TV

Conservative Middle-Aged Dudes Had Some Manpinions About Abortion On ‘Q&A’ Last Night

Minister for Ovaries Barnaby Joyce has some ~opinions~ for all the abortion-having ladies out there.

by Alex McKinnon  29 September 2015

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Last night’s Q&A was the first regular, full-panel episode to air since the #LibSpill, so naturally half the bloody thing was taken up with eye-glazing discussions about Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott and the ethics and effects of leadership changeovers. Expect a solid twenty minutes of every Q&A episode for the next year to be spent talking about whether or not Bill Shorten will face a leadership challenge of his own, as well as a noticeable uptick in foreign guests looking politely bewildered.

But once last night’s conversation eventually moved on to more important things, like the ongoing domestic violence crisis and the current push in NSW to decriminalise abortion, things got a little more interesting, if no less infuriating. The Turnbull government’s recent $100 million DV announcement came under a fair bit of audience scrutiny, with one questioner asking why it’s being directed to things like CCTV cameras in homes rather than towards chronically overstretched and underfunded shelters and frontline services.

In grappling with that question, Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce tried to take a leaf out of Turnbull’s book, emphasising that Australia needs large-scale social and cultural change if domestic violence is to be confronted properly. Turnbull’s argument at the time of the announcement — that “all violence against women begins with disrespecting women” — was met warmly, both at the time and by panellists last night, but Joyce’s attempt to riff on that theme proved to be pretty weird:

“Ultimately, it’s a cultural change, and we’ve all got to be a part of that. This might seem a bit quaint and a bit woopy, but we’ve got to start changing our attitudes all the time with how we deal with women. Things like don’t swear in front of them, it’s not politically incorrect to open a door. These are all attitudes that we can change to show that we respect people. If you don’t respect them from a younger age, how are you going to develop it later on?”

The questioner’s face summed it up pretty well.

Screenshot 2015-09-29 at 12.58.12 PM

“kay then”

Given Barnaby’s history of saying chronically weird things for no discernible reason, his folksy ideas on how to be respectin’ the womenfolk aren’t particularly surprising. If you were being generous, you could argue that there was a skerrick of a point underneath his aw-shucks banter: teaching young men that women are human beings worthy of respect, as opposed to one-dimensional sex prizes in a really realistic video game called Life, is something that clearly needs to be done, and Barnaby might have been trying to convey that point in terms his older, rural voter base could best identify with.

But earlier in the evening, when the conversation turned to abortion, it became pretty obvious that Joyce’s “respect” for women runs along pretty narrow and warped lines. Abortion has sprung up as a political issue in a pretty big way over the last week or so. In NSW, a push is on to finally remove abortion from the Crimes Act; an American activist who has called for abortion doctors to be executed is planning an Australian tour; and a new hotline allows women in remote and rural areas to access medical abortion resources like RU486 over the phone. (Incidentally, the group who set that hotline up, the Tabbot Foundation, is named after Tony Abbott, who famously tried to get RU486 pulled from shelves when he was Health Minister in 2005. That is an amazing sledge, for which someone deserves a trophy.)

It was in that context that an audience member questioned why abortion is still treated as a matter of criminal law in many Australian states. Backed up by the Institute of Public Affairs’ John Roskam, who you may note is also a man without a womb, Joyce defended the legal status quo and expressed objections to the Tabbot Foundation service.

“I don’t agree to it. If something is that serious, I think it warrants you meeting somebody face-to-face and having that discussion,” Joyce said. “This idea of ‘I’m going to talk to you over the phone about probably one of the most profound decisions of your life’ just doesn’t wash with me.”

Leaving aside, for the minute, that whether or not getting an abortion is “one of the most profound decisions of your life” is very much up to the woman having one, Joyce’s response makes a lie of his professed concern for society’s need to respect women. As we all know, women uniformly react to the word ‘shit’ with an episode of the vapours, but it never seems to occur to Joyce that telling women what they can and can’t do with their bodies is far more disrespectful than swearing around them.

It’s also telling that in this almost seven-minute long discussion about abortion, the two women on the panel barely got a word in, while the men felt they could bang on about it ad nauseum. Opinions on abortion are like nipples: everyone has them and that’s fine, but women’s actually serve some useful purpose, which is ironic given men are the only ones who can flaunt theirs in public without fear of being harassed or threatened. (Please no one point out that I am a male writer going on about abortion, oh boy, ah geez.)

The enormous and bizarre sense of entitlement anti-choice men like Joyce exercise by defending their ‘right’ to hold power over a woman’s body, as well as their blind assumption that their opinion on an issue that barely affects them matters, is a function of the very disrespect Turnbull railed against a couple of weeks ago. Joyce would have us all holding doors open for women — unless those doors lead into an abortion clinic.

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Watch last night’s episode of Q&A on iView.