I’ve told you guys before that I want to be Tracey Spicer when I grow up, she has an uncanny ability to nail an issue. This country does not just have a problem with its current political leadership that is running the government, but also with its federal opposition. Because in charge of that mob is Tony Abbott, a Catholic arch-conservative global warming skeptic, contraception opposer and denier of female reproductive autonomy. Abbott would fit better in the USA with his views, is my impression of the man. He also doesn’t seem very bright somehow. Tony Abbott has long been recognized to have a problem with female voters, they don’t like him, don’t vote for him, mistrust him and find him generally creepy, as Tracey Spicer again points out in this article :
In the Australian Women’s Weekly that year, Helen McCabe wrote, “On the problem of businesses paying women on average 16 per cent less than they pay men in the same jobs, Tony is unaware there is still a problem”.
This was the same interview in which he described a woman’s virginity as “the greatest gift you can give someone”.
As Virginia Hausseger opined on the SMH website, “Abbott’s logic suggests a female’s most precious and important asset, above all else, is her sex”.
The next month, he made the assumption that only women do the housework.
“What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing is that… their own power bills when they switch the iron on are going to go up,” he said.
Then there’s abortion.
Ethicist Leslie Cannold remembers a speech from 2004 when Mr Abbott described it as “an objectively grave matter [that] has been reduced to a question of the mother’s convenience”.
During the RU486 debate he shouted, “Mr Speaker, we have a bizarre double standard in this country where someone who kills a pregnant woman’s baby is guilty of murder, but a woman aborts an unborn baby is simply exercising choice”.
Essentially, Abbott is a Christian fossil who sees women as birthing machines, cooks and domestic servants, and women can tell this, and that’s why so many don’t vote for him. I’d say that is a feature, not a bug, because the last thing this country needs is a Cro Magnon like Abbott running the country, we are punished enough by the current Labor government, which, just as in the USA, while being a general disappointment and far from ideal, is still by far the preferable alternative.
I ♥ Tracey Spicer !
