reputation and it is not likely to improve much if the public believes that MPs are getting their staff to vote for them, or they are dashing off any required votes in a few seconds between doing their domestic chores, having a beer and taking a trip to the beach. The last vestige of any illusions about MPs attending parliamentary debates, getting to grips with the issues and thinking about how they vote would be swept away. Possibly that would be a good thing.
Once we have reduced voting to such a rote activity we might reasonably consider why we bother involving MPs at all, so long as they are members of parties. Why not let all those MP’s votes be allocated by their party whip, with an option for any party MP who wants to rebel by not voting that way to opt out before the vote is held? That would leave all the independents and rebels to vote individually, but life would a lot simpler for the rest with the party taking care of all the tedious stuff. There would really be no reason any longer for back-bench party MPs to attend parliament at all; they could get on with their lives, take second jobs, do all the constituency work they can bear and see as much of their families as they like.
Senate video voting via zoom? That would require very robust networks with real redundancy (eg satellite links) to prevent accidental drop outs?
How would quorum work? Can MPs pull the network cable out to exit a meeting they want to avoid?
Would meeting participants be willing to discuss sensitive topics knowing that any participant could be recording the discussion as a future bargaining chip?
I too have concerns about the optics of dial in parliamentarians. Should they be allowed to dial in from only their offices rather than from home?
Rather than 50 MPs dialing in from 50 different places, maybe State Parliament buildings could be set up with IT hubs where Fed MPs can go en masse if they dont want to travel to canberra. This way the public can watch the action across 8 screens, not 50.
Finally, I’m not comfortable with this idea that representing your electorate, or being a minister should be a straight 9-5 job, just like other high power jobs arent. Happy to make concessions where they can, but ultimately it’s about productivity not inclusiveness.
This also raises a more fundamental question. If I want to be an Olympic gold medalist it requires dedication and sacrifice. Winning will be a trade off with other things I want in life. Im competing against others who are in the situation and I’m free to choose to give myself the edge by forgoing other desires to maximise my chances of winning….and that’s my decision.
So why then are we saying that MPs should act like 9-5 workers? I get that people with young kids or other responsibilities want to be MPs, but why should they win when there are others who are willing to sacrifice more to do so? Are we heading towards a system where MPs are restricted to working a 38 hour week and they get kicked out of parliament at 5pm?
I agree that parliament could operate more humanely. And I agree the culture is demonstrably awful. I agree it is embarrassingly misogynist. I agree that it must be reformed. I agree that it is a workplace.
But I do not agree that it is a workplace like any other, at least in respect of MPs. Representation is a national duty, not just a job. The national parliament demands some formality and theatre. It cannot be reduced to a Zoom meeting. However, I do agree that some rules could be relaxed to make it more human and humane. Less gladiatorial colosseum and more a theatre of debate. Changes to the rules of the contest can go a long way. But making it like any other workplace is not a solution.