The previous Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, had a reputation of being a misogynist. The famous speech by Julia Gillard, where she begins: “I will not be lectured about sexism by this man…” and she continued on about how he had treated women in his time as a Minister. I love the cartoon soon after Tony Abbott was elected Prime Minister and only one woman was appointed to the Cabinet – Julie Bishop.The image is of a woman who is outside a closed Cabinet Room knocking on the door and a voice from within the Cabinet Room yells out “Who is it?” and she says “it’s a woman”. And from within the Cabinet Room the reply comes “No thanks, we already have one.” I would like to build on some of the material that Peter left you with last week on how women are still treated as second class citizens in most places within the world today. Australia has a long way to go before equality can be claimed among the sexes. Every time we turn on the news, incidents of the disrespect for women are numerous. Three incidents which dominated the news this week on talk back radio, social media, esp Twitter and Facebook and water-cooler chatter were 1.The appalling assaults on women in Cologne and other German cities including Hamburg and Stuttgart on New Year’s Eve bringing to the fore the treatment of women in public spaces.

2. The Federal Liberal MP Jamie Briggs (Minister for Cities) incident where in Hong Kong he became overly physical with a Consular staffer, and when the incident was reported, her identity was leaked to the media.

This was followed by the Minister for Immigration, Peter Dutton’s supposedly missent and  disgusting text to a female journalist.

3. The high profile cricketer Chris Gayle was fined $10,000 for the denigration of a female journalist by making inappropriate and disrespectful comments in an on-air interview.

The Hong Kong incident prompted Liberal Federal MP Sharman Stone of accusing some of her male Liberal Party colleagues of not knowing how to treat women with respect. She wrote, “The interesting activities of the last few weeks demonstrate that some of our male colleagues still don’t get it in terms of treating all women with respect. This is another example of how we’ve still got a long way to go.” Some hard facts indicating how far we have to go. Regarding gender inequality in Australia, even though Australian women and girls make up 50.2% of the Australian population and 46% of the work force, they take home on average $283 less each week, about 20% less. Therefore Australian women have to work an extra 66 days a year to earn the same pay as men for doing the same work. Australian women are over-represented as part-time workers in low-paid industries and insecure work, and continue to be under represented in leadership roles in the private and public sectors. One in three Australian women aged 15 years and over has experienced physical violence (the headline news this morning of the woman being king hit by a man outside a nightclub in Mt Isa on Friday night) and nearly one in five has experienced sexual assault. It is estimated that violence against women and children will cost the Australian Economy $15.6 billion per year by 2021 unless decisive action is taken to prevent it.  More than smoking or obesity, domestic and family violence is the leading preventable cause of death. In 2013 Australia was ranked 24^th on a global index measuring gender equality, slipping from a high point of 15^th in 2006. As Federal MP Sharman Stone said last week, “we have a long way to go.” Has anyone had the opportunity of viewing the wonderfully produced and acted movie Suffragette on at the cinemas at the moment?   Set in London 1912, Suffragette is centered on a group of British women pushing for the right to vote in national elections. Women had been denied the opportunity to elect their country’s leaders since the passing of key legislation in the 1830’s. Countries such as New Zealand in 1893, and Australia in 1903, had obtained voting rights for women and the U.K. felt it was their time. The historical drama, set in London, follows the early members of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and the story of their radicalization from peaceful protesters to law breakers. The drama tracks the story of the foot soldiers of the movement, women who were forced underground to pursue a dangerous game of cat and mouse with an increasingly brutal state. These women were not primarily from the genteel educated classes, they were working women who had seen peaceful protest achieve nothing.   Radicalized and turning to violence as the only route to change, they were willing to lose everything in their fight for equality – their jobs, their homes, their children and their lives. Maud Watts, around which the story revolves, was one such foot soldier. Her fight for dignity and equality is heart-breaking and inspirational. If you get a chance to see it, I would highly recommend that you do. The traditional liturgical time of the year in which we find ourselves is taken from the pagan earth based religions from which they emerged, are about hope and expectation. They are  rituals about new births, new beginnings and moving to the warmer more light-filled time of year. The liturgical season reflects rituals, prayers and readings of hope. In the opening lines of the gospel, “A feeling of expectancy had grown among the people”( Lk3;15). We are to become that hope. We are to become in the words of Gandhi “the change we want to see”. The women, who gave their lives in the Suffragette Movement to bring about greater equality and equal voting rights for women, were women who embodied a hope for a better world and were prepared to give their all in achieving this. They inspire us today to continue to be hope in a world which needs such aspiration and embodiment more than ever. I would like to finish with the encouraging words of Feminist Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngazi Adichie in her book “We Should All Be Feminists”  where she wrote, “Culture does not make people People make culture If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.”

9^th and 10^th January 2016

By Terry Fitzpatrick.