Hypocritical Left fail all women
The Left have made women’s safety a partisan issue by failing to act when conservative females are attacked. By Nicolle Flint.
The following is an edited extract of the valedictory speech given by Nicolle Flint MP on 16 February.
We are a different nation and a different world compared to when I gave my first speech to this place on 31 August 2016. I am vastly different too. I rose to give my first speech as a person—a person who was a proud Australian, South Australian and Liberal, and the fourth generation of my family to serve our local community in Boothby. Today, I give my valedictory speech not as a person but as a woman, having been forced time and time again over the past seven years in this place to confront and defend the fact that I am female. This has been exceptionally challenging for me. Throughout my long and interesting career, developing policy in industry associations, as a staff member in politics, as a senior Liberal Party volunteer and as a deliberately provocative newspaper columnist at the Age — still not sure how they published me — and then the Advertiser for over three years, I was never attacked as a woman. I was never reduced to a woman.
As a newspaper columnist, the only vaguely sexist comment was a letter to the editor asking if I was writing for the Advertiser or Dolly magazine. That might be something that my fellow women in the chamber understand, because we grew up with Dolly magazine, and perhaps you have to be of a certain vintage to get the reference. Before anyone tries to suggest that perhaps the internet and social media weren't invented when I was writing columns, they were. I'm old, but I'm not quite that old. At the Age and the Advertiser, I never had to put up with the repetitive sickening, sexist, misogynistic abuse and dangerous behaviour that started in the lead-up to the 2019 election and hasn't stopped since.
At my lowest point last year, after a series of events in and around this place that you could not dream up if you tried — my 'Whipsie Chicks' Jessica Anne Howard and Larnie, understand exactly what I mean — it occurred to me that all of these things were happening to me during my time, in this place, in politics, because it's up to me, as a woman, to try to fix them for all women. So today I want to suggest a few ways we can fix things for women in public life because, as some other Chicks sang, after they'd been cancelled, 'I'm not ready to make nice, I'm not ready to back down.'
My first suggestion is: the Left of politics needs to act, and that action needs to start in this place with the Leader of the Opposition. Last March, in response to an emotional speech I gave in this place, the Leader of the Opposition told the press gallery and the Australian people that he would act when sexist and misogynist dangerous behaviour was drawn to his attention. Well, he hasn't, despite further speeches I've given in this place, the letters I have written to him, and the numerous newspaper reports, especially since last December when online attacks on me reached a disgusting new low of sexism and misogyny.
It's tempting to describe the Leader of the Opposition with a single word, a four-letter word. It begins with L and ends with R. But that would be unparliamentary, so I won't. Instead, I call on him again to finally show some leadership on the issue of women's safety in public life, because it's not just me who is copping this behaviour. It's not just me who is being abused by men and some women on the Left; it's senior ABC journalists like Leigh Sales, Jane Norman and Lisa Millar, and businesswomen like Sall Grover.
I want to be very clear about the sort of behaviour that I'm talking about. Men on the Left, some of whom are public figures of influence, have done the following: stalked me; suggested I should be strangled; criticised the clothes I wear and the way I look; repeatedly called me a whiny little bitch; repeatedly called me weak, a slut, a d*** — and I apologise for the language — and much, much worse over email, online, on YouTube, on Facebook, and on Twitter. They've commented that I should be raped, grudge-f****, that I am doing sexual favours for all my male colleagues, that I should be killed, that I should kill myself, and many, many more things that I will not repeat here. These men have also consistently reminded me that I deserve everything that has happened to me.
To the Left, to GetUp, to Labor, to the unions and to the left-leaning media — you know exactly who you are — you need to finally show some leadership and put a stop to this sort of behaviour by not pretending that you will stop this sort of behaviour, because you're on the side of women, allegedly, but by actually stopping the behaviour. They have the power to do so. They have the power to lead. They have the power to stop implying that I'm the wrong kind of woman or that Senator Holly Hughes is the wrong kind of woman and that we deserve everything we get because we're Liberals and we stand up for women. If they don't, well, they're not really leaders, then, are they? I say that particularly to the Leader of the Opposition.
The second challenge that will allow women in public life to get on with their jobs is for social media companies or big tech to start to behave like corporate citizens. I did put some very colourful language in here to describe their approach, but I'm trying to maintain some standards of decency, even if they're not. We know that big tech could stop all forms of hateful abuse tomorrow if they wanted to, but we also know that they won't. Just look at their recent evidence to the Select Committee on Social Media and Online Safety. Again, I commend the member for Robertson for her incredible leadership of this committee. My submission to the select committee documents the abuse they allow on their platforms. And I will have a lot more to say about this later today when I speak on the trolling bill.
People like to say that social media is like a sewer. Experiencing the online attacks over multiple platforms, as I have since last December, I think it's more like a festering toxic sewer. But this is where I think the analogy needs to be extended. It's not so much about the sewage itself; it's about the companies that are spreading it. Big tech is the modern-day equivalent of the unregulated, greedy, big business polluters of the industrial revolution. Big tech is enabling toxic sewage to spill into the homes and the lives of innocent, hard-working Australians every single day
It took the 19th century legislators decades to clean up the waterways, the air, the streets, and public health in Britain. But they did, and lives were saved, improved and enhanced. It's the responsibility of every single person in this place to support legislation that will clean up the online sewer right now and force big tech to finally behave the same way that we demand of every corporate citizen and every business in Australia, as responsible corporate citizens. I do believe this will happen, thanks to our government and Prime Minister Scott Morrison. We are already leading the world with our online safety laws. I commend this place and all of my colleagues, Minister Paul Fletcher and the Prime Minister, for their leadership in this space.
Having seen and having personally experienced sexist and misogynistic attitudes online from other human beings, my third observation and suggestion is probably the most important. Women need all-encompassing protection from sexism and misogyny through, I think, the Sex Discrimination Act. We need to stop the abuse at the start. Women like journalists Leigh Sales, Lisa Millar, Jane Norman, Erin Molan, Natalie Barr and Van Badham, AFL player Tayla Harris and businesswoman Sall Grover should be able to do their jobs without highly sexualised abuse.
I know that women on the other side of this place, like the member for Kingston and the former member for Adelaide, Kate Ellis, copped this too. Ms Ellis devotes an entire chapter of her book, Sex, Lies and Question Time, to the online abuse of women in parliament and public roles. Ms Ellis's excellent book does a lot more than that as well. She explains how difficult it is to be a woman in this place. If you want to make it easier for your female colleagues, please read the book. It's outstanding.
This is a hard place to be a woman, whether you're a staff member, MP or senator. I want to thank most sincerely Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins and her team for their incredible work in a short period of time last year on Set the standard, the Jenkins report, which I believe will finally lead to the change that we need in this place. More broadly in society, however, women will continue to be attacked, abused, belittled, gossiped about and lied about until we have blanket protection that says it's an offence to offend, insult, humiliate and intimidate women. We know this has worked to protect other groups in our society. It's worked well. Now we need to protect women. We are half of the population. I hope everyone here today and especially those in the next parliament can give this some consideration.
My final major observation about this place is also about modern society in general. I've thought very carefully about the things that have happened to me and the things I've seen happen to others in and around this place. All of it comes back to one simple problem: a complete lack of respect for other people. This is the obvious conclusion of the less great project, the disruption of Western civilisation. They've sought to replace our institutions, our traditions and our conventions with causes that have no moral compass and no guide as how to respect your fellow human beings. The outcome is disrespect, abuse and hatred. When you replace religion and the models and ethics it has taught us with the religion of climate change, for example, when the battle of ideas is replaced with cancel culture and the lynch mob, when you tell women that we have fewer rights than men who choose to change their sex to be women, when women are abused for asserting our right to be women, when the Left celebrate being rude and disrespectful, claiming freedom of expression, when this becomes the standard, contempt creeps in, hate flourishes and society breaks down.
Nicolle Flint is the outgoing Member for Boothy in SA. She is also the co-author of three reports for the MRC on Gender and Politics. This is an edited extract of her valedictory speech to parliament. Watch the full speech online
Click here to download Gender and Politics (2015)
