Decades ago, the left developed the concept of “structural violence”, to show a state could willingly kill people in ways other than shooting them. The cuts to Western public sectors of the Thatcher/Reagan years, and the evisceration of services in the Global South under the “Washington consensus” and the global debt bomb, made it clear the withdrawal of health services, social care and employment could cause deaths and illness and destroy lives — and were not random with regard to the social classes they hit.
Since the 1917 October Revolution, the right based its political morality on policing the divide between politics (where amoral killing was possible) and economics (where, they argued, it simply wasn’t). The Republicans’ desperate move in Congress last week, condemning “socialism” and tying Joe Biden’s mild social market policies to Stalin, is an example.
But then, on the left, a funny thing happened. The notion of “violence” began to expand in another direction: the personal level. An increased focus on domestic violence from the 1990s onwards caused an examination of the wider context in which it occurs, and the way in which physically violent (and non-violent) men used verbal abuse, mind games, financial control, etc, as part of a suite of techniques to control women, some of whom they also physically assaulted.
In the 2000s this prompted a redefinition of the idea of “violence”, which drew in developing notions of trauma and non-war PTSD to suggest the permanent psychological imprinting of fear constituted a form of violence in its own right. This was arguable, but it also quickly became over-extended. Verbal or emotional haranguing, social media bullying and revenge-posting became violence.
This extension of violence was a policy disaster, relying on a Victorian-era victimhood model of women. In the past few years, it has been wound back to notions of abuse such as emotional and financial, but the sense of it has hung around, due to our contradictory residual notions of gender.
Which brings us to the question of Rachelle Miller. Miller, the former adviser to Alan Tudge, gave evidence to the robodebt inquiry last week. Grizzled viewers of the inquiry had already seen a parade of public servants whose blithe recitative of the cruelty and bastardry they applied on behalf of politicians, without objection, tended to revive one’s respect for Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” argument.
But Miller was something else: coldly, disdainfully talking about the “left-wing” media in purely political terms, as she detailed doxxing critics and feeding isolated welfare cheat stories to News Corp mouthpiece Simon Benson. This was what the Liberal Party looked like. It doesn’t like or care about the poor, and it doesn’t much like or care about you.
This was the same Rachelle Miller whose affair with Tudge and its subsequent fall-out became a media fixture after the first of two “Canberra Bubble” Four Corners episodes, the first mostly about Miller and Tudge, the second about the Christian Porter rape allegations. The former was largely a lame story about their rather teenage affair (judging by the released texts) and some alleged poor treatment of Miller by Tudge. She also described being made to feel like “an ornament” at the 2017 Midwinter Ball; arriving in a red dress, she was encouraged by Tudge to walk in with him, despite both wanting to keep their affair on the down low.
Miller then became some sort of victim-hero. Yet many people still have not twigged that the “woman in the red dress” and the cool robodebt operative, who detailed how the life-and-death situations of the poor and disabled were being used for spin, are the same person.
We always knew Miller was in Tudge’s office while the robodebt systematised cruelty was going on. Yet as soon as it became alleged that she might have had some oppressive treatment in a male-female workplace relationship with an imbalanced power dynamic, progressives and the left picked her up as a hero. The notion of interpersonal emotional violence was deployed in Miller’s favour and as a knock against Tudge — even though Miller was clearly a Team Tudge/ScoMo player — and the entire notion of “structural violence” was forgotten.
This woman was a willing and enthusiastic participant, using her skills and contacts, in advancing and defending a system that has directly caused suicides, self-harm, psychological breakdown and immense misery. Her inquiry appearance shows she’s smart and presumably good at her job. Those skills helped extend the robodebt scheme when it was under attack. She has a share in those deaths it caused.
How was it that a Liberal became such a standard-bearer for the claim that we should prioritise this form of oppression — that of professional-class, usually white, women — over others? Well, firstly, because the notion of structural violence has been occluded by the interpersonal politics of “abuse”. In a society where many material relations are invisible, allegations of personal abusive behaviour seem more real than, say, gendered poverty. But it’s also because a division opened up some time ago between the interests of professional-class white women and many other social groups, who they once were in alliance with and had common conditions of oppression.
Miller’s fairly anodyne case was thrown in amid more serious allegations by many progressives. “Where has the woman’s rage of 2021 gone?” an article by Caitlin Fitzsimons asked in The Sydney Morning Herald:
Parliament House became a lightning rod for a national conversation about the treatment of women as Brittany Higgins, Rachelle Miller, and Kate [Christian Porter’s alleged victim] became household names (with the accused men vehemently denying all allegations).
This seems to capture the general progressive feeling of the time, as well as the lack of interest in Miller’s involvement in the robodebt horror as a staffer in Tudge’s office.
It seems the identification flowed to Miller — steered there, in part, by Four Corners and others — and the victims of the politics she participated in were forgotten.
You ready for the hard stuff? The same is true of Brittany Higgins. Higgins, like anyone of whatever politics, has a full and absolute right to every resource of the law and social support that go to people who claim to be a victim of a crime. But why on earth did she become a culture hero for progressives, standing there alongside Grace Tame, when she enthusiastically joined the Morrison government and clearly had no qualms about its actions?
How did that simply get negated? How far would that misplaced solidarity extend? To One Nation? Morrison’s government did a lot of stuff worse than anything One Nation has thought up, yet if Pauline Hanson appeared at the head of one of those rallies, the support and solidarity of progressives would be withdrawn. The Liberal Party and One Nation have different policies, but the government both Miller and Higgins were so desperate to be a part of is notable for eliding that difference in practice.
Why does this matter, beyond these two cases? Because it’s going to keep happening. There are going to be a lot more young right-wing women, precisely because professional-class women can no longer be put in that “oppressed” class anymore.
There’s going to be a power imbalance if progressives keep signing them up to the worthy victims’ roster, because, look, there’s no other way to say this: right-wing women of this type will run rings around teary-eyed progressives because they don’t share the progressive idea of a universalist ethic. They’re Liberals. They believe in individualism, the virtue of selfishness, and they don’t have much time for structural notions of oppression (unless it’s quotas for winnable seats, at which point Liberal women start sounding like the Rosa Luxemburg Cuban Women’s Fighting Brigade).
Let’s make it really direct. Many right-wing women don’t have the same hallowedness for the “believe women” mantra about sexual violence and harassment as progressives do, so many of them simply do not have the same internal brake on strategic action in this regard.
So it’s time for progressives, and for the material left especially, to take a tougher stand on this emerging contradiction, and not hide behind vague statements about standing with all oppressed peoples, etc. Some tough choices have to be made, and some ambit claims by professional-class women interrogated.
This has real life-and-death consequences beyond robodebt. The draconian Victorian bail remand system that led to the death of a First Nations woman has been attributed to the crimes by the Bourke St car killer, who was out on bail. That’s only half the story. They originated from Dan Andrews’ now largely abandoned (because it was ineffective) vast, narcissistic crusade on violence against women, which drew in the fact that Jill Meagher was murdered by a man out on bail.
People, mainly non-white people, are dying and rotting away in bail remand to give a privileged group the illusion of greater safety. Time to stand with the truly oppressed — the victims of corporate and state machines — and recognise that the great social unity movement is over.
Parliament’s adoption of workplace safety standards for the actual building, on its first day of sitting, may be a good move, but it’s yet another indication of where the priorities lie. Single mothers, and many others, are still running out of money a week before their next payment, on a rate the Labor government promised to raise when it was in opposition.
In all of this, one must apply a degree of scepticism to those seeking redress in a red dress at the Monsters’ Ball.
Excellent piece, Guy, thank you … Not an original observation, but it’s worth recalling that on the day in 2012 that Julia Gillard gave her “misogyny speech” (something of a Magna Carta moment in the rise of this brand of feminism, in Aus at least) her government passed legislation lowering the cut-off age for all recipients of the Parenting Payment Single, forcing tens of thousands of single mothers onto Newstart, and slashing their already tiny income in the process. Your “contradiction” in action, perhaps.
Exactly. I have never understood why being a woman gives a hall pass on naming and shaming deeds that hurt women. I am tired of the fawning of women in leadership/power positions while deliberately ignoring the realities of their use of that power. Madelaine Albright is famous for saying “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support women”. Many have used that to justify the fawning & ignoring and harsh criticism of those who question conduct. In truth, for mine, that special place is for women who have power and use it to the detriment of women – particularly working class, disenfranchised & non-white women.
What has this got to do with Guy’s claim that Rachelle Miler is a “hero” for the “left” because Tudge mistreated her? I don’t consider her a hero on that basis. I thought her evidence to the Royal Commission was admirably frank and it showed how cruel and inhumane the LNP could be in government. Well done for that. But the role she frankly reported to the commission? Perhaps it was as admirably as helpful as she was expected to be but she furthered a cruel and inhumane enterprise directed at many vulnerable people and that role was as contemptible as the Robodebt program. So, I have no idea what “left” Guy is talking about.
Surely Madelaine Albright’s view that “women who don’t support women” are bound for hell is not “left” in any way and she would not have regarded herself as at all left.A qualified version of her view with some truth to it might be “Women who don’t support vulnerable women for so long as they are vulnerable to the powerful deserve a special place in hell”. As for Julia Gillard, her “mysogyny” speeches rightly celebrated and she, along with other women in positions of power traditional occupied by men, such as Jacinta Adern, should be supported by the left when they are subject to the abuse that Gillard called out. But Richard King is quite right to deplore to deplore the legislation that threw many single parents onto job start from the single mother’s pension. This was the fault not only other but her government, who still believed the economic myth of the superiority for growth of “small government” and the need to get tough with “dole bludgers” and maintain an ample workforce for private enterprise who are too fearful of becoming unemployed to push for higher wages through collective action, which is the only feasible means in a capitalist economic system.
delayed spellchecker typos: “speech rightly” should be “speech is rightly”; “traditional” should be “traditionally”; “”only other” should be “not only of her”; “to deplore to deplore” is not a spellchecker typo.
Rundle did not claim that Rachelle Miller is a “hero” for the “left”. He actually argued the opposite.
“So, I have no idea what ‘left’ Guy is talking about.”
Then you haven’t been paying attention, Ian. Forgive me, but you really haven’t.
The “left” that GR is talking about is, well, *what’s left* of the left after decades of retreat from material politics. Over this period, and in the face of a neoliberal consensus, progressivism was largely redefined in individualistic (neoliberal) terms as the struggle of individual actors to attain respect, recognition and so on. The largely progressive knowledge class that emerged in this neoliberal period still uses the language of social justice but recasts it as a story of ballsy (?) women taking on the establishment. In this milieu, moments like the misogyny speech are not merely ancillary to the fight for redistributive justice. They *stand in* for redistributive justice, to the point, as Guy says, where a contradiction emerges. Gillard’s misogyny speech was fine. But it didn’t trickle down, any more than the wealth did.
Ian the whole article is saying shes not a hero. Really, bit of closer reading please
Ah, but whoever thought she was a hero?
Good grief you soft paps are wilfully delusional. Go back and re-read the ENDLESS Crikey threads gushing about Rachelle Miller (and Higgins, and Holgate, and Tingle, and the NPC celebrity-fest/circle-jerk.) Michael Bradley’s are a good place to start. Read Bernard Keane’s, too. Amber Schultz’s. Imogen Champagne’s. Read the threads, busting at the seams with uncritical Lefty adulation of Miller’s ‘bravery’. On and on and on and on about how these LNP rebels were bravely exposing Teh LNP Teh Evilzzzzzzzz Patriarcheeeezzzz. Watch the Bubble shows. Watch Teh Project.
Honestly, catoke. ‘Whoever thought she was a hero’???? You’re simply taking the p*ss mate.
Are you seriously saying that compassion shown for abuse is synonymous with hero status?
That’s abhorrent
I find most people entirely capable of having sympathy for a person when they have been through trauma whilst not excusing any unrelated poor behaviour
It is an absolute disgrace that showing humanity and care for others is viewed at best as feeble-minded, and at worst as a means of ignoring faults
No, wh. I’m not ‘seriously’ saying any such thing. As you well know, unless you’re functionally illiterate, I’m not saying any such thing ‘at all’. That extrapolated interpretation is purely your invention. As you know. That little rhetoric-shimmy of yours is a discursive tactic called ‘the strawman fallacy’. As you know. It is used by intelligent people, when they are unwilling or unable to engage with an awkward truth that confronts their unexamined worldview. As you know. In this case that awkward truth is that the progressive left made a #MeToo victim-hero out of Rachelle Miller, on what always were but are increasingly obvious so extremely dubious grounds. As you know. The attention and support Miller enjoyed – the active platforming, the sustained ABC profile, the elevation to similar levels of public empathy as Tame (proven rape victim), Higgins (alleged rape victim) and indeed ‘all victims’ in the feminist/abuse conversations, the $650k payout, and so – went far beyond simply having an entirely natural and admirable ‘sympathy’, as you described it.
As. You. Know. Stop putting your words in other peoples’ mouths.
Look, as it says on the packet, this is a discussion for you Lefties, wh. If you want to stick your head in the sand, pretend you weren’t duped by the more cynical #MeToo opportunists, or at best, didn’t wildly lose perspective te: their cases, to the cost of more genuinely powerless/oppressed victims…then OK. I mean it’s a pity, but….fine. Whatever. As Rundle says, the Left will just go on being suckered into allowing important feminist (and other systemic/structural/class power imbalance) issues be hijacked by the Right’s cynics and class war manipulators, to their political and economic advantage.
And The Left will go on being slaughtered by The Right in the material world, even as you all go on admiring your own superior virtues in e-mirrored echo chambers like this one. Your choice, wh. Not my stoush.
yeah. Miller said little to the Commission that couldn’t be extracted from seizing her records, papers, computer emails and hard drive, texts, etc. She just saved the Commission time that’s all. There is nothing heroic at all. I said the same for Brittany Higgins on first hearing of her rape allegations. You work with a party that sees workers as chattel, as slaves, that sees people as commodities and values them less than animals in some cases, that favours ruthless exploitation of the earth’s resources for profit and you wonder that these things happen – from people with a born to rule attitude!! They are both, Higgins and Miller, after lucrative payouts and are not afraid now to dish the dirt on their former bosses. I would like to do the same.
And I thought Miller let Tudge (sorry, Allan…) off the hook when asked the crucial question about whther Tudge KNEW the scheme was not legal. She replied that she was not sure if Tudge knew or not. Hmmmm….
wake up over 400 thousand Australian women of all creeds and races homeless -having been professional , children or not , not domestic violence survivors necessarily – no you cant get a job if you went off to reat children unless you are labelled as worthy – the general nasty rubbish herein is poor critical thinking based on lies
thats the blame of neoliberal values not feminism – The loss of logic and humun compassion- why blame feminism and women its a weak misogynist article
it’s not blaming feminism; it’s blaming one *kind* of feminism: neoliberal feminism
Then it’s misnamed. Neoliberalism is totally incompatible with feminism or any other kind of social progressivism.
Have you heard of Sheryl Sandburg?
Upvote from me (in lieu of a functioning ‘up arrow’). Great observation.
Correct. Never forget what she did to poor women.
Original, unflinching, typically gutsy Rundle truth-bomb. Dangerous lefty thinking of the most constructive stamp, and another reminder of why the sub is far too cheap, Crikey. Thnx all.
Agreed, Jack, but I’ve got to say I didn’t need Guy to slap me this time. Miller’s RC evidence did that – and I’d already started looking sideways at Ms Higgins in light of it. Won’t be fooled again.
Already had long term serious misgivings about the separation between comfortable middle class professional women feminism and the rest of us. They forgot about us long, long ago. I can still hear them cheering about how they “ won the last election and changed Australian politics”. I’m still waiting for the change to kick in.
It’s not really us Guy needs/ed to slap though, huh. It’s bold, courageous writing precisely because it’s aimed…erm..*coughs respectfully, even solicitously*… elsewhere. As it says clearly on the packet, this is a conversation the Left needs to start and conduct with itself. For everyone’s sake. Because, Culture War paralysis, etc etc: such a conversation can only be of common useful value to us all, to the whole #MeToo/gender issue conversation, when the unexpected ‘side’ of the cultural divide stewards it. When those with solid Lefty credentials kick it off. Maybe Rundle has no mates to lose, anyway – eminently plausible – but while no doubt some here will try hard, he can’t be dismissed as either misogynist or anything but politically Left. I struggle to conjure up any other platformed Lefty who’d have a go at this line; van Badham, maybe. Certainly no-one else with similarly hard-grafted Lefty skin to lose. Jesus, can you imagine any of the creaking, rusted-on, Boomer Lefty AI-Bots farting eternally away at their AI-Bot keyboards in Wheeler Centre Lefty AI-Bot Central – your Adamses, Faines, Cassidys, you spleeny old lefty-lotharios like Mike Carlton, all these rich Whitlamite hippie hypocrites looong past their ‘original ideas’ use-by date – calling for a re-appraisal of hallowed #MeToo figures like Miller & Higgins, with their deadly e-attack squads of millennial flying monkies on 1 minute notice to scramble and carpet-bomb hitherto impeccable Lefty reputations? Good Lord, Carlton can’t wipe his bum each day until he checks out the prevailing ‘blue tick approved’ woke mode du moment (scrunched, rolled, folded, damped wit’ tongue first…oh, Mike, all these epic political decisions! ).
So the still-dominant Boomer Left won’t start these conversations, because they’re all too terrified of…I dunno, being called ‘uncool’ by the youngsters, or something. The youngster Lefties meanwhile are so over-juiced on hyper-doses of self-reflective gender theorising that they’re likely to be trudging around an Escher staircase for a good few years yet. (Most of the younger writers here at Crickety couldn’t even tell you what their gender politics are even if you got ’em to drop their kecks and bung a selfie of their bits on TikTok for a crowd-sourced hot take.) And obv. there’s zero point in social conservatives like me getting involved, too. Blabbering on about #MeToo double standards, ‘soft pap prog’ hypocrisy and gender blind spots, etc etc…well, it’s just what us misogynist/RWNJ/rape apologists do, innit. Fair cop m’luds, which way to the stocks.
Nope, the political ‘Left’ is what has led us into this awful, albeit impeccably well-intentioned, gender impasse. It’s had a stranglehold on #MeToo righteousness from day one. Probably since second wave feminism, actually. And it’s paralysed genuine gender progress in an equally objectifying – I think, no less deeply sexist – ‘prison of those good intentions’. Once upon a time you were cursed to be born with a vagina, a lesser human. Now, everybody who’s anybody has either got one, wants one, or pretends to have one even if they don’t. But saint or whore, it’s the same objectifiying, agency-robbing cross to bear. To point out that ‘some women’ can ‘sometimes’ be nasty, vindictive, gold-digging rank liars re: sexual matters – a #MeToo crime of metaphoric Salem proportions – isn’t ‘misogynist victim-blaming’. It’s just a frank – often rueful! – recognition of the full, rich, complex, powerful, contradictory (infinite!) range of typologies and varieties that can co-exist with – subsume, transcend, be totes incidental to, or whatever – the mere biological category ‘female’. I don’t know Miller at all, and probably shouldn’t put too much store publicly in what my gut has always told me in no uncertain terms (take a guess, g’warn…), but frankly, GR describing her ‘coldly, disdainfully talking about the “left-wing” media in purely political terms, as she detailed doxxing critics and feeding isolated welfare cheat stories to News Corp mouthpiece Simon Benson’ sure as hell makes her a whole lot more of an interesting, compelling, richly-layered, agency-wielding individually unique human being than two years worth of…well, AI-Bot-Lefty Saint/Victim Role Assignation ever did.
So hopefully…this sort of unflinching Lefty critique of #MeToo might be the start of a recalibrated feminist conversation more generally. In which ‘Left politics’ and ‘Feminism’ aren’t assumed to be the same thing, and in which women (of all political stripes) , too, can get to play the juicy complex/bad guy roles as often as the nice but dull victims/foils. Because…some women, like some men, are just…arseholes. Not in a feisty, bold, ‘don’t-suffer-fools’ Superwoman kind of not-really-an-arsehole arseholey way.
But just….genuine arseholes. It doesn’t make anyone sexist to agree that applies to Lefty women as often as to Righty ones.
Insult and argument are two different things, as I often had to remind my students. Rundle provided argument; you’ve given us a string of sweeping, pejorative insults as a substitute.
Aye, t’is true good sirruh. Lucky Runders here gets paid to be the adult, huh, lethell. Me, I just do it for tacky personal kicks. Also to give you soft paps a useful salving Fool/whipping boy, whenever one of your own gang just ‘might’ have lit a wee little spark ‘neath your rickety deadwood pile of pomposities and vanities!
Don’t panic, lethell! You’re still morally and intellectually loftier than moi! All is not lost yet, sirrah!
You’re welcome. ?
That’s no surprise. that’s JR’s modus operandi.
Hey Jack, heard of the concept that less is more?
meh. come on, be creative at least, man.
re: less/more tho’….how much of your and my money do you reckon Bruce Lehrmann will get, via the NPC/ABC defo case, frank? More or less than Higgins got ($3mil they say) on the basis of one or two ministers (vaguely) ‘doing her wrong’…? More, shorely…what with the entire Oz Journalism body politic AND the national broadcaster going all tag-team on him…plus the entire Parly…geez, miller’s $650k LNP grift sure starts to look real cheap…
Etc. Look, stop making it about me, frank, I’m just a gobby serial pest, of no import, you Crikerians ought to have well grasped that by now. The issue here is just as Rundle eloquently outlined it. It’s yours, too – not mine. I was never suckered by the worst of the #MeToo cynicism. You lot were.
Go and check if you want. The Miller threads are all still there. Higgins, too. Etc. Stop reading my comments here and now (they bore me now, too, my work is done)….go back and read yours back then instead, when Miller was still a soft pap prog hero…and then maybe look in the mirror.
ie less criticising me, and a wee bit more self-reflection for the well-established ‘#MeToo’ majority consensus’ here at Criks. Take it from Rundle if you can’t, understandably, stomach it from me. Chrs.
I may suggest that that man would do well to consider just how successful a libel case can be , given the history of a succession of such cases. Will he front cross examination by an experienced KC/SC as we have seen in the Robodebt RC. Or will he hide away? Either option could destroy any reputation he might have.
Hey Jack. I reckon this identity politics BS is a neocon plot to keep us on the left too busy to bother about class struggle.
We lefties may learn something from Mick Lynch and the total failure of neoliberalism as practiced by the tories for the past 12 years.
Quite. Though it hardly needs to be any great cunning plot, does it. The Tories are too thick to deserve much credit, anyway. Fact is most people require only the thinnest of theoretical justifications to openly embrace self-interest as a ‘virtue’. The idea that your prosperous, morally aspirant upper and middle classes will clutch at any old prop to hold up their self-belief in their own ‘fairness’ except the only one that counts – sharing their prosperity with those underneath them – is not new. Neoliberalism isn’t successful because it’s a grand strategy, it’s just that to nowish it has absolved an unprecedentedly large mass of modern consumers of any tempering guilt about their age-old choice to be greedy. All the old (social conservative) brakes – class stability and mutual obligation, church morality, family clan & community peer pressure, ‘common weal’ civic decency and so on – have been deracinated, usually by those who are individually rich enough not to need them to remain safe. The ‘greed is good enough, who needs society’ thing. Uttering it unadorned and out loud might be a vaguely ‘neoliberal’ new twist, but its underlying moral always isn’t, and that’s the bit that always has been and always will be an ‘easy sell’, to most of us, anyway.
That’s not a moralistic position, btw. We all instinctively now want to be individually rich. It’s just a modern learned human trait, to do with the same old natural instinct to protect our kids. ‘Civilisation’ (to me anyway) means actively fighting against it, on the ultra-rational, empirically indisputable and intellectually obvious grounds that a far greater number of individuals can find sustainable tribal safety (ie for the/eir kids) in collectivism. It’s just….obvious. Historically. Intuitively. Politically, even – from whatever shade you examine the idea. Even the most extreme-right ‘Thatcherite’ economies and extreme-left anarcho-syndicalist (snicker) ones can’t survive without deep-set, mutual collective tribal concessions. (That’s a very unremarkable and very socially conservative position, by the way, completely divorced from politics.) Only whackjob jackboot libertarian survivalists and Elon Bezos State-monopolist-welfare grifters seriously kid themselves that they can ‘make it alone’.
But it sure is nice to have nice things, lots of leisure time and a bunch of spare discretionary cash for life’s contingencies. It used to be definitive on the political Left, and at least ‘civic continence and decorum’ self-contained on the Right, to fight, fight, fight against that individual self-interest; to resist the siren calls of overt personal enrichment and comfort from all material political positions. Vanishingly rare on even the nominally-material Left, now. Especially in union leadership circles!!
Australian ones, anyway. I don’t know a heap about him, but yeah Mick Lynch seems a goodish egg, having his sunny side up moment in the UK. But the subsumist absolutism of modern State/Corporate/Media Fascism will doubtless grind him down, and/or chew the juice from him, and/or seduce him to impotence one way or another. It’s so so hard to be a good human being in a world hell bent on autopilot self-destruction.
Chrs TC4551. (A gap filler! In-joke or secret society handshake/password…?)
Exactly. And all these “morally aspirant” upper middle-classees can all be Generals in their own little army. Generals! How much more attractive is that than just being a foot-soldier in the endless was of Labour VS Capital? More vanity!
Aye. The cult of fame still has a vice-like grip on us. Celebrity, individual renown, the Byline Disease, personal time in the tribal sun, hogging the tribal talking stick…me, me, me, look at ME, everyone!!! We aren’t going to get anywhere in the Class War until we destroy that toxic impostor ‘journalism’, TC. Self-interested narcissism’s advertising agent.
oops, ‘muleskinner’ i meant. ‘pols comrade. keep fighting. keep the faith.
You understand me perfectly. “Hogging the tribal taking stick” indeed. It will not be until corporations and the politicians they own have reduced us again to literal Serfdom, slavery, that a true ground-roots Socialism will emerge, and this petty identity politics put on the back-burner.
keep the faith comrade. it’s a long, long game, demanding cunning, subtlety and a carefully husbanded, smouldering anger.
Reply in Mod, TC, as if often the case for me because I tend to do so in depth, if at all. Be patient, I guess. Out of my hands. Chrs.
That’s pretty much what it is: gays, trans, blacks, women, koalas etc all need to realise thet their real oppressors are the oppressors of everyone – corporations and the politicians they own. As a genuine Socialist economic Lefite, I see the divide-and-conquer startegy working very well for the Right.
As usual just a diatribe about JR’s pet hates. The question was, Jack whether the odious Brittany Higgins was the victim of rape, not her abhorrent political views.
Which, incidentally seem to coincide with both Rundle’s and your own.
Ms Miller definitely IMHO, did not deserve the enormous payout she received for having hurt feelings, indeed, I’d have kicked her out of my own bed for being such a disgusting human being. It is for the reasons of mistreatment of women that some of your favourite targets (name them ) would have taken up her cause, despite her revolting political stances.
Your utterly charmless and highly sexualised misogyny targeted at Miller rather negates your wildly sprayed blah about my own supposedly ‘abhorrent’ views. Repellant language and thinking, just not interested Bill.
On the rape allegations, though, yes quite so. And Miller was duly afforded tenfold more opportunity at justice on that than most alleged rape victims. Like many other white, professional, privileged women she was turned into a #MeToo hero-victim-star by the good but too-gullible faith of the soft pap prog left, including many in the meeja. She rewarded them by cutting and running from her chance at justice, instead pocketing a fortune under an NDA, and dumping her many media allies up Litigation Sh*t Creek.
She might have been raped. She might not have been raped. We’ll never know. All the victims of sexual abuse, harassment and crime she was purporting to be ‘acting for’, and who will never enjoy a fraction of the resources, attention, public support and goodwill she did….are entitled to feel cynically exploited.
Sorry ‘Higgins’ not Miller. Apols, tired typo. More than enough now on this mournful few years from me. Chrs Crikey, thank you for all the space and a more than fair dissenting go on #MeToo matters since 2020. Rgds all.
Surely the co-starring gong should go to Mathias Corrman, whose “debt and deficit disaster” nonsense alludes to the entire Liberal Party’s collusion in the marginalisation of some Australians.
Soz, that last line above meant for you David. You’re of course right about Cormann. Another massive neolib con if Lefties’ better angels. Turnbull, a third.
See Rundle’s clear-eyed appraisal of the relative street-fight killer-merits of decent wet lefty feelz v. righty hyper-individualised Darwinism.
PS …we both of course went through all this twenty years ago. one despairs of The Left ever actually HTFU. now as then not enough are serious about their easy rhetoric. only 10 x worse, given the great tranquillisation of ‘virtual politics’ Hence the ‘soft pap goading’.
We’re burning to death faster than ever. I despair.
Yes, but I would also hand two shared Academy Awards – ‘Best neoliberal performance in a feminist-victim-hero role’, and ‘Best Costume Design (Bespoke Suffragette White Executive Power Suits) – to Laura Tingle* and Christine Holgate**, for their tear-jerking, scene-stealing two-hander at the very apex of the local #MeToo adaptation’s narrative arc.
* Tingle of course completing her early performative training at the highly regarded ‘AFR Academy for Smelly Centrist Orthodoxies’ before retiring to the ABC as an Untouchable Elder of the Feminist Oz Drama; while ** Holgate evolved her craft in the more rough n’ tumble world of regional theatre, as a jobbing ASX grifter and then ‘Executive Quotas now!’ featherbedder, where getting (one’s own, faux-feminist) bums on (lucrative Board) seats, luvvies!’ is what #MeToo is all about. Author, author!
Lefty fans of Tingle can of course still avail themselves of groupie t-shirts at a very reasonable above-cost mark-up ($15 – $40, shopping around online is recommended). Those whose ‘Superstars of #MeToo!‘ taste runs a little more towards Holgate’s acting style will have to shell out more for fan memorabilia, with the Cartier catalogue looking distinctly thin below four figures. A more fiscally accessible #MeToo buy-in, for the single mum feminist-on-a-budget, say, might be shares in Toll Group (currently ASX $9.02), Holgate’s next-level starring role in the global franchise blockbuster to where she fled in humiliated fear to heal the terrible wounds inflicted by Teh Evilz Patriarcheez of Parliament House. And tearfully count the paltry $1 million taxpayer’s fee, for the role that briefly made her, too, a #MeToo hero-victim-superstar of the soft pap prog Left.
Chortle. PS: Don’t grizzle, Crickers…I could lay it much, much thicker, you know. This is barely out of first gear!
There’s not much of a place for, nor space for, human decency in today’s Liberal Party, regardless of gender.
Or sex. Because that’s really what it’s about.
Power is the issue here, I believe. A criminal misuse of. Robodebt was a mafia style attempt to ripoff the weakest in our society. There should be jail time for it’s worst perpetrator’s, regardless of their identified gender.
It was extortion. No other word for it. I live in hope of criminal charges, but have little faith. Remember, the entire Dutch Cabinet resoigned over a similar scandal.
It’s about control.
The fact that this despicable excuse for a human-being managed to score a cool $650k towards paying off the loan on her investment property while there aren’t enough shelters for women who have suffered genuine abuse says all you need to know about the class system in Australia.
$650k for having one’s adultery exposed is a rort and the fact she was more ashamed by being exposed as such than for being a soulless hack indicates the total lack of morality rife in Tory politics
tick
As someone who has worked as a relationship counsellor, and especially in the field of domestic violence and sexual assault, and well educated in dynamics of abuse this article is pure rubbish. Violence and abuse is not a progressive or conservative issue. It is a criminal matter. For far too long interpersonal abuse has been minimised by attitudes such as by police saying it is just another domestic. I’ve counselled victims across a spectrum of ages, cultural backgrounds, sexual orientation,socioeconomic status, employment and there is always a common thread The true victim is the one who is silenced by perpetrators, legal entities, governments, journalists and society in general. Abuse of all kinds flourishes in silence. Higgins and Miller had every right to break the silence and claim compensation as anyone who experiences workplace injury does. To say this is only applauded by progressives is a shocking indictment on those who are unhappy about the revelations of abuse and it’s being addressed
Why is my + bouncing back as a “you have already voted ” when I have not?
THANK-YOU for writing this comment, krisMD. I read this after the article about men killing their partners and former partners, and I’m very disturbed that Crikey’s editorial team didn’t get someone with your knowledge to examine this article for the possibility of unrecognised and commonly held prejudices underpinning it.
The next part of my comment is just here for convenience. I’m in no way trying to suggest that you would agree with me.
I’m becoming increasingly disturbed by Crikey’s willingness to demean “professional” women seeking freedom from violence and prejudice while pretending to speak for women completely without power or resources who also wish to live free of violence and prejudice.
As a woman who has experienced poverty and is now able to pay the bills with a little left over to save and indulge occasionally, I think these men seek to silence all women. Their articles and comments just use different strategies to silence us, and I think they know exactly what they are doing.
Exactly.
How silence? I write an article, you and others reply. Where’s the silencing?
Consistently demeaning women (and that is a generous characterisation of some of your work) is one aspect of bullying and bullying is a strategy designed to undermine people, including by silencing them.
Speaking for women who have incredibly limited opportunities to speak for themselves fills the space with your voice pretending to speak for them. Another silencing tactic.
As violence against women becomes less and less a taboo topic, men who don’t like women seeking freedom from violence and prejudice just change their strategies.
When I was a woman with absolutely no power working the night shift on a factory floor, my friends and I waited for us all to collect our gear and go to the toilet so everyone of us could get to our cars safely in a group. We parked our cars close together so we could see each other drive off safely once we were in them.
When I waitressed and sold shoes in the day and went to uni in the night, I was confronted by two men with knives while I was walking from the uni bus stop to the bus stop for my bus home. When I switched bus stops to try to stay away from such men, a bus driver told me I wouldn’t be safe there and drove me to bus stop outside a pub because being harassed by drunks is safer than being a woman alone in the city.
After I graduated from uni and got my first job as a graduate, I couldn’t get a drink from the water cooler without a slime coming up to me and putting his hands on me. Neither could I work late or come in early as he would bail me up in the lift and the stairwell when there were few people around.
Eventually I got a better job but when I worked later into the evening to meet out of control deadlines, I discovered that a woman working late had to be escorted to her car or the nearest bus stop or taxi rank by security.
You and your ilk don’t speak for me when I was all but powerless and your demeaning words don’t define me know. My daughter knows to be careful around men who exhibit these behaviours and my son is too much of a man to need to indulge in them. krisMD is correct in his analysis of your article. My children know it, I know it, many men know it and many, many more women know it.
‘Miller and Higgins had every right to….’ yes they did, which is what the article said. The question i raised was whether they should become left heroes, in a way which depoliticises their other actions
The ‘depoliticisation’ is a fact of which you as a journalist should, but obviously are not, aware.
The question is and only should be about the truth of their experiences. That they held views utterly abhorrent to most people is a different matter not relevant to anything other than a self-indulgent excuse for a rave about a pet hate.
I’m sorry, but unrelenting class war isn’t a ‘pet hate’.
It’s the reason there is a question mark over the future of civilisation, and the single most under-appreciated issue I could name, and almost any political situation is clarified by viewing through that lens.
There is no amount of reminding people who the perpetrators of this vast crime are, that is overdoing it.
Brittany Higgins made me punch the air with delight when she stood up with Grace Tame to piss on the coalition, but she was a willing participant in that vile organisation, and has said nothing to suggest that she’s decided she was wrong to participate in class war.
And Rachelle Miller hasn’t asked forgiveness for helping to persecute some of our most vulnerable citizens in an ongoing disaster of cynical political bastardy.
Guy is totally right to remind us these people are filth. And to remind us that the sort of feminists who vote Liberal are NO sort of feminist. Well-off white women who consider themselves feminists are constantly throwing their poorer, browner sisters under the bus.
Before you can be an actual feminist, you have to be a humanist.
You can’t be a humanist if you’re in favour of the war waged by the rich on the poor.
The misery the thousands of victims of Robodebt, put through what they were, by the willing perpetrators of that early questioned (by some of those, in the administration of it, concerned with it’s ethicality) policy – at the hands of a government, in concert with a similarly predisposed (and so promoted) element of the PS, more intent on persecuting some of the most vulnerable, “great unwashed(?)” in our society.
Was Miller ever a “hero” to those victims she was a willing participant in harrying – the use of ‘friendly media’ in the belittling and dismissal of what those people were being put through? How do those victims (men and women) see the willing perpetrators of their misery?
After all they’d been through, did her blowing the whistle on Tudge absolve her to them?
… What drew her to Tudge the way she was earlier in their relationship? I can’t see it being ‘pure animal magnetism’.
So what was it … ‘kindred spirits’? The ‘crusading embodiment of an ideological and philosophical sympatico avatar’?
I can’t help but feel that the lionising of Miller is but one more outrage perpetrated on the memory of those thousands who, over those angst-riven, traumatising years, confronted by letters demanding money with menaces (money that they pretty much knew they didn’t owe) from a minister (and his underlings) who threatened them, on national TV, with being hunted down and a good chance of being sent to gaol?
…. Who did Tudge’s ‘paperwork’ – for his various ‘parliamentary/ministerial entitlements’ – and was paid to do it? While these victims had to go back over years of receipts to try to prove their innocence of those ‘guilty’ allegations (generated in the department by that army of zealots), that they faced?
Tudge an ambitious, ladder-climbing, crowd-surfing, penny-pinching, lime-light seeking, narcissistic, ideologue ‘media tart’?
That a large proportion of those thousands that suffered at their collectivised hands, didn’t see Miller’s ‘outing’ as more some sort of “falling out among thieves” kismet?