Jennifer Oriel, a recent contributor to the right wing think
tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, provided an opinion piece to the
Australian on 23 September 2015 which was breathtaking in its inaccuracy,
curiously unabashed in its misrepresentation of recent history and laughingly
inconsistent and self-defeating in is argument.
Evenso, it is still not worth paying the $4 The Australian is demanding
for the opportunity to read it, so if you are curious I recommend a search of
Google News.
The third paragraph dives deep into her argument:-
“In six short
days, the new Prime Minister has put an end to the era of female victimhood.
His ministry is brimming with women keen to make a mark on federal politics,
including the country’s first female defence minister.”
Oriel’s argument relies on the proposition that the appointment
of 5 women to the Turnbull Cabinet represents the establishment of an era where
people are appointed to Cabinet posts by virtue of their individual
merits. As a consequence, she announces
the end of the opportunity for feminists, particularly those from the “hard
left” to complain about discrimination. This is an end of the age of
victimhood. Further, she posits, the age of merit will not be the nirvana for
these hard left women that they may have anticipated. They are, of course,
bereft of the merit so ably demonstrated by the conservative members of society
so beloved of the IPA. Accordingly, they will not be troubling the current
status quo which is of course full of meritorious men and a few women who can
aspire to the great heights of their male betters - five at last count.
She illustrates the lack of merit by a discussion of that
clearly unmeritorious hard left ideologue, Gillian Triggs and the evil Julia
Gillard who launched into a diatribe about misogyny because that great
egalitarian Tony Abbot looked at his watch. She clearly did not watch the video and see the trigger.
I will not seek to defend either Triggs or Gillard. The claims of the article are just too
ridiculous to give credence to and don’t deserve to be prolonged by a
response. However, I cannot stand by and
see logic so badly mauled in the name of opinion.
The first observation is that if the appointment of 5 women
represents the end of the age of victimhood and the beginning of the age of
meritocracy, then prior to that time, the appointments were not made on
merit. Accordingly, the prior claims of
discrimination are valid. The idea of
victimhood, an invention of the right wing media, was not kept alive by leftist
complaints, but by the fact that discrimination was rife.
Secondly, if 5 women out of 24 cabinet members represents a
cabinet based on merit, all the statistics which demonstrate clearly that for twenty
years or more girls outscore boys at every level of education from preschool to
post graduate must somehow not be related to merit. (see for example ABSGender differences in educational achievement )
Thirdly, if a society which maintains a 20% and rising
gender pay gap suddenly becomes discrimination free as a result of the
appointment of 5 women to cabinet, I have misunderstood discrimination. (Pay Gap Data)
And of course, the right wing garbage bin of “minority
politics” to which she consigned the greater than 51% of our society comprising
women – herself included – should rightly have been assigned to the Liberal
Party which holds government by grace of a coalition with the National Party,
while attracting less than 35% of the popular vote. That however is not minority politics but the
age of meritocracy. If you are born to
rule you deserve to rule.
“Perhaps women
in public life should consider feeling less and thinking more, but such
dedication to logic requires evidence, mental effort and the disciplined
inhibition of emotional impulse: all anathema to hard left ideology.”
I will assume all readers were sufficiently amused by the above
paragraph which accused the rest of the world of being driven by hard line
ideology and not the logic, facts and evidence so clearly set out in her
article.
Clearly, she has nothing to gain from a meritocracy.
