Psychotic. Mongoose. Saboteur. Liar. Traitor. Dysfunctional. Egotistical.
Childless.
In week of whirring insults, the claim that ex-PM ex-FM Kevin Rudd called Prime Minister Julia Gillard a “childless, atheist, ex-Communist” is a standout.
Mr Rudd’s office dismissed the story that he badmouthed Ms Gillard at an Adelaide pub a year ago as “lies”. Maybe the witnesses were all mistaken. Maybe he said “guileless, earnest, optimist’. These things can happen in noisy bars.
But the ‘childless’ tag has been used before and will be used again. And it’s a simple fact. So why does it pack such a venomous punch?
Those who use it generally argue that it shows the Prime Minister can’t understand her constituency, as though giving birth somehow magically produces an umbilical cord that connects a woman to the whole community.
Former Labor leader and recurrent loudmouth Mark Latham said:
Anyone who chooses a life without children, as Gillard has, cannot have much love in them.
He returned to the controversial theme while spruiking The Latham Diaries, describing her as ‘wooden’ and linking it to her lack of offspring.
Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan famously said Ms Gillard was not fit to lead because she is “deliberately barren” so she couldn’t understand the voters. At the time, Mr Rudd hit back at him, saying:
This sort of 1950s politics has no place in 21st century Australia, it has no place in Australian modern politics and these sort of remarks, frankly, I just find to be positively outlandish.
Onya, Mr Rudd.
Liberal frontbencher George Brandis said Ms Gillard wouldn’t understand how parents felt about their children’s virginity – which obviously would have a huge impact on developing policy across a broad range of portfolios.
Other childless Australian Prime Ministers – there have been four before including Ben Chifley, whom Mr Abbott quoted approvingly yesterday - don’t seem to have copped the same criticism.
That’s because the sting in the tail of the ‘childless’ jibe is not really about empathy.
If a politician had to experience something first hand before they could work in the area, we really would see a paralysed administration. There’d be a sudden demand for candidates who are both male and female, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, soldiers and pacifists, old and young, fishers and non-fishers all at the same time.
The real slime they’re trying to spread, of course, is that choosing not to have a child is a dereliction of woman’s sacred duty. That a woman without children is not just incomplete but unnatural.
It goes hand in hand with the glorification of the (traditional) family, the worship of parenthood that goes beyond admiration.
Politicians in electioneering mode love to venerate the family. Appealing to mums and dads is safe ground, and stereotypes are easy soundbites. That means that the opposite – denigrating those who do not fit the mould – has its own currency.
But it’s a black market because it’s appealing to people’s baser side. The idea that people without children are somehow less human has no logic – it just appeals to people’s distrust of those who are different.
These men wouldn’t sling this ‘childless’ arrow unless it had force. And it does.
Declaring yourself happily childless can inspire a similar venom to being an atheist – there are people who presume somehow that the absence is a vindictive rejection. As though a personal choice by its nature heaps scorn on all those who take the other path and choose kids, or God.
Some people are so affronted by the childless woman, so threatened by a fruitless womb that they shuffle off any pretensions to politeness in their quest to convince that woman that life’s true meaning can only be found in progeny.
It must make painful listening for those who want to have children, but cannot.
Up to one in five women will never have a child.
It’s no longer so widely accepted that being a mum is every woman’s most important role. A friend recently said something along the lines of ‘you’d be good at it and you’d love it’ – and it was such a refreshing change from years of ‘your life must be empty, fix it’.
It was almost enough to make me chuck out the pill packet. Almost.
The pernickety pushy questions and judgements usually come from pesky people with old ideas. And Rudd was right - they belong back in the 1950s.
Twitter: @ToryShepherd
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