Notes from a National Disappointment

There is a long history of sexism in Australian politics. One has to go no further than to look at the ‘honour’ roll of the annual Ernie awards, which are awarded every year to people who make the most offensive sexist comments. Previous ‘winners’ include:

• Prime-Minister-at-the-time John Howard, who said that there was “no appropriate woman” to be Governor General (2000);
• Tony Abbott, now opposition leader, who said that paid maternity leave would happen “over his dead body” (2002);
• Still-Prime-Minister-at-the-time -why-oh-why John Howard for vetoing an ad campaign about domestic violence, arguing against paid maternity leave and wanting to change the anti-discrimination act (2004);
• New South Wales Senator Bill Heffernan, for saying that deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard was ‘deliberately barren’ and then following that up with “I won’t walk away from that…so rude, crude and attractive as it was…if you’re a leader, you’ve got to understand your community” (2007); and
• Many, many more.

To anyone who knows Australian politics, it is clear that all this offenders belong to one political party – the Liberal party, the more conservative party in Australian politics, who were in government from 1996-2007. One name that isn’t appearing on this dishonour roll is former treasurer Peter Costello, who famously said that Australian women should have one baby for themselves, one for their husband and one for their country. Understandably, a whole lot of Australian women took great offence at this.
In 2007, a new government was elected. The Australian Labor Party won in a landslide after eleven years in opposition. The Kevin ’07 campaign was, as I remember it, pretty damn inspiring, considering the country had been under Howard for so long. The Kevin Rudd government not only had some solid policy platforms, they had a pretty damned awesome woman in at 2IC in Julia Gillard, who is now the deputy Prime Minister.
Which is why I was pretty damn horrified when I saw this article [Kevin Rudd on Why Young Women Should Be Having Babies].
I thought we were past the Costello days of ‘a baby for you, a baby for your husband and a baby for the country’. But apparently not. According to Nina Funnell, the young woman who wrote this article, our Prime Minister was harping on exactly the same bandwagon. To quote her:

“Arguments were made about superannuation and the strain on healthcare. But there was a deeper message: young people (women in particular) are failing in their civic duty to reproduce. Apparently, gen Y is to blame for the inverted population pyramid.”

Now, I could go on a rant about immigration and the proliferation of ‘Fuck Off, We’re Full’ stickers in our society, which are obviously foul, but that isn’t really the point I am getting at. The point is that once again, women’s bodies are being made political. When Costello said that women should have a baby for themselves, another for their husband and another for their country, he was making the decisions that women make with their bodies a duty, rather than a personal decision. The Howard/Costello government was voted out for a reason, and I like to think that this was a big part of it.
And yet here we are, with a nationalistic notion being politicised in the female body.
Funnell goes on to talk about how Rudd spoke to some of the under-30 crowd after his speech, and, when she was introduced as a PhD student, Rudd – who was supposed to be part of the solution, not the problem – “rolled his eyes and in a terse voice lacking any sense of irony remarked that is the ‘excuse’ that ‘all’ young women are using nowadays to avoid starting families”.
Um. Yeah.
I don’t quite know how to respond to that. I’m Gen Y. I’m starting a PhD in July. I thought that was, you know, a good thing. But no, because I’m not married and I’m childless and I’m not planning on popping out kids any time soon, I am some kind of national disappointment. I’m using my education and my future career in academia as an excuse to avoid settling down and populating the country. Because it is my responsibility. Young men? Pfft. They can go off and get PhDs and have careers and do whatever. But young women? No, they must stop making excuses for their childlessness and start having kids. And because I don’t want to have kids right now, because I want to do my PhD, I am selfish and not acting in my nation’s best interest.
My body, as an intelligent young female member of Generation Y, has been politicised, and my brain has been made functionally irrelevant. And this politicisation of the female body is not restricted to Gen Y. A couple of years back, there was a photo shoot of Julia Gillard in her home. There was an empty fruit bowl on her table. Suffice to say that that empty fruit bowl and the symbolism read into it has received just about as much press time as any political coup or scandal Gillard has been involved in. And, as Ernie winner Bill Heffernan noted, this means that she cannot relate to the average Aussie mum.
Obviously male politicians can relate to that average Aussie mum much better than Gillard can, given as she has chosen career over family and all and is thus barren and unnatural. What a stunning national disappointment she is – despite the fact she is our freaking deputy PM.
It was all supposed to be different under a new government. With the Howards and the Costelloes out of power and a new, progressive government with a powerful woman like Julia Gillard in, it was all supposed to be different. But now Kevin Rudd appears to be espousing that same tired old rhetoric – that women should go forth and multiply and do their duty for their country.
There is a whole other issue here about how this rhetoric assumes that children and career are mutually exclusive, which they are clearly not. However, even if they were mutually exclusive, no one, not even the Prime Minister, has the right to tell women what they should do with their bodies. Personal decisions should not be made political. The individual human body should not be something that is conscripted into national childbearing duty. And I thought, in all the heady rush that was Kevin ’07, that the ALP government would respect that, and stop telling me that I should have babies for my country.
But I was wrong. My personal decisions are still apparently politically selfish. Because I have prioritised my brain over babies, I am still a national disappointment.