“Australia is all about mateship,” tweeted our nation’s leader merrily, his half of a jolly exchange with his clown-faced counterpart in the Old Dart. Boris and Scott, giving each other virtual high-fives across the intrawebs in brillo celebration of the date this continent was invaded, became officially terra nullius and the slaughter began. What fun!
Mateship was an interesting choice of trope for old mate Morrison to be invoking the day immediately after he was excoriated in the most publicly imaginable way by the outgoing Australian of the Year, a person who doesn’t fit the traditional definition of a “mate” and who has spent the past year leading a national conversation about how grotesquely black is the dark side of the Australian concept of mateship.
She had turned up at an official function at the Lodge, not Scott’s place. Morrison, spotting her from a distance, had called out “Grace! Come on over, Grace!” She had complied, to be polite, and had drawn the line at that. What she was thinking is her business. What she did was her right. It was, we can be sure, sincere. Why would she not feel that way about Morrison?
The prime minister has spent the past year dogging the conversation which the Australian of the Year has been leading. He has spent it gaslighting, deflecting, avoiding and protecting. He maintained, for almost the whole of last year, two men in his cabinet who stood accused of sexual violence, then welcomed back a third as his deputy (all three deny the allegations against them). He didn’t once contemplate forcing them from office.
All last year, as the Australian of the Year and an ever-expanding array of women demanded with growing volume that the disease of male violence against women be taken seriously, Morrison dogged it. But not just that; he committed his own outrages, both rhetorical and symbolic, and I don’t need to reference them. He could not have displayed his disrespect for the cause any more clearly if he had addressed a “ditch the witch” rally like his Neanderthal forebear.
When Morrison did put on the pretence of interest, he positioned the conversation as one about “women’s safety”. A women’s minister, women’s safety minister, women’s financial security minister. A women’s safety summit. A women’s safety plan, a women’s safety commission. Sometimes the description slightly shifts — from women’s safety to “violence against women”.
Notice anything missing?
It’s odd, isn’t it, when Australia is all about mateship, and mates are — we know — men, that there is no mention of men in relation to the one hot public policy issue about which Morrison cares so deeply that he has more than once publicly choked up?
Not that men never get mentioned, or centred, in the conversation. They do, well they like to centre themselves, as victims. Their mates gather around them, then, and empathise. And protect. Morrison has been at the forefront of that exercise, calling on the rule of law, declaring innocence on the word of the man accused, denouncing mob rule. Mateship in action.
Mateship has positive attributes. It is, at the same time, toxic. It suffocates and silences. It excludes.
The Australian of the Year was appointed because she had spoken out, and was encouraged to keep doing it, so she did. She inspired and was joined by countless others, survivors and allies. They spoke about violence, against women, and they added the extra and most important words: by men.
That is the scourge: violence by men. That is the conversation we must have, if we wish it, genuinely, to stop.
That being so, there could not be a weirder, more incongruent, frankly despicable moment for the national leader to be invoking mateship as the essence of what Australia is.
It is not true and never was, but if that’s all he really thinks we are, what matters in our nation’s soul, then nobody should be gracing him with a smile.
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