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Issue No. 140 | 14 June 2002 |
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Abbott's Rule of Law
Interview: Party Girl Unions: Touch One, Touch All Industrial: Condition Critical International: Innocence Lost History: Strange Bedfellows Organising: Just Say No Review: Choosing Life Beneath The Clouds Poetry: Did We Make a Big Mistake
The Soapbox The Dressing Room The Locker Room Week in Review Bosswatch
 Luke and LearnDue CreditTom's FooleryMore LathamMore Tom
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Tool Shed Affirmative Action
******** The outspoken wet in a dry, dry Liberal Party was fronting the official celebrations for this week's centenary of female suffrage. This was a nice touch from a party that has a leader who believes that the most effective way of combating unemployment is to keep women in the home. Still, in Amanda, we have living proof that its not just stylish women who get ahead in the Liberal Party. The event bought together women from all sides of politics for a group hug and the opportunity to have Vanstone lecture them on the Liberal's laissez faire approach to getting women into Parliament. Her line is that Labor's quotas system - despite increasing female MPs from less than 10 per cent to 30 per cent in a decade - is actually demeaning to women. Instead, Vanstone advocates the Liberal approach of putting advertisements in newspapers trying to drum up interest in the glamorous life of a party hack. What she doesn't explain is that this is the strategy that drew Pauline Hanson into public life. Lesson, your recruitment materials should not end up wrapping fish and chips. But back to those week's 'celebration' of suffrage. To mark the occasion one would have expected some sort of ground-breaking announcement that casts the battle of equality forward to deal with the complexities of the modern world. Paid maternity perhaps? Or affordable workplace childcare? A system of industrial laws that provide security to families? So what did Amanda come up with? A major public artwork to commemorate the sisterhood. Now we at Workers online have nothing against the yarts, but to hold this out as a tangible recognition of the suffragettes is an insult nto the political pioneers who paved the way for people like Vanstone to enter public life. Then again, insults to the sisterhood seem to be her stock in trade. Take her 'radical plan' to overhaul the welfare system that she's cooked up with the Mad Monk. The idea is to knock thousands of social security and get them back onto the 'employment' list so they can access the more arduous unemployment benefits. The plight of the permanently impaired is a real one, but to simply cut back the support for the most needy in society has just one effect -shifting the onus of care back to their families - and in particular to women. And who could forget her time as Education Minister, when she promoted the spread of full fees, on the grounds that allowing students to "invest in themselves" was policy in the interests of low-income families. Her stewardship of the portfolio, also led to her being immortalised in the book ' Cooking With Australian Nuts' by noted Ipswich chef Bernard a la King Dowling .The Amanda Vanstone Lettuce Salad (which has gone a tad stale since last weekend) Take four lettuce leaves and feed them to students and the unemployed. (Serves 4). Thoroughly abuse anyone who has not enough money to put decent food on the table or who blow all their income on food and rent rather than sending their children to private schools. Like all Liberal Party initiatives it all comes down to one issue: money. Their's is a philosophy that works for those who already have the power in society by starting with a notion of equality that ignores the vast gulf in opportunity that has already existed. So the son of a millionaire should have exactly the same opportunities as the daughter of a single mum on welfare and any policy setting that attempts to help the latter along is an affront to the free market. When you look at the powerful through a gender lens it doesn't take long to conclude that the Tory agenda is inherently sexist. By the end of the week Vanstone was in danger of choking on her own rhetoric. She asserted that we will have reached full equality when we have female politicians as mediocre as men. Memo Amanda: true equality may closer than you think
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