Australia and the Global Women’s Movement

CW: The following article contains references to sexual violence and femicide.

It took over two months but Scott Morrison finally met with Brittany Higgins; only after the mass mobilisations and national outrage had died down a bit.

Phil Gaetjens, the secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, has resumed an internal investigation. The Australian Federal Police are conducting an investigation.

In April, before the Prime Minister finally conceded to a cabinet reshuffle, it looked like everything was about to explode. Since then, he has also agreed “in principal” to accept all 55 recommendations of the Respect@Work report.

While people’s immense anger has simmered for now, the smallest thing could start a new wave of protest.

Deeply ingrained sexism in the halls of power

On Monday 15th March, just a week after International Women’s Day, 100,000 women and men joined the March 4 Justice rallies. They were held in 42 cities and towns around Australia. In Canberra, protesters marched to Parliament house and confronted Scott Morrison. However he refused to meet with the representatives in public, inviting them to a backroom meeting instead. Importantly, under pressure from the movement, the organisers refused: if he wanted to talk he would have to confront the whole movement.

In response to criticism that he didn’t meet with March 4 Justice protesters, Morrison said we should be grateful we weren’t being shot at like the women in Myanmar!

Considering it was a work day and there were still restrictions in place in all states the size was incredibly impressive and a sign of just how fed up and angry women are at their treatment at home, on the streets and in their workplaces, and how much it affects every layer of society.

On the 15th February Liberal Party staffer Brittany Higgins made a public accusation that she had been raped by a fellow staffer inside the office of defence minister Lynda Reynolds.

Just a couple of days later, after a terrible apology from Scott Morrison, it was revealed that there might have been a backgrounding campaign against Brittany Higgins and her boyfriend.

It also came out that Lynda Reynolds had called Brittany Higgins a “lying cow”, Eric Abbetz allegedly made comments implying it was her fault and that if she was drunk in Parliament House that she posed a security risk. Since then, other women have come forward saying the same staffer has harassed or assaulted them in some way.

On 26th February, the ABC published details of a letter which had been sent to the Prime Minister and several other members of parliament, alleging that a 16 year old girl who is known as Kate, had been raped in 1988 by a now sitting member of parliament.

On 3rd March the then Attorney General Christian Porter made it publicly known that he was the person accused, but denied it was true.

In late February a sex education activist, Chanel Contos, released a petition for consent to be taught as part of sex ed in schools. It came attached to testimonies from 2500 girls about their experiences of sexual assault in schools. Particularly with boys from elite private schools in Sydney. Some were as young as 13 when the incidents occurred. Tens of thousands have signed the petition and it’s brought into the mainstream a discussion about teaching consent, and having an LGBTIQA+ inclusive approach.

The federal government released an outrageously bad educational resource on consent for Australian schools. It was almost instantly and universally criticised by experts, educators and students.

This isn’t even an exhaustive list of all the sexual assault scandals that have been exposed since February.

The Australian Women’s Movement Today

This is a sign of how prevalent gendered violence and particularly sexual violence really is, but it’s also a sign of how extensive the growing women’s movement is.

We are seeing not just the actions of terrible men being exposed. We are also seeing them suffer the consequences. The repercussions and the justice have been thinly spread. People in positions of power have done everything to preserve themselves and their allies. But they’ve been boxed in and forced to make concessions and admit mistakes. This has all unfolded in a way that it wouldn’t have even a few years ago.

Without a doubt the working class, and middle class in Australia have been impacted by the world wide events of the last 10 years.

As far back as 2011 when Slut Walk started in Canada it was immediately taken up by a small but very determined group of mainly young women in Australia. In 2014 Rosie Batty became a household name from her work as an anti domestic violence campaigner after her abusive husband brutally murdered her son, Luke. The following year she was awarded Australian of the Year. This also sparked the first Royal Commission into Family Violence. Just this year, Grace Tame was named Australian of the Year for her work campaigning against sexual abuse after she was groomed and abused by a high school teacher. We’ve also seen mass outpourings of grief and rage after the femicides of Jill Meagher and Eurydice Dixon and so many other women who have been murdered while walking home.

This growing fury hasn’t yet taken on the form of a sustained mass movement. But it has been brewing and festering under the surface.

We can also quite clearly see the impact of the #MeToo movement leaving Hollywood and filtering into other workplaces. In Australia this seems to have been taken up the most in the hospitality and entertainment industries. A growing number of venues and events are taking up clear policies to protect staff and customers from sexual harassment.

It’s quite likely that Brittany Higgins was influenced by the #MeToo movement, and supported by it to come forward. It is far reaching and has influenced everyone’s consciousness. Even the immensely right wing Murdoch press felt the pressure and started to turn on the Liberal Party for a moment.

Out-of-touch ruling class promote corporate feminism

As with any movement for change, there are many ideas being discussed, but not all of these ideas, and not all sorts of feminism, can create the change that working class women need. In the last couple of months dozens, possibly hundreds of articles have been published in the mainstream media about the crisis in parliament, there have been countless opinion pieces making suggestions for change.

These vary from talk of the Prime Minister needing to show more leadership, or discussing having quotas for women in the major parties and the need for education campaigns.

One idea that was taken up enthusiastically by a layer in the media, was the idea of the collaborative effort by Lucy Turnbull, millionaire businesswoman and wife to former Liberal PM Malcolm Turnbull, and Therese Rein, millionaire business woman and wife to former Labor PM Kevin Rudd, to tackle the culture in parliament. They urged Scott Morrison to launch an independent authority to review sexual harassment complaints in Parliament House.

There should be an independent review, carried out by elected representatives of staffers.

But this initiative does not represent some grand coming together across the political divide. They are both millionaires, and have shared interests as a result.

Rein and Turnbull are members of the ruling class. Therese Rein heads a private, for profit job network provider. This company profits from the privatisation of our welfare system.

One of the most immediate reforms that would help women escape abusive relationships would be to raise unemployment payments to above the poverty line, and to remove all the punitive measures attached.

But it is just not in Rein’s material interests to support these reforms. What women like Therese Rein and Lucy Turnbull are fighting for is equality for women of their own class, they will never fight for the liberation of working class women.

The extreme backwardness of the culture in Parliament House has shocked most working people. The extremely low understanding of these issues in Parliament is completely out of touch with the understanding of ordinary people, especially working women. They do not represent most people — in reality they represent the ruling class. Working class people are well ahead of them.

Roots of Women’s Oppression and Socialist Feminist Approach to Fighting Gender Violence and Sexism

These aren’t the only ideas that are being discussed at the moment. At the International Women’s Day rally on 8th March many of the placards and speeches correctly identified the system as the culprit for all gender disparity, including gendered violence.

The organising committee for the rally in Melbourne had several demands, all linked by an exploitative system. Their general demands included First Nations sovereignty, an end to gendered violence, climate justice, economic justice, full access to healthcare and workers’ rights. Women were encouraged to join their unions, and there was even discussion of a general strike in order to help bring about systemic change.

Some of the speakers, and the organisers, defined the system that drives gendered violence as “the patriarchy” or “misogyny”. Without a doubt we live in a deeply, fundamentally misogynistic society, and a patriarchal one.

Power and wealth are still traditionally passed down through male heirs, and women the world over are treated as the property of men, often in the eyes of the law. Women’s sexuality is seen as existing for men’s desires instead of as something that belongs to each individual.

This deep sexism that pervades all aspects of life is not a natural state of affairs but, like all forms of oppression, has its roots in class society. Patriarchal values, as with white supremacy, heteronormativity, ableism or any form of discrimination, are ideological tools of the capitalist system. This is an important distinction. We need to be able to identify the exact cause of our oppression and exploitation in order to be able to effectively fight back against it.

The capitalist system divides the world’s population into two main classes, the working class and the capitalist class. The capitalist class is tiny, a comparative handful of people compared to the world’s multi-racial, multi-gender working class and poor. Strikes, mass movements and revolts show that when properly mobilised and united we pose a real threat to the capitalists. They therefore require an apparatus in order to maintain power. This apparatus is the state, and it is made up of the cops, judges, courts, schools and other institutions.

Sexism is a tool used by, and thoroughly embedded in, the capitalist state to discipline and divide the working class and oppressed. And many women are becoming more aware of this fact. One of the highlights of the International Women’s Day rally was a group of mainly South American women who performed “Un violador en tu camino‘’ (A rapist in your path). In the lyrics they say ‘it’s the cops, the judges, the whole system’… and,…’the oppressive state is a macho rapist’.

However, the dominant theory behind the majority of the platform at the International Women’s Day rally was postmodernism. This broadly covers identity politics, privilege theory and intersectionality. They all have aspects to them that can be helpful in understanding the world around us, but none of them actually challenge capitalism. For that we need a materialist understanding of women’s oppression and exploitation.

The devaluing of women in society leads to greater profit for the ruling class and their greater ideological dominance. The system is rigged against women’s rights, because this underpins profit. Oppression is not just one of the many consequences of capitalism but an integral part of how it works.

Women are expected to provide enormous amounts of domestic labour, to be objectified in advertising and the sex industry, and exploited as workers. Sexist ideas justify lower wages for work seen as ‘women’s work’, and are used to put downward pressure on the wages and conditions of the whole working class. All of this helps support and perpetuate capitalist profits.

When people are seen as inferior, they are seen as less human. Dehumanisation drives gendered violence. It is an integral part of the system, which objectifies all working people by using us as tools to create profit.

This is why we need socialist feminism.