Feminist media manipulation

We’re all used to his cringeworthy antics, but this time our Prime Minister has excelled himself. Watch him here trying out some schoolboy humour at the expense of Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.

Asked an innocuous question during a podcast interview about gifts he’d received on his travels, Albo launched into a nudge-nudge-wink-wink routine about the melons Takaichi had given him - moving cupped hands in front of his chest, in case anyone missed the point. His interviewer, Nikki Osborne, was happy to run with it: “She just came in looking like Pamela Anderson?”

This was all sleazy Albo’s own work - totally unprompted, unlike the Kylie Minogue “shag” line later in the same interview, which at least came off the back of Osborne’s sexy banter. The Kylie line was juicy enough to make headlines from London to Los Angeles.

That’s what should embarrass our media. The Kylie line made the world sit up, yet here was a Prime Minister who self-styles as a feminist ally, choosing to mime a foreign leader’s breasts on camera - a leader who happens to be the head of government of an important trading partner. You’d think that would be the story.

It wasn’t. Most of our mainstream media has ignored it entirely.

The reason isn’t hard to find. Albanese is Labor, and most of our media is not so quietly rooting for Labor. So, it turns out the feminist media’s outrage isn’t actually about protecting women - it’s about who’s doing the offending. It’s been left almost entirely to Sky News and The Australian to point out the obvious - that a Coalition Prime Minister who mimed a foreign leader’s breasts on camera would have been finished by lunchtime.

What interests me isn’t really the story about melons, or Kylie Minogue, or a PM having a midlife crisis, but rather how “believe women” and “call out sexism” turn out to have an asterisk next to them - *unless it’s politically inconvenient.

That asterisk has shown up everywhere I’ve looked this past month - not only in the reflexive media outrage machine, sitting selectively idle when it comes to Albo’s inanities.

There was also Jenna Price’s provocative column in the Sydney Morning Herald entitled: “Think the family court is a disaster now? Hanson would make it worse.” Price, an old-school, ranting feminist, seems rattled that Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party is surging in the polls. Hanson is one of the very few politicians in Australia willing to say out loud what feminism has done to our Family Court - where a tsunami of domestic violence allegations is used, mainly by mothers, to gain the upper hand in custody proceedings. I’ve spent years documenting exactly this, through interviews with police, law professors, former Family Court judges, prosecutors and lawyers - most recently in my Substack piece on the Domestic Violence Triage System.

Price is convinced Hanson’s policies would bring “far more stress and pain” for families. Here’s her idea of balanced commentary on the issue: Hanson’s push for equal time with kids, Price writes, “would be fine if they stopped beating the mother of those kids.” Note the “if” - which amounts to an unproven allegation against every father in Australia. That’s not analysis. That’s bigotry.

And what’s her evidence for dismissing Hanson’s assertion that domestic violence orders get used tactically to cut fathers out of their kids’ lives? None. Price doesn’t rebut it. She just declares it doesn’t exist - case closed.

This is the Sydney Morning Herald, mind you - the paper whose current marketing slogan is “Here’s to Reason.” That’s a process which usually requires considering evidence. I spent over a decade writing for this paper, and that used to mean subeditors who queried every controversial claim. These days, apparently, all you need is a byline and a grievance - no factchecking required.