Today, Australians from all walks of life, in big cities and tiny country towns, are expected to attend scores of March 4 Justice rallies as they demand action against gendered violence, sexual discrimination and the lack of federal government action on issues affecting women.
There is widespread frustration (indeed, incredulity) among women that, after millennia of discrimination and sexual tyranny, despite generations of protests, and notwithstanding decades of legislative and cultural changes to improve women’s places in workplaces and the community generally, this government still does not get it.
There is real anger, especially, about the manner in which Prime Minister Scott Morrison has handled serious allegations of rape levelled at Attorney-General Christian Porter. And there is anger, too, at Mr Morrison’s astonishing admission that he did not recognise the gravity of rape allegations by a former Liberal staffer until his wife prompted him to consider his response if such an outrage were perpetrated on his own daughters.
The March 4 Justice protests represent a critical cultural moment.Credit:Lauren Pilat
That speaks to a moral vacuum of sorts at the nation’s highest level of leadership. But the concerns raised by the March 4 Justice movement focus on issues beyond Mr Morrison’s response and his decision not to hold an independent inquiry into Mr Porter’s fitness to hold office.
It’s fair to ask where the Coalition’s female leaders are in all this. As political editor Peter Hartcher noted on Saturday, they are “all but invisible” as, behind the scenes, they engage privately in fatuous and flippant self-congratulations via a WhatsApp message network.
Late yesterday, it emerged that Mr Morrison and the Minister for the Status of Women, Marise Payne, had agreed to meet the protest organisers. Words are one thing; action matters most.
Of course, Labor is not blameless either. On Sunday news.com.au reported a Facebook group of current and former female Labor staffers had warned MPs and male staffers “accused of sexually harassing them at Parliament House that they will ‘no longer keep their secrets’“. Both sides of politics have much work to do.
These protests represent a critical cultural moment. They come in the wake of the global #MeToo movement, which highlighted the prevalence of sexual assaults. And March 4 Justice follows the extraordinary protests across the United States and in Europe in early 2017, when almost five million women turned out to denounce sexual violence and assault in the wake of Donald Trump’s inauguration as US president.
On Saturday, thousands of women rallied in central London to honour a young woman who was abducted and brutally killed on her way home at night. Women are angry that they should feel afraid walking at night, that they are disrespected and abused, that their friends (daughters, sisters, lovers and more) are raped, assaulted and murdered in their own homes.
