I tried to be open minded, I really did. For a second, I even thought Janet Albrechtsen was being reasonable. But it was only a second. Just when the #MeToo episode of ABC’s Q&A was responding to a great question about including exploited and powerless women – who are over-represented in crimes of abuse, harassment and violence – Albrechtsen, a columnist for the Australian, pulled the favoured manoeuvre of people losing arguments everywhere: the whataboutery move.
“I think #MeToo needs to get a passport because there are these kind of things going on around the world,” she gasped. “If we don’t shine the light then who on earth does?”
Where do I start? Do I start with: “They do, Janet. Women in other countries talk about the same stuff we do – are you listening?” Or do I start with: “We were just doing that, Janet! We were almost at the point where we were going to talk about women who aren’t rich and white and also live in Australia when you moved the spotlight so deftly out of that corner that we never found our way back again”?
It’s no secret I’m not a fan of Q&A, the ABC’s flagship political panel show. But I am a fan of the #MeToo movement exposing the most damaging aspects of our patriarchal society. This put me in a difficult position on Thursday night. I had little hope that a Q&A special on this complex, nuanced, powerful movement for change could progress the conversation in any positive way. The inclusion of Charles Waterstreet, famous for being badly behaved, in the line up proved that the producers were after a show where panelists could yell at each other and the crowd could boo and Twitter would go wild, not one from which we could actually learn anything.
Waterstreet has been accused of sexually harassing a 21-year-old paralegal – a claim he strongly denies. It was this aspect of his rakish life that apparently made him a worthy panellist. He was presumably appointed to add “balance”, to beckon us to consider whether maybe, just maybe – as host Virginia Trioli asked us at the top of the program – #MeToo isn’t just a “social media witch hunt”.
It must have been so disappointing for the ABC when Waterstreet withdrew, but even then I wasn’t encouraged. How can you have a panel on #MeToo and not include a single woman of colour? The movement was literally founded by a woman of colour, Tarana Burke.
Is this what “balance” has become to the ABC? Because, really, what was the balance they were trying to create in the #MeToo special? Is it to say that maybe there is no such thing as systemic and rampant gender inequality, workplace sexual harassment and an epidemic of violence against women? Wouldn’t “balance” have been better achieved by the inclusion of people with different backgrounds and life experiences?
Not to take anything away from the brilliant panellists who were included. Catharine Lumby, a Macquarie university academic and Guardian contributor, Isabella Manfredi, lead singer of the Preatures, and Josh Bornstein, an employment lawyer, all made thoughtful and valuable contributions, and even Albrechtsen concedes that the movement is necessary.
But a well-meaning question from a self-described “70s feminist” about how we get women to speak up, drew an insightful response from Bornstein, who said that anyone who doesn’t understand why a woman can’t “just say no” to sexual harassment or violence committed against her suffers from a severe “lack of imagination”. His response goes to the very heart of why so many people from the professional class can’t understand what all the fuss is about over #MeToo. They really can’t imagine the lives of poor, powerless women.
It is of course so much easier for some rich women, and woke men, to feel more sympathy for a colleague who may be a bit-of-a-scoundrel-but-really-means-well being outed on Twitter than it is for them to feel empathy for the immigrant cleaner who puts up with her lecherous boss because she doesn’t have the correct visa. They know that bloke but may never have met that woman. Which, you know, is why a woman of colour or a working-class woman might have been good on the panel. But unfortunately for Australia, those kinds of women are usually only good enough for Q&A audiences, not the panels.
There was one instructive moment in the show for me, and it came in response to an audience question about why allegations aren’t being tested in a court of law. Bornstein and Lumby did their best to explain how woefully inadequate our justice system is in dealing with rape and sexual assault, highlighting that only 10% of rape cases result in conviction, and how doctors usually advise patients against prosecuting their rape because the trial can be like a “second rape”. This was a brief but important discussion about how our legal system needs to change to better deal with these crimes.
Bornstein had some constructive suggestions about improving workplace sexual harassment claims: remove the time limits on reporting within six months; remove the caps on damages; start a debate about confidentiality agreements in claims; and force companies to report sexual harassment claims to a central agency.
Did that make it worth watching? Well, maybe, because the success of #MeToo relies on these changes happening and I’m encouraged they were aired on national TV. But as much as I take my hat off to Bornstein, Manfredi and Lumby - and yes even Albrechtsen because it is not at all her fault Q&A is so terrible – an adversarial panel show hosted by an increasingly timid ABC was never going to capture the excitement of this transformative movement.
