On Wednesday in the Australian federal parliament, in an emotional precursor to White Ribbon Day, Labor MP Emma Husar tearfully recalled how as a child she’d watched her father bash her mother. When she said, “whilst the blows that landed on my mother during my childhood didn’t land on me physically – they may as well have”, I winced and remembered my sister.
Vicki Cleary was a mere 25 years of age when her knife-wielding ex-boyfriend rained blows as she parked her car outside the kindergarten where she worked on 26 August 1987. Like so many women at the time, Vicki had stayed silent about the killer’s previously threatening behaviour and violence. Sadly, unlike Emma and her mother, she did not survive it.
In the Victorian supreme court, I was outraged when Justice George Hampel granted Vicki’s killer a provocation defence and was astounded when he was found not guilty of murder and sentenced to less than four years in jail. Outside the court, I told journalists the manslaughter verdict reduced Vicki, and all women, to chattels and should be taken up by the feminist movement. In time I’d discover that not guilty verdicts and sentences such as these were rife and that the very act of separation was enough in case after case for a dead woman to be deemed to have provoked an ordinary man to lose control and kill.
Unlike Emma Husar, not once during my time as a federal politician, from 1992 to 1996, did I deliver a speech about my family’s experience of domestic violence. Although I was at the forefront of the public campaign to expose the depth of the violence and law’s complicity in it, my only parliamentary foray into violence against women was a request that Labor’s attorney general, Michael Lavarch, put the provocation law on the agenda for the Coag meeting of state and federal governments, which he did. It took a further 20 years before the law was abolished in Victoria.
Mark Latham was elected to parliament as Labor MP for Werriwa, adjacent to Husar’s Lindsay seat, less than two years after me. He once accused me of being a “defender of clapped-out Marxism”. But today, it is Latham whose views appear clapped-out, as he hectors women into remaining silent about men’s violence. Blind to the facts, he sheets home the blame to a changed social world in which men have “lost their self-esteem, their job, are welfare-dependent, on drugs or alcohol” and are using the violence as “a coping mechanism to get over all the other crap they have in their lives”.
Like a defence lawyer in a “wife killing” trial from yesteryear, Latham wants to paint every violent man as a victim, ironically, of the very free market policies he worships. The real victims, innocent women, are reduced to the collateral damage of these displaced men. Thankfully, the days of blaming women for the violence are rapidly passing, with Latham’s views relegating him to a vanishing world.
Most thinking people now accept that gender-based violence has a political and cultural subtext and should to be examined in the context of the changed position of women in society. In the wake of second-wave feminism, more women than ever before are prepared to assert their right to sexual and economic independence, and to end a relationship.
Prior to the feminist revolution and the social and economic changes that accompanied it, few women had the capacity to escape bad relationships. The changed power dynamic, even if it hasn’t led to genuine gender equality, is clearly a factor in the levels of violence, in particular the killing of women. But rather than accept that the violence is a crude attempt by a disenchanted male underbelly to retain power, Latham romanticises it as a cry for help by abandoned and afflicted men.
That he would rail against the proposition that “men beat up women in some cases because they hate women”, depicting it as left-feminism’s obsession with political correctness, is almost unfathomable.
How can he seriously argue that misogyny, and its partner, patriarchy, play no role in the violence visited upon women? The man who killed my sister was clearly afflicted by a hatred founded in patriarchy. “No woman drops me,” he told an inmate in prison. The same hatred is surely at work in the hearts and minds of the 60 men a year across Australia now killing intimate partners or ex-partners, often in the context of separation.
In his muddled mind Latham imagines campaigners “demonising men and making them feel worse about themselves”, whipped into a frenzy of political correctness about a problem “no worse than 30 years ago”. If only he’d been in my company when a former supreme court judge described the courts’ past treatment of women as “the bad old days”. As a barrister, the ex-judge had defended a “wife killer” found not guilty of murder in the early 1970s. Today he welcomes the cultural and judicial changes we campaigners have brought to bear in Victoria.
If Latham bothered to listen to the stories of women bashed and terrorised by intimate male partners he just might stop talking like someone who believes the average woman basher is a victim.
Given his erratic outbursts, we shouldn’t be surprised Latham has attempted to belittle Rosie Batty, 2015 Australian of the Year and mother of a murdered son. His depiction of her as a pawn of “left feminism” who has no right to be paid to speak professionally on the question of violence is the final piece in the Latham jigsaw puzzle.
For his is a picture of women accepting their lot and remaining silent, as so many did before we campaigners exposed the dark secret. When my mum came across the jury in the foyer after they had effectively exonerated her daughter’s killer, she did not accept her lot, crying out “she was just a girl, do you know what you’ve done, you’ve let a murderer go free”. Those comments and my audible lambast of the “murderer” were enough to have us banished to the gallery for the sentencing the following day. Those truly were the dark old days.
My mum was a brave, intelligent and compassionate woman who spent her final 24 years quietly lamenting the loss of her daughter and reflecting on the collective pain of family violence, as Rosie is doing publicly today.
I’ve already told Rosie it’s a shame Mum had passed on before they could share a cup of tea and reflect on their sorrow. There’s much Latham could learn from women like Lorna Cleary and Rosie Batty, if only he could excise the insecurities the march of feminism has visited upon him. It’s time he put the machismo aside and accepted that the bad old days, when it was politically correct for men to bash and terrorise women with impunity, are over.
• Anyone seeking support for domestic violence can call 1800 737 732 or log on to www.1800respect.org.au
Phil Cleary is writer and broadcaster and member of the Victorian Government’s Victim Survivors’ Advisory Council.
