If a cabinet reflects the plans and priorities of a new government, then the Liberals have been very clear about what kind of government we should expect. Ministries devoted to homelessness, youth, workplace relations, mental health, ageing, multiculturalism, child care, science and international development have been cut or relegated.
A ministry for border protection has been created to make it clear what Australia’s immigration policy is really about.
While every member of the new cabinet is worthy of their own shit-sheet, Jade Eckhaus takes a special look at a few.
Tony Abbott, PM and responsible for women’s policies
Once said: “It would be folly to expect that women would ever approach equal representation in a large number of areas simply because their aptitudes, their abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons.”
His appointment as, in effect, women’s minister is as apt as Pauline Hanson being made minister for multiculturalism.
Told an audience in regional Victoria in 2009 that “the climate change argument is absolute crap.”
Eric Abetz, minister for employment
A notorious homophobe who doesn’t support same sex marriage rights because they would “lead to polygamy” and are “socially destructive”.
Last year he spoke at a national marriage day rally against same sex marriage. The rally sang a song called “Stand Up For Marriage” set to the tune of Waltzing Matilda. So it is a little rich for him to lecture anyone about being socially destructive.
In 2006, he described the campaign against the export of Tasmanian woodchips as “akin to treason”.
Peter Dutton, minister for health
Referred to as a boring no-hoper in the capitalist press. But his problem is being a racist moron.
He was one of the Liberal MPs who refused to stay in the House in 2008 when former PM Kevin Rudd apologised to the Stolen Generations.
Dutton also defended and agreed with former Liberal MP Wilson Tuckey when he said that acknowledging traditional landowners at official events was a “farce” and that he had “never thanked anyone for the right to be on the soil that is Australian”.
Kevin Andrews, minister for social services
The jerk minister for employment and workplace relations who oversaw the implementation of WorkChoices.
He is also a racist. In 2007, when immigration minister, he cut Australia’s refugee intake from Africa because Sudanese refugees were not “settling in and adjusting to the Australian way of life”.
Andrews is an adviser to the board of Life Decisions International – an anti-choice group that campaigns for chastity and boycotts corporations that support abortion, euthanasia, stem-cell research or what it calls sexual promiscuity.
He supports the Endeavour Forum, a group that describes its aims as “to counter feminism, defend the unborn, and the traditional family”.
In his book Maybe “I do”: modern marriage and the pursuit of happiness, he argued that marriage can stop you getting cancer.
Shame he wasn’t made the health minister.
Scott Morrison, minister for immigration and border protection
Well-known racist refugee basher.
In December 2010, 48 refugees died when their vessel smashed into the rocks at Christmas Island. Morrison demanded to know why the Labor government paid for relatives of the victims to travel to their funerals.
In 2011, he allegedly made comments in shadow cabinet suggesting that the Coalition should take advantage of the electorate’s growing concerns about “Muslim immigration”, “Muslims in Australia” and the so-called “inability” of Muslim migrants to integrate.
In February he said that the police should be notified where asylum seekers are living in the community.
Julie Bishop, minister for foreign affairs
Former education minister who promotes performance pay for teachers.
She previously complained that that school curriculum comes “straight from Chairman Mao”, even though it was her government that insisted that Iraq could be liberated through the barrel of a gun.
Lamented that “we have gone from teaching Latin in year 12 to teaching remedial English in first-year university”. Exactly how Latin is more useful she declined to elaborate.
Bishop defended Israel over its forging of Australian passports in the assassination of Palestinian resistance leader Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh.
Warren Truss, deputy prime minister
Doesn’t support abortion and worries that women see abortion drugs like RU486 as the “easy way out”.
He’s a borderline flat earther who denies that we can understand Australia’s drastically changing climate in terms of climate change.
He instead offers this explanation: “Australia’s climate, it’s changing, it’s changeable. We have hot times, we have cold times …” Brilliant scientific analysis.
Truss is offended by the acknowledgement of First Peoples preceding the parliamentary prayer. He says that it denigrates the country’s Christian heritage to acknowledge Aboriginal people.

Jade Eckhaus

Abbott gets his shit together

Sheryl Sandberg’s new book LEAN IN: Women, Work and the Will to Lead is being peddled as a “sorta feminist manifesto”. It’s closer to an updated version of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Sandberg is the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, who last year took home $26.2 million and in 2011 topped the list of high-paid executives earning $40 million.
It is often argued that if more women were in positions of authority, equal with men, they would create a more humane culture because they would understand women’s problems. It is this sentiment Sandberg is trying to tap into with her nod to feminism.
But her book clearly refutes this hope and shows that, just as Marxists have always argued, women who are part of the capitalist class are just as uncaring as their male counterparts, and concerned only with profit at the expense of workers, including women workers.
She is downright insulting, blaming women themselves for their unequal position in the business world: we “hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in”.
In Sandberg’s fantasyland the concrete barriers women face – unequal wages, discrimination against women on the job, the sexism which permeates the media, the education system and popular culture – are not the cause of the genuine lack of confidence felt by women in many aspects of their lives, but just a result of women’s shoddy decision-making, lack of self-actualisation and inability to value ourselves.
According to Sandberg, women need to spend more time “dismantling the hurdles in ourselves” (sounds painful), which is highly ironic coming from a woman who is in favour of putting even more hurdles in the way of women being able to have some control over their working lives.
At the World Economic Forum’s 2013 annual meeting in Switzerland, Sandberg argued that employers should be able to quiz potential women employees about whether or not they plan to have children.
In her view, the fact that bosses in many countries are restricted from asking such questions leads to a general discrimination against all women of “childbearing age”. So Sandberg’s response to sexism in the workplace is not to argue that women and men combat it but rather that it should be made easier for companies to figure out who are the right people to discriminate against!
Handwringing by Sandberg and her Silicon Valley ilk about the difficulties faced by companies is grotesque. The poor dears who earn millions -- and want to earn an extra million at the expense of everyone else -- have nothing to say about the fight for genuine women’s liberation.
This book is a timely reminder that women workers can expect nothing but exploitation and discrimination from their capitalist “sisters”. In the fight to win women’s rights in the workplace, the men we work beside are our potential allies, so arguing for workers’ solidarity – and fighting the sexism which undermines it – remains the way forward.

Sheryl Sandberg’s CEO manifesto

Flick on almost any TV show, rifle through a magazine, listen to most of the top 100 songs on the radio and you’ll learn the truth: there’s a big scary problem in the world today. That problem is angry women.
The internet is full of advice for the poor dears who have been forced to deal first hand with this disturbing phenomenon. When you Google “angry woman”, the first result that comes up is a Men’s Health article explaining that if you are forced to face this fearsome adversary, looking her in the eye and not providing her with more information will stop her ever escalating, uncontrollable rage.
Women are made to feel that we have to play nice all the time. Our anger is unappealing. We’re meant to feel lucky to live in a world where every product, whether a music video, a soft drink or a new line of tampons, features a cavorting scantily clad woman staring back at us with a vacant expression. Women have our sexuality repackaged and sold back to us.
While sexuality pervades every aspect of our lives, women’s sex lives, instead of being a source of pleasure, are often a source of anxiety. A 2011 study by the National Council for Research on Women found that only 41 percent of women reported being satisfied with their sex lives. This is hardly surprising when we are meant to feel empowered by having our sexuality bought and sold.
Equality?
While fathers who have careers are looked upon as stable family men, women are accused of “trying to have it all”. We are forced to straddle the contradiction that the roles we are meant to perform are both contradictory and unattainable – that we must be successful, confident women in the workplace as well as being Martha Stewart in the kitchen and a porn star in the bedroom.
While women are not expected to be stay-at-home mothers, we are still expected to do the vast majority of looking after children. Women don’t do this because of abstract ideological pressure – although that pressure clearly exists. A 2012 Productivity Commission study showed that Australia has one of the lowest levels of public expenditure on early childhood services. Only 19 percent of non-working mothers said that if they had access to affordable child care, they would continue to stay home.
The stereotype of the kind, caring and nurturing mother is also used as an ideological battering ram to justify underpaying women in the workplace. In Australia women earn 67 cents on the dollar for the same work as men. This, combined with the difficulty men face is getting access to paid parental leave, forces women in heterosexual relationships to continue to be the primary caregivers.
Often we hear the refrain that if only we had more education, then we could teach people to treat women equally. The problem is not education; the problem is that you can’t educate people to believe they’re equal when they’re blatantly not. The problem is not that women and men are told that women are unequal – the problem is that women are unequal.
Who has it good?
The lie that “we’ve never had it so good” is true for a tiny minority of women in Australia. For ruling class women, it’s clear that they’ve never had it so good. Take Gail Kelly: she’s the CEO of Westpac and last year took home a salary of $9.6 million, making her the second most highly paid CEO in Australia. For women like Kelly, their experience of life has nothing to do with that of working class women.
Kelly will never be forced to decide whether or not to have children based on whether she can afford it, or if she is financially able to leave an abusive relationship; she’ll never have to rely on social services or have to worry about finding affordable child care or housing. What did she do to earn that money? Last year Kelly got rid of 565 jobs at Westpac. She also campaigned against penalty rates. In Gail Kelly’s ideal world, we’d have a 24/7 economy, and workers would have no rights to be paid more for working long, unsociable hours.
There has been systematic use of sexism against Julia Gillard. But that doesn’t make her our “sister”. Gillard has thrown tens of thousands of single mothers into poverty by pushing them off parenting payments. She is responsible for locking up refugee women – mothers and their children – in concentration camps. She presides over the occupation of Aboriginal women’s lands and has set up an apartheid-style system in the Northern Territory. She has allowed giant mining companies to rake in billions of dollars, while refusing a free universal child care scheme. She is part of the problem.
It’s clear that the scary thing in the world today is not women who are angry about sexism; it’s how pervasive sexism continues to be. What we need is more women – and men – who are angry about it. Only by having more loud, confident fighters will we be able to challenge a status quo that breeds inequality and oppression.

Abbott gets his shit together

Sheryl Sandberg’s CEO manifesto

Women are right to be angry

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