loading . . . Sussan Ley didn’t just lose the numbers. She lost to a Coalition culture that has long loathed women Haven’t you heard? Sussan Ley’s leadership demise has nothing to do with sexism. Don’t listen to the bleating from the “handbag hit squad.”
This was the gist shared by _Sky News_ reporter Peta Credlin last night, citing that a number of high-profile Liberal women including Jane Hume, Sarah Henderson and Jacinta Price are backing Angus Taylor and a leadership spill.
“Let’s be clear, it’s not misogyny that’s sealing her fate,” Credlin declared, matter-of-factly.
“It’s electoral arithmetic. No bleating by the handbag hit squad can alter the iron law of politics: the numbers are all that count. Presiding over a collapse in the primary vote from 32 per cent to just 18 per cent this week would be lethal for anyone.”
It’s funny to me that Credlin can’t see the internalised sexism embedded in her own words. “Handbag hit squad”, a term devised (likely by Credlin herself) during Tony Abbott’s prime ministership, was used to mock Labor women who condemned the Coalition’s record on gender representation. Because the term was most frequently wielded by the Coalition’s short supply of female ministers at the time, like Julie Bishop and Kelly O’Dwyer, it was clearly perceived by the Liberals as clever, ironic and witty. And not at all sexist.
Of course it’s sexist. It’s a term designed to belittle women, trivialise their perspective, and dismiss legitimate structural inequality as hysterical noise. More than a decade on, that inequality very much persists in the Coalition.
Women who sit in the Coalition today have built their careers in a culture that loathes women.
They have sat through a myriad of sexual misconduct allegations levelled against male colleagues. They lived through the proven rape of a female colleague in Parliament House by one of their own men. They heard Tony Abbott address “housewives of Australia” and promise cheaper power so ironing would be easier. They watched Scott Morrison tell Australian women they were “lucky not to be met with bullets” for protesting against the country’s #MeToo cover-ups. They saw Peter Dutton send a text referring to a female journalist as a “mad f***ing witch.”
And let’s be honest: these examples are the tip of the iceberg.
What’s also striking is how quickly “electoral arithmetic” becomes the tidy excuse whenever a woman fails but rarely when a man does. Male leaders preside over catastrophic losses all the time and are afforded time, loyalty, and endless fodder about “rebuilding” anew. Women on the other hand? They get told the numbers don’t lie, as though those numbers exist in a vacuum untouched by culture, sabotage, or a party room that never wanted them there in the first place.
The idea that sexism conveniently switches off the moment a woman ascends to leadership is laughable. The sexism merely mutates. It becomes quieter and hides behind phrases like “unity,” and “viability.” But it’s still there, narrowing the margin for error for women to almost nothing.
And let’s not pretend Angus Taylor is some electoral saviour waiting in the wings. This is not a party rallying around a visionary alternative, they’re defaulting to muscle memory. A white man feels safer, he feels familiar. And they’re so determined to feel comfortable that they’ll blatantly ignore the electorate telling them definitively that they want something different.
Of course, we’ve seen numerous talented Coalition women leave as a result of insidious culture: Julie Bishop, Kelly O’Dwyer, Julia Banks, Ann Sudmalis, Elise Archer and Karen Andrews, to name just a handful.
But the women in the Coalition who have stayed, who continue to weather a culture of toxicity that has never looked remotely like changing, have understandably become part of the resistance themselves.
Sussan Ley has had less than a year in the role. She has been undermined by her own party room at every turn, robbed of the space and authority required to make any meaningful impact. Do I think she’s been effective? No. But has she genuinely had the capacity to be? That’s a hard no too.
In Julia Gillard’s famous words: “The reaction to being the first female prime minister does not explain everything about my prime ministership, nor does it explain nothing about my prime ministership… and it is for the nation to think, in a sophisticated way, about those shades of grey.”
Misogyny isn’t everything in Sussan Ley’s demise. But it isn’t nothing. And where Gillard was mostly subjected to sexism from the opposition and the public, Ley has faced the hard barricades of misogyny from her own party.
Women can be sexist. It really is that simple. And the fact that so many Coalition women are publicly backing Angus Taylor isn’t surprising in a political culture that has never given them reason to believe they could be anything more than lackeys to men.
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Angus TaylorPeta CredlinSussan LeyThe Coalition
by Tarla Lambert-Patel
1 day ago
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