Federal Sports Minister Kate Ellis has donned a tight leather dress and stilettos to pose for a photo shoot in this week’s Grazia magazine. The photos accompanied an article about readers’ attitudes to their bodies, but does a frocked up MP in high heels help promote a healthy body image? Or should she hang up the Gucci heels and head back to the ministerial desk?
Here’s what the pundits are saying:
The Daily Telegraph
Lucie van den Berg: Federal Sports Minister Kate Ellis’s leather dress shot in Grazia backfires
Federal Sports Minister Kate Ellis’ decision to appear in a glossy magazine in sky-high heels and a black leather dress has backfired, damaging her campaign to promote more normal-looking models.
Claire Harvey: Meet the minister for body image
It’s dangerous for any politician to shed the business-suit – just ask Mr Downer. The former Foreign Minister posed for a 1996 Variety Club fundraiser in fishnets and faux-leopard print heels.
Herald Sun
Robyn Riley: Kate, you’re a minister, not a model
…our Sports Minister is prancing around a sports field in a slinky leather dress and killer heels and not at her desk, as she needs to be.
Susie O’Brien: Wrong to hate Kate Ellis
Let’s not hate her because she looks more like Heidi Klum than Bronwyn Bishop. Shouldn’t we encourage politicians to get out of their Canberra comfort zones and live a little?
The Courier Mail
Dennis Atkins: If the shoe fits Kate, maybe Tony should try it
While the effectiveness of a tall, slim woman wearing a black leather dress with the Gucci heels as a way of promoting positive body image portrayal in the media is questionable, it’s Ellis’s story and she’s sticking to it.
Kellie Alderman: Kate Ellis gets the fashion vote for spread in Grazia Magazine’s body image edition
…the 32-year-old minister sports a pair of killer $1790 Gucci heels and a curve-hugging $695 leather Karen Millen dress and looks more like a runway model than a Member of Parliament.
Elsewhere
Girl with a Satchel, Erica Bartle: Mags, walking through Grazia’s body issue
If I were an aspiring MP and took one look at the Amazonian Ellis in all her Grazia glory, I would feel betrayed by both the association with a fashion magazine with a dubious diet-story record and also the idea that even smart MPs have to fit the fashion mould to become successful.
Ellis is my local Fed.
This stupid self aggrandisement is so bloody transparent! If this silly woman gave one tuppenny ha’penny damn for ‘body image’, she would not be filmed tottering around on fecking stilts!!
This crap was designed to promote Ellis , and Ellis alone. It is a classic: look at moe! look at moe!
These people are elected ‘by the people, for the people’ (worralarf!!!!), and paid by the people. We don’t have any choice…
Ellis may have had ‘her people’ decide on this, but it is Ellis-and Ellis alone, who went ahead with it because of her own vanity.
Silly beearch.
Niiice.
Kate sure looks fitter than Tony!
and yet another woman has to defend herself for being a woman. What a shame she doesn’t look like Belinda Neal (or Sophie Mirabella for that matter) then we could really go to town.
Hey I’m going to write a important ground-breaking column about Tony Abbott wearing speedos or Kate Ellis wearing a dress. I’m an Australian journalist, my job is difficult!