Why on earth anyone is still soliciting opinions from former prime minister and onion fetishist Tony Abbott I have no idea, but nevertheless here we are.
This morning during his regular slot on Sydney‘s 2GB radio (WHY have we given him a regular slot ANYWHERE?), Abbott and host Ray Hadley had a go at a recent suggestion by the Australian Human Rights Commission that the government try to lead by example and encourage a more even gender balance in the companies they work with.
All that noncommittal language you just read – “encourage”, “lead by example”, “suggestion” – that’s not me trying to tone it down; that’s exactly what the thing was. A gentle suggestion that the Australian government look into asking the organisations they contract to “demonstrate efforts to improve gender balance“, with the end goal of achieving a 40:40:20 (male / female / unspecified) split. I.e., just try.
But because any suggestion, however mild, that things could possibly be improved on the gender front is taken by a certain subset of blokes as the worst possible insult to their character, Abbot and Hadley were not keen on this idea.
“There are lots of things we can’t change but one thing we should never do is fail to call out politically correct rubbish,” Abbott said, clearly high on his own unfounded sense of self-righteousness.“There is a lot of politically correct rubbish around. This latest attempt by the Human Rights Commission to start yet again to dictate to business how they should do their jobs shows why the AHRC has long outlived any usefulness it might have, and we just don’t need this body.”
When Hadley suggested that tomorrow’s headline should be “thanks very much for the advice“, Abbott finished the sentence for him:
“But pull your head in. Exactly right.“Obviously we have to give women a fair go, but some of this stuff sounds like it’s just anti-men.”
Hadley went on to spout some steaming garbage about how “young ladies” coaching school sporting teams do their best “but they don’t have the same expertise in certain areas as they have in other areas, it’s just a fact of life,” and I assume the two then nodded sagely at one another across the desk while fiddling with themselves through their pockets, painfully aroused by their own wisdom.
In a statement released today, the AHRC quite rightly points out that working towards gender equality in the workforce has a bunch of positive outcomes, and is remarkably easy to do – one of the AHRC’s suggestions is that organisations have a crack at improving the gender balance of recruitment short lists.
There’s nothing in the proposal that suggests hiring quotas, or implies that the government shouldn’t work with companies that fall short of gender equality targets; it’s literally the softest and least aggressive way to ask that maybe, possibly, if everyone could make a tiny bit of effort, the government could attempt to be a model organisation, thereby making the workplace slightly more accepting of women and gender minorities.
God forbid.
Source: The Guardian.
Image: Getty / Stefan Postles.
