Women Are Receiving Liberal Party Campaign Letters With Their Partners’ Surnames For Some Reason

Women in NSW have been receiving Liberal Party campaign letters with their last name changed to match the man they live with. (Because it’s the 1950s again apparently, and we’re all living in the black-and-white world of Pleasantville.)

“I am the owner of my apartment, and my boyfriend is basically my tenant,” journalist Alex Lee told The ABC after getting a wrongly addressed campaign letter in the mail. “So for them to assume that not only were we married, but that I would take his last name, it felt very strange.” 

Heyyy @NickVarvarisMP just because I live at the same address as my boyfriend does not mean I take his last name pic.twitter.com/TX4B2R8fLF

— Alex Lee (@alex_c_lee) June 27, 2016

The Electoral Commission have already stated they have nothing to do with the gaffe, while the NSW branch of the Liberal Party have blamed that old chestnut “human error” in a statement provided to the ABC. “This was unintentional,” the statement read. “No discourtesy was intended and we apologise.”

However, the women on the receiving end of this gaffe are not too pleased. “It’s so 1950s that the assumption would be that a man and woman living together would share the same surname … it felt very presumptive,” said Kelly Tall after the same thing happened to her.

Kelly’s right. It does seem like a bit of ’50s throwback this ‘man of the house’ thing, doesn’t it? It also seems like very ’40s thing, and a ’30s… wait… didn’t this whole sir-name thing start in the Middle Ages? Just around the time landownership and tax were becoming a bit of a bigger deal? So you could almost say this has been happening in one way or another since money and power as we know it were invented … or  maybe it really is just a clerical error.