Yesterday afternoon my Facebook newsfeed was on fire. Julia Gillard called Tony Abbott a misogynist during an impressive 15 minute oratory performance that achieved the seemingly impossible: it momentarily wiped the smirk from Tony Abbott’s face.
If you haven’t seen it you can re-live it below:
Comments from Facebook that accompanied links to the speech appearing on my feed include:
“BOOOM!!”
“Gillard taking Abbott to pieces over his misogyny and blatant hypocrisy”
“I haven’t been massively impressed by Julia Gillard’s speeches that I’ve seen in the past but she has a point and is on a roll here. Abbott walked right into this one.”
“Snnnnnap! Take that, you fucker”
“Just amazing”
“I don’t think I’ve ever liked her so much until now. BOSS LADY.”
Pedestrian, in one of our forays into the political, posted the speech on the site which was shortly joined followed by 393 Facebook likes – a large amount for any story published on a site whose bread and butter is pop culture.
As I made my way home on Tuesday evening, the points on the scorecard (according to Social Media, at least) clearly stated: Gillard 1, Abbott 0. I imagined the headlines across the morning papers: “Misogynist” they’d cry, with a picture of a tamed Tony and a triumphant Julia who stood up for women everywhere.
What a difference 12 hours can make.
The Sydney Morning Herald‘s lead story on the Gillard vs. Abbott Misogyny stoush, penned by their Political and International Editor Peter Hartcher, was titled: ‘We expected More of Gillard’. The article questions the validity of Gillard’s take-down of the Opposition Leader, considering her support of Peter Slipper.
Slipper’s derogatory comments about women made in private text messages provided the catalyst for igniting this debate around who in Parliament is the greater misogynist.
In Hartcher’s article he claims that Gillard “confronted a stark choice yesterday – the political defence of her parliamentary numbers, or the defence of the principle of respect for women. She chose to defend her numbers. She chose power over principle.”
“Dude, have you talked to a woman in the last 12 hours?”
The fact Slipper resigned from parliament at 7pm last night, after narrowly surviving a vote of no confidence, didn’t do Team Julia or Labor any favours.
But what of Julia vs. Tony and the great misogynist speech of 2012? When you take Gillard’s speech out of the context in which it was delivered it is impressive and unrelenting – inspiring even. Watching it I found myself with chills down my spine and moved by the sheer force of its delivery and its message.
But does the speech lose its sheen if it is delivered in defence of someone who said, in reference to vaginas: “They look like mussel (sic) removed from its shell. Look at a bottle of mussel meat. Salty c**ts in brine”, and then called Sophie Mirabella (she of the Q&A death stare) “an ignorant botch (sic)”?
I have no doubt that Julia Gillard believed in everything she said in her speech. But was she merely deflecting the glare away from Peter Slipper for her political gain? While they’ve never been summarised so effectively as they were in Gillard’s speech yesterday, Tony Abbott’s women issues have been widely discussed.
The majority of the social media and global praise for Gillard’s speech separates it entirely from its context.
Does it matter whether Abbott or Slipper is a greater misogynist?
Can you attack one and defend the other?
Is Julia Gillard a hero or a hypocrite?
Photo by Graham Denholm for Getty Images
