Abbott likes women around him, so do I. They are smarter. Like Ramjan, they are more generous, kinder and emotionally honest. Ramjan built houses of bricks in her career, Abbott a house of sticks.

In law, good character means, among other things, that what such a person says about a matter is more likely to be believed. If Ramjan says she was intimidated, surrounded by fists, then I believe her. If Abbott could not recall it, then I would have believed that, too. When he changed his mind and said it did not happen, I believe Barbara.

The Prime Minister nailed Abbott to the wall this week. We have all done stupid things. Men of character apologise and move on. They don't hide from the fog of the past and suddenly remember. I have been accused of living in a glass house of misogyny and sexism myself. When I appeared with Penny Wong on Q&A, I whispered to her that we had something in common. She turned to me quickly - ''We both love beautiful women''. She laughed, I think.

Abbott could not laugh when Gillard stripped him of all his emperor penguin's clothes in the chamber. One thing he could do is get dressed, get on his bicycle and cycle down to Barbara Ramjan's house and apologise.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/gillard-brought-down-the-house-20121013-27jmn.html#ixzz29FqMz3MQ

So the media wants a context. How about contexts — plural? There is never a single context in politics. The contexts are always a complex recipe of sub-texts and alternative agendas. I can walk, talk and chew gum simultaneously. It would appear that the mainstream media can’t ― or won’t.

How about a media now so involved in a 24 hour, or less, story time-zone that they no longer look at bigger pictures. Why? Such analyses either don’t fit in with the desired agenda and direction of the media organisation for whom they work; or many media workers are now suffering from a kind of media driven attention deficit disorder; or, in any story, it’s too difficult and time-consuming to explain the combination of contexts that drive any narrative.

The mainstream media had their ‘Alan Jones moment’ last week. They still appear to be in some state of shock. Haven’t we all been alternatively amused and outraged at the apparent discomfiture of the mainstream media as we see them scramble about to try and justify why their supposed analysis of the Prime Minister’s speech was so off the mark? Why was it that ordinary people have stated how wrong the media is? How is it that her speech has resonated not only in Australia, but around the world? How is it that her speech is now ranked among the great defining speeches of an Australian political leader ― one that will be remembered long after we say Peter who? How is it that her speech has become a viral on-line must-see? How did we get it so wrong?

http://www.independentaustralia.net/2012/business/media-2/the-contexts-of-julia-gillards-speech/

Gillard presented herself as a political leader who is attacked because of her gender. More seriously, the lead attack-dog is Tony Abbott, the Leader of the Opposition and, as such, the alternative prime minister. According to the Prime Minister, she hears ''misogyny, sexism every day from this Leader of the Opposition''.

The message is clear. All that is standing between a civilised society, in which women play their proper role, and rampant woman-hating is the continuation of a Labor government. Yet such a message to overseas audiences is much more negative than talking down the Australian economy.

The facts are obvious. Women occupy senior roles in politics, business, the judiciary, medicine, law, even sections of the clergy. Labor's Gillard is Australia's first female prime minister. If the Coalition wins next year's election, the Liberal Party's deputy leader, Julie Bishop, will become the most senior female Coalition minister ever.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/shortsighted-see-hate-at-every-turn-20121015-27mx9.html#ixzz29PEU9VCb
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Gerard, of course cannot see the fact that the prime Minister speech was directed at Tony Abbott who in his wisecrack mode attacked Gillard as being sexist and misogynist... Having a female Prime Minister shows that AUSTRALIA  IS BIG ENOUGH to have female accepted as equal, except for a few male chauvisnist pigs still trying hard to bring down the tone of the country and one of them pigs is Tony Abbott, with reservation, that he selects his female targets and has a coterie of female bodyguards to protect his budgies... 

I don't know if Gerard Henderson is a sexist person and I don't think so but he certainly is a conservative who has never understood the value of a lot of things, nor has he understood the threat of global warming. Tony Abbott has been scorching the earth beneath Julia Gillard's feet with promises of Armageddon and such and the only devil we've had is ... Tony Abbott...
come on on, Gerard, give dues to Gillard...
Abbott is an iddiott

Julia Gillard demonstrated a lack of commonsense when she lambasted Tony Abbott over his attitude towards women, says Peter Reith. You can't make outrageous claims and then slip away as if nothing was said.

After the intensity of last week's debate on sexism, things have quietened down, but that will not disguise the damage done to Labor's standing.

You can't make claims and then not back them up, because accusations that can't be substantiated are worthless. In fact, they can come back to bite the person who makes the initial baseless claim.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4313780.html?WT.svl=theDrum

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Well YES, I hope the comments would come back to bite the person who made the initial baseless claim... BECAUSE IT WAS TONY ABBOTT WHO FIRST ACCUSED THE PRIME MINISTER OF BEING SEXIST AND MISOGYNIST... Let's not reinvent the wheel here... And Tony knows this, but he's letting his coterie of ning- nongs like you, Peter Reith, and the Canberra press gallery — a conga line of Tony's arse lickers — to tell more lies and more lies and more lies...

And as far as the ABC is concerned, it's f%$#@^&ed in the head of management to let people like Peter Reith have their GLARING-IN-YOUR-FACE LIES published. Would the ABC let any pathological liar spruik any crappo on its site? No! So why is the ABC letting Reith tells his porkies with impunity when the fellow has been shown to lie and and lie and lie over and over again...

Enough is enough... Check you F&^%$#ing bloody facts.

Remind me again who it is that has disengaged?

This mindset (that voters are disengaged) has become so ingrained that even when "the public" does openly and obviously enter the discussion, the reaction from the political class is not one of welcome, but of anger and condescension.

Look what happened when people took to various social media platforms and criticised coverage of the Prime Minister's attack on Tony Abbott's sexism. How did the media react?

First, a murmuration of journalists chose to pretty much ignore the speech itself, deciding that the resignation of Peter Slipper was the more important story and therefore gave it all the front pages and bulletin leads.

Then, when people went onto Facebook, their blogs, and Twitter and complained that the media were reacting like a bunch of pre-programmed hacks locked in a self-regarding embrace inside a room of facing mirrors - that is, when they dared to express dissatisfaction with the media's coverage - leading journalists slapped them down.

Social media, they said, is not representative. It is an echo-chamber. It is full of disaffected whingers who are probably all lefties anyway, completely out of sync with the views of "real Australians". It is full of trolls who lack the insight and experience of us professionals.

The Australian, as usual, was the most contemptuous:

The twitterati are, of course, entitled to their views but the Government's problem is that it dips into this leftist, activist echo chamber and seeks its validation, encouraging itself down a futile path.

Some patronised.

"For the rest of the country, it was a week about Julia Gillard finally hitting back," wrote Laura Tingle.

"In Canberra, it was much more complicated."

Somebody had to understand "the context", she sighed.

Katharine Murphy told us:

But now the audience not only selects the representatives it wants, but the facts it wants," and that "If you strip out the context...we had the PM in a plain-speaking moment.

Lenore Taylor joined the chorus:

If you forgot the context, didn't over-scrutinise the substance and just saw a powerful woman calling out sexism and saying she had had enough, it was arresting.

Even that paragon of even-handedness, Piers Akerman, picked up the theme:

...there has been no attempt to place her remarks in context in the void of cyberspace.

"Context", apparently, can only be one thing and can only be defined by the professionals. Too complicated for mere voters.

You could imagine them all standing up at Gettysburg and saying, "Nice speech, Mr Lincoln, but we need to understand it in the context of your wider views on graveyards."

It was weird to watch.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4317978.html?WT.svl=theDrum

see also: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/17/difference-between-sexism-and-misogyny

The context was that Tony Abbott first accused Julia Gillard of being sexist and misogynist... That's the only relevant context... Julia hit back .... and about time too.

AFTER making headlines across the world with her scathing speech about misogyny, Julia Gillard is back in the international news for falling over "spectacularly" during a trip to India.
 
The Australian prime minister had just laid a wreath at a Gandhi memorial in New Delhi on Wednesday when she fell in front of the cameras. Gillard was unhurt and immediately declared she was "fine", despite falling face first when her heel caught on soft grass.
 
Laughing it off, she told a male journalist that he might not appreciate "the logistics" of wearing heels on grass, reports The Daily Telegraph. "If you wear a heel it can get embedded in soft grass," she explained. “And then when you pull your foot out, the shoe doesn't come – and then the rest of it is as you saw."
 
Gillard has a history of losing her shoes, most notably as she was being whisked away from protesters at a function in Canberra in January. Her footwear later turned up on eBay.

Read more: http://www.theweek.co.uk/asia-pacific/49630/australian-pm-julia-gillard-falls-head-over-heels-india-video#ixzz29gzxpv5S

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If my memory is correct, even Rattus the First was prone to loosing his footing... And it's my privilege to say that Julia's high heel being stuck in the grass was preferable to being stuck in someone's arse, such as Tony's, who nonetheless got his derriere booted to the other side of the misogynist kingdom...

That metaphor is the blame game. Labor has become the master of blaming other people for its own blunders. Its blame-game politics have now reached an implausible, almost farcical extreme unworthy of our first woman Prime Minister.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/misogyny-tactic-will-backfire/story-e6frg6zo-1226494621560

------------------------

And then one hits pay wall... Thank god and the lamppost at the end of the street for that... I sometimes don't mind Paul Kelly... But here he is missing the target by ten miles...

Now, who actually raised the issue of sexism and misogyny in parliament? Who accused the Prime Minister of being sexist and misogynist while doing windmill impressions?... It was that little rat Abbott, of course... This could not be let go by anyone, especially the Prime Minister. 

Is Abbott, this two-faced misogynous detritus, your not so-secret friend, Paul?...

Meanwhile whether the "misogyny affair" does harm to Labor or not is irrelevant at this stage, since all the media seems to be hell-bent to kill Labor, at every turn... Even on this issue, to the point of saying the social media does not have the "context"... What crap. Labor is attacked not so much because it's doing things wrong but because the media, especially the Merde-och press, want Abbott to rule the roost so they can pull his strings to make him sing — but the media cannot do the same to Julia. And that really peeves (notice the use of a polite word) the media... And I have rarely seen Julia blame anyone else for "blunders"... 

Blunders? What blunders?... Craig Thomson? Peter Slipper?... Julian Assange? Refugees?  Licking the arse of the US?... Israel?  Most of these blunders are actually bipartisan blunders. Look at bugalug Tonicchio promising to the Aussie morons out-there to turn back the boats — when a captain's dog would know this would amount to piracy!!...

Tony is a dangerous idiot! One wonders what idiocy he will come up with next... Well one does not have to go far, and yet again he pushed a pram of ill-winded intent uphill.

Beyond this there are two main relative types of dealing with social politics... Labor as a rule tends to solve problem with money "redistribution" so that everyone can have a life... This is not easy to manage in some financial climate... The Liberals tend to create problems they make appear like solutions but are illusionary for most, by sucking money out of the some average pockets and transferring it into a rich's pocket, while taking a fee (surplus)... and telling greed is in our best interest... Look at the baby bonus... Rattus the First's claim to fame. Soon after this doonah feat, he jacked up the cost of education to a point which one would need twenty baby bonuses to pay for it... devilishly clever...

Costello was lazy... while his government was collecting piles of cash from robbing workers during a time of excellent trading conditions (not due to his do-nothing skill but to Chinese demands), he did bugger all in infrastructure investments, apart from stashing the loot into a future fund and creating indecent surpluses... with the idea the cash cow was going to survive into the sunset... It did not. The cow got killed by the Global Financial Crisis in which some of Costello's mates like Greenspan told mega-porkies about the status of banking, while banks were robbing each other (and us) blind...

What about global warming? Are you aware of the thingster?

It appears not... Paul Kelly, on this occasion, you are as useful as a sheet of ordinary plywood in the rain: it delaminates...

see toon at top...

By ABC's Scott Stephens (religion[s] and Ethics) Note: the "s" at the end of religion has been added by Gus.

As I recently suggested in a conversation with Waleed Aly, it is precisely the rather promiscuous way that Julia Gillard and many on the left have been throwing around the term "misogynist," along with our inability to talk intelligibly about sexual difference and complementarity, that creates the context within which the kind of chauvinism and sexist innuendo employed by Tony Abbott can proliferate.

Likewise, to use a different example, it is the smug dismissal of every moral objection to marriage equality out of hand as somehow "homophobic" or "bigoted" that cultivates the unreconstructed bigotry of the likes of Cory Bernardi and Jim Wallace.

The left ("self-righteous as war," to gloss Les Murray) and the right ("brimming with resentment") are thus both complicit in our current political deadlock; and things are certainly not helped by the sub-rational stampede of social media, which thunders indiscriminately, fecklessly from one glitzy cause to the next.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-10-25/stephens-more-discrimination2c-please/4334142?WT.svl=theDrum

How many times does one has to remind people out there that the term misogynist and sexist came from Mr Abbott? The left did not throw the term out of context... as it was Tony Abbott who accused the prime Minister of being sexit and misogynist to which the prime Minister responded as she should have.