Australian state party to hold International Women’s Day event at men-only club

The Australian state of Queensland is…special. It’s sunny, and beautiful, and reliably absurd. See a ridiculous headline, say, a snake winning a fight with crocodile and then eating it? It almost certainly happened in Queensland. A drunk man making his seven-year-old drive him home? Definitely happened in Queensland. Which is why I knew, when I saw that a state party in Australia was holding its International Women’s Day event in a club that only allows men to join, that it was a Queensland story. Or an Onion story.

My first instinct was correct: Queensland’s Liberal National Party — our conservatives — are indeed holding their International Women’s Day event at Tattersall’s, Brisbane’s “oldest and most prestigious members-only club,” where women are usually only allowed if a man brings them and remembers to pack his “Partners card.”

You cannot make this shit up. You can, however, spin it as feminist. Watch as our Prime Minister Tony Abbott, the self-appointed Minister for Women (yes, really), pats his party on the back for being awesome at gender equality when grilled about the Queensland party’s choice:

I say congratulations and thank God that bastion of old fashioned chauvinism has finally collapsed like the walls of Jericho at the trumpet cry of the Liberal and National Party. Good on you.

Obviously they’ve now broken down the last barrier and they’ve made the men-only club admit women. Isn’t that fantastic. At last.

They’ve admitted women and they’ve done it on International Women’s Day because of the Liberal National … good on the Liberal National Party, smashing the glass ceiling yet again.

Gender equality! At last! And for one whole meal!

I look forward to more glass-ceiling smashing in my home country. Here’s hoping that next up they pay women fairly for one whole day, and refrain from raping women for a whole hour. Take that, sexism!

Header image (of a quote from Tony Abbott): Birdee