loading . . . The attempt to punish Grace Tame tells us everything about how we treat women who speak up Five years ago this week, Brittany Higgins sat across from Lisa Wilkinson on _The Project_ and told Australia what had happened to her inside Parliament House.
She didn’t know then what it would cost her. She didn’t know the years of trials, retrials, defamation suits, and character assassination that would follow. She only knew that she could not stay silent anymore.
That interview, aired on 15 February 2021, cracked something open in Australian public life. It was not just a conversation about sexual violence, but a reckoning with the expectation that women who survive should be grateful, quiet, and forever palatable.
Five years on, we have watched that reckoning be used against both her and Grace Tame. In March that year, thousands of women flooded the streets in the March4Justice. Grace Tame stood alongside them. Together, these women dared to be more than their suffering. The response, then and now, tells us everything.
Last week, Grace Tame spoke at a protest in Sydney against the state visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog. She led the crowd in a chant: “From Gadigal to Gaza, globalise the intifada.” The word _intifada_ is Arabic, meaning “uprising” or “shaking off.” To many in the Palestinian solidarity movement, it represents resistance. To many in the Jewish community, particularly eight weeks after the devastating Bondi Beach terrorist attack that killed 15 Australians, it evokes something far more traumatic and threatening. Both of these truths can exist simultaneously. Language is not neutral, and context is everything.
What followed was entirely predictable. The outrage machine cranked into high gear. Politicians from across the conservative spectrum, including One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce, demanded Tame be stripped of her 2021 Australian of the Year honour. Rebel News, whose Australian face is convicted family violence perpetrator Avi Yemeni, launched a petition to have her stripped of the award and criminally charged. Israel’s deputy foreign minister called her behaviour “absolutely outrageous.” The calls to prosecute her for inciting violence came thick and fast. Social media did what social media does to women who refuse to perform compliance, it turned feral.
Tame, characteristically, didn’t flinch. “In the pursuit of justice, proportion, fairness, and truth, I refuse to be silent,” she wrote. “I am not the story.”
She’s right. She is not the story. And yet here we are, making her the story, again.
Let us be honest about what is happening. The people loudest in their calls to strip Tame of a badge she earned for her courage in surviving, speaking out about child sexual abuse, and changing laws that had silenced victims, are not people who have historically shown particular concern for the women Grace Tame has spent her life protecting. The Australian of the Year Award was given to her for bravery that has not diminished. The work that earned it has not been undone. A chant at a protest does not erase years of advocacy that changed lives.
The deeper question this incident forces us to ask is what exactly do we expect of the women we honour? Are Australian of the Year recipients meant to be moral mannequins frozen in the precise moment of their acceptable suffering, displayed on a shelf, only permitted to speak about approved topics in approved tones? Because that is the logic being applied here. Grace Tame is celebrated when she is the victim. She is punished when she is the activist.
This is a pattern we know well. It is the same impulse that spent years vilifying Brittany Higgins. It is the same cultural reflex that told women their stories were welcome only within tightly managed borders brave enough to be useful, but never so brave as to make the powerful uncomfortable.
The irony is crushing. Bridget McKenzie said that Grace Tame should be prosecuted by police for inciting hatred, in the same breath as saying that removing “a little badge” from Tame’s lapel won’t change the fact that she is a leader and she is absolutely right. It won’t. Because the bravery that made Grace Tame worthy of that honour is not stored in the award. It lives in who she is. You cannot revoke courage.
We live in precarious times. Words carry histories. The pain of Australia’s Jewish community is real and deserves to be held with care. The suffering of Palestinians is also real and deserves to be seen. These are not competing truths. But stripping a sexual abuse survivor of a national honour for exercising her right to protest on the say-so of partisan media, outrage politicians, and a foreign government, is not how a democracy navigates complexity. It is how it silences dissent.
Grace Tame never promised to be comfortable. She promised to be honest. And five years after women marched through every capital city in this country demanding to be heard, we are still asking them to choose between the two. To be brave enough to survive, but not so brave as to inconvenience us. To share their pain, but keep their politics to themselves. They won’t. Tame won’t.
And if that makes powerful people uncomfortable — good. That’s the point. Grace Tame knows it. And no petition, no politician, and no foreign government gets to take that from her.
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Brittany HigginsGrace Tamewomen in politics
by Rita Nasr
5 hours ago
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