Jennifer Oriel and Female Victimhood

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.

MalcolmTurnbull Ends the Era of Female Victimhood

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.