Memo Hanson, for many it’s not easy to leave
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Speaking about family violence, Pauline Hanson says ″women can lose their cool as well″ (″Anger at Hanson’s ‘two-way street’ call″, 23/7). Yes, of course, we can all lose our cool, and yes women can be violent – to children, to other women and to men. But there would be very few men who live in fear of their women partners, very few men who spend their day wondering what their partner will be like when he comes home – whether this will be a time when he is violent or threatening or abusive, when he doesn’t like what she cooks or how she behaves. Yet that is the reality for far too many women. Women who work hard at keeping their family together, who forgive their partner for the violence, women who know that if they try to leave that is when he will become extremely dangerous. It is not easy just to leave. Tell it to the many women who either were killed or subjected to further violence, abuse and stalking after they left. Family violence and its causes should never be used to achieve cheap political headlines.
Marg D’Arcy, Rye
No details is the default position
In her domestic violence can be a ″two-way street″ comments on a Brisbane radio station, Pauline Hanson again displayed a total lack of knowledge, understanding and empathy. However, just as telling and typical, was after describing DV as a ″scourge″, she said, ″I’m not going to go into detail.″ This is Hanson’s default position. Why? Because she is unable to give any detail. It’s an inconvenience, it’s too difficult. She has somehow made a 30-year career by avoiding detail, by trumpeting stereotypes and bigotry so outrageous that they deflect genuine attention and scrutiny.
It would be interesting to see how a ″would-be″ prime minister, would go into ″detail″ around federal portfolios such as: health, education, defence, home and foreign affairs, treasury and finance, industry, innovation and science.
Craig Jory, Glenroy, NSW
Little surprise in comments
We can condemn Pauline Hanson’s comment that domestic violence is a ″two-way street″, but we should not be surprised. In 2019, she said that while one woman was dying each week at the hands of her partner, 21 men were committing suicide, blaming the family law system for ″killing dads″. Men were being forced to pay too much child support, she said, suggesting this was a factor in men’s suicides. Violent men are emboldened by these baseless and irresponsible claims by Hanson that women are as much to blame as men. They can also be a factor in dissuading women from leaving a violent relationship.
Neil Hudson, East Melbourne
Feeding the manosphere with grievance
Pauline Hanson’s recent public pronouncement about domestic violence serves only to highlight her adroitness at perpetuating commonly held tropes about a complex subject. The negative effect of this is that her ill-informed and dangerous commentary becomes fodder for the manosphere of misogynist grievance.
What Hanson and others don’t understand – as promulgated by survivor Orly Lavee (Comment, 22/7) – is that “The mechanics of abuse are not symmetrical” and underpinned by the common denominator of coercive control. That is, whatever manifestation of abuse the woman is being subjected to, but often times multiple types of abuses at once.
Moreover, when police become involved at the pointy end of a DV incident it is acutely apparent of how readily a victim can be misidentified as a perpetrator (ie due to her heightened emotional distress and seeming ‘incoherence’) and concomitantly, how police can unwittingly collude with the actual perpetrator (due to a fundamental lack of understanding of the mechanics of coercive control).
Jelena Rosic, Mornington
Danger can follow women out the door
Pauline Hanson seems to suggest women can just avoid domestic violence by simply leaving the relationship. The trouble is that women are often actually in more danger when they leave, the abuser can just become angrier, and track them down.
Terry Kelly, Coburg
THE FORUM
Lens on Big Build
Professor David Hayward provides a further lens on the jaw-dropping allegations surrounding the Big Build and rightly calls for an inquiry into what has become a blight on our state (“Independent inquiry into the Big Build is urgently needed”, 23/7). In another time, if a politician had faced the accusations that have been levelled against the premier, they would have stood aside and allowed a due process to take its course. In refusing to take this step, the Victorian government, the union movement and the public service will continue to be viewed with deep suspicion by the electorate until we know the full story.
As Professor Hayward highlights, the privatisation agenda comes under further scrutiny. The government, as the custodian of taxpayer dollars, bears the responsibility of ensuring that money is used judiciously for the benefit of its citizens whilst the public service acts as the guardian ensuring procurement and contracting processes are undertaken with integrity and transparency. With so many unanswered accusations it is difficult to have trust in either institution. Premier, it is time to act to clear the stench surrounding the Big Build.
Anne Lyon, Camberwell
Read the room
Jacinta Allan should read the room: rural voters will dump her government into a very large pothole come November unless they see multiple teams in high-vis dealing ASAP with the dangerous state of country roads. And, a Big Build Royal royal commission will help save the city vote.
Greg Malcher, Hepburn
Compelling reasons
While I agree strongly that public school teachers and the system in which they work needs to be better valued and funded, I consider that teachers need to come to an agreement with the government soon. There are two reasons for this. First, the ongoing disruption to the lives of students’ parents will ultimately result in a loss of their support. Second, and more importantly, based on current polling the teachers could soon be dealing with a Liberal-National Coalition or One Nation-led government. Based on the Coalition’s attitude to public servants such as teachers and nurses in the past and One Nation’s stated attitude towards all workers, good luck getting what they want from them.
Kevin Bailey, Croydon
Tackling the grifters
All political parties, when out of power, use grievance and criticism of those in power to gain ascendancy. As Shaun Carney observes (Comment, 23/7), both the Coalition and One Nation’s proposals to address these grievances rely on a combination of returning to the very economic paradigms that have caused our current imbalances and a grab bag of irrelevant culture war distractions. This worked for Donald Trump, but his time in office is an unravelling disaster. We are seeing rhetoric coming from Anthony Albanese and the new UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham that acknowledges the validity of some of the grievance zeitgeist.
An awareness is developing that the way to beat the populist grifters is to enact policies that address the underlying economic grievances they rely on. Yet we don’t have an overarching economic framework to supplant the post-war Keynesian welfare state system and the neoliberal globalist system that replaced it. We desperately need one.
Graeme Henchel, Yarra Glen
Importance of home
What a good reminder about the importance of housing v the current government’s focus on other concerns. Your correspondent (Letters, 23/7) beautifully states the basic benefits of why housing is so important, useful, supportive and necessary – stability, a place for family to establish themselves, security – and that for most people, it is a commitment to remain long term in their home, not use it as a short-term investment. I hope someone in the government is paying attention.
Joyce Butcher, Williamstown
Points of difference
Your correspondent is spot on about Labor and the Coalition not seeing how Pauline Hanson, like Donald Trump, is too different from regular politicians to be defeated by the usual rules (Letters, 23/7). However, let’s hope that Australians are too different from Americans to allow that to happen.
Henry Herzog, St Kilda East
Disturbing views
The issue of immigration (key planks in the policies of Donald Trump and in Brexit) continues to raise its ugly head with it being a key plank in One Nation’s rise in popularity.
This xenophobic, discriminating and economically stupid policy is disturbing enough being espoused by One Nation, but add Hanson’s views on domestic violence and the views of Senator Malcolm Roberts, makes it even more disturbing when one looks at the numbers of people willing to vote for them.
Phil Mackenzie, Eaglemont
Zero understanding
Even if you don’t interpret Pauline Hanson’s “two-way street” comment as victim blaming, at the very least it demonstrates zero understanding of the complex limitations, both psychological and financial, for a woman needing to leave an environment of domestic violence.
Claire Merry, Wantirna
Not the same basket
Your correspondent (Letters, 22/7) hits the nail on the head in relation to migration and Australia. They mention the Afghan cameleers who came to Australia and, not only ″dug dams, put up the telephone poles and helped build the inland roads″ also opened trade in the interior.
We also have many other cultures to thank for greatest impacts on ″settlement outcomes″: Chinese during the gold rushes, Greek, Italians and others from Europe at the end of WWII building the Snowy Mountains scheme, all the people from Asian countries. And yet for some reason people like Pauline Hanson, Barnaby Joyce want to both stop these people providing their knowledge about how their way of life can improve ours. By all means screen them to ensure we accept the truly genuine people but, do not put all immigrants in the same basket.
Rosemary Berrell, Ashburton
Erasing history
From the sidelines of the federal Labor Party national conference comes the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union demanding the removal of the Union Jack from the Australian flag along with the removal of “offensive colonial statues” (“Flying the flag for fight that nobody else in the party, especially PM, wants to have”, 23/7). Like it or not, these artefacts tell important parts of our history.
While they are busy prising loose statues, perhaps the union could liberate us from the Westminster system of government and the rule of law as we know it. It brings to mind the way Stalin removed faces and persons from photographs in the 1930s so he, too, could control the narrative of history.
John Whelen, Box Hill Sth
Energy crisis
Australia must urgently expand its electricity supply.
Oddly, an obstacle is terminology: certain terms — “renewables”, for instance — seem to cause angst. More precise language may help. There is inexhaustible clean “electron energy”, ie, solar, wind, hydro, which generate power by moving electrons. And “combustion energy” produced by burning finite fossil fuels, with resultant carbon emissions and pollutants.
Take solar as an illustration of energy potential.
Elon Musk calculated that a 160 kilometre by 160 kilometre solar array could power the United States.
Split across the outbacks of Queensland, NSW and South Australia, each state would need an area of just 93 kilometres by 93 kilometres, under 1.1 per cent of their land, to match US supply, which is 15 times our current electricity generation. Using clear unemotive terms like “electron energy” may help defuse the culture wars, allowing urgent action to secure our energy future.
Carlo Ursida, Kensington
Like, what she said
In total concurrence with your correspondent (Letters, 23/7). It’s not just young people’s overuse of the word “like” that offends, but interviewees of all ages tend towards overuse of ″like″.
Often the sentences start with “Like” and the word is interspersed after every third word thereafter, like.
Like, it’s so annoying.
Sue Parrington, Port Melbourne
Address gambling
When my father returned from overseas service in WWII in 1945, he would bet on two flies climbing up the wall. We didn’t have television or a TAB, so he became a starting price bookmaker and not a very good one. My brother and I sold newspapers in the 1940s and ’50s so we could put food on the table as our father continued down the path of gambling destruction. I spent my early years as a blue-collar worker, supporting Labor principles and for the last 50 years have been involved in finance.
I am now 90, and was impressed with the late Peta Murphy’s work on gambling advertising, but the watering down of Murphy’s propositions by this government disappoints me greatly. It seems to me that gambling advertising is on the increase in all mediums.
Gambling has never interested me personally and I hope the Labor conference sees fit to extend the advertising bans in sport to totality even if it means a loss of donations.
Kenneth Clarke, Wangaratta
Photo: Matt Golding
AND ANOTHER THING
Trump
In Donald Trump’s logic it’s fine for Saudi Arabia to have nuclear power, but not Iran? As usual, does he have any idea of what he’s doing?
Tim Durbridge, Brunswick
Along with AusAlert, will we learn how to duck and cover in preparation for Donald Trump’s next level of warfare?
Bryan Lewis, St Helena
Furthermore
The PM has turned down the heat on climate debate at the ALP national conference. But it’s a sure bet that he’ll be feeling it this predicted El Niño summer.
Jenny Smithers, Ashburton
For more than 10 years our car registration plates have said Victoria, ″The Education State″. Maybe it is time for a change. I suggest ″Victoria – The Big Build State″.
Tony Wheeler, Doncaster East
Victoria can’t give teachers a 28per cent pay rise. Victoria is broke.
David Hughes, South Melbourne
Your correspondent (Letters, 23/7) suggests teachers of English have a class competition to see if any student can make a sentence without the word “like” in it. As a teacher of English, I like that idea.
Deborah Morrison, Malvern East
The criminal waste of money on the Big Build has added to Victoria’s dire financial standing. Apparently, it will be investigated, subject to electoral convenience.
Bill Burns, Bendigo
It is immaterial whether one is pro-Israel or pro-Palestine: Hamas is a listed terrorist organisation and as such Labor is morally and ethically obliged to call for it to be disarmed.
Louise Kloot, Doncaster
Bubble bubble toil and trouble Neil Mitchell, you’ve really stirred the cauldron, although not in the way you wanted (Comment, 19/7).
Jane Ross, San Remo
Finally
There are more letters about a dog than Donald Trump,which is a bonus. And a dog has even made it to the front page of Green Guide. But, doggone it, it’s enough already.
Myra Fisher, Brighton East
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