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Federal Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Jenny Macklin. |
MARGIN NOTES: Why Jenny Macklin earned an Ernie
ISSUE 188 - 16 Oct 2009
ISSUE 188, October 15, 2009: EVA COX* nominated the Minister for Indigenous Affairs in the annual Ernies. Here she explains why the NT intervention is both racist and sexist.
Once a year, Sydney feminists gather for the annual Ernies' awards dinner, named after a deeply sexist trade unionist and run by a group of feminist politicians.
People condemn obnoxiously sexist statements by nominating the people who uttered them.
One award is the Elaine, and is reserved for the woman whose public statement was deemed to be the least helpful to the sisterhood.
I nominated Jenny Macklin this year but she was beaten by a much more blatantly nasty statement about feminists.
However, I think she was a worthy nominee and would like to explain why I put her name up.
My statement was that she damaged feminism by justifying income quarantines and other aspects of the Northern Territory intervention as "protecting the rights of the women and children".
She defended the current NT provisions breaching the Racial Discrimination Act, by stating that the need to protect women and children over-rides other rights, saying that is that.
Why is this type of statement a problem?
I agree that the rights of women and children to be safe and protected are important, but there is no proper evidence that involuntary income management is making their lives better.
So there is no adequate basis for removing the rights of thousands of women and men to make decisions about how they spend their income payments, and contradicts the Minister's claims to care about the rights of women, or anyone else's for that matter.
She offers a few scattered reports from shops and claims that some individual women have told the Minister they like the welfare quarantines. But this is not enough to justify the discrimination presently in place.
Of course women should be able to ask for income management, if they feel it will benefit their families, but this must be voluntary.
Using humbugging as an excuse for making it compulsory shows a lack of respect for the ability of people to decide how to sort out their own family tensions.
If there is evidence that money is being misspent, there may be grounds to implement the quarantines, but doing it to everyone because some families have problems only creates more problems. This is not on!
Why did I nominate the Minister as being sexist?
Because she has claimed for years to be a feminist but seems to have forgotten that feminism involves ensuring that laws treat women as adults.
Legislating against a category of people in prescribed areas while she is claiming to protect some women against their possible family's and personal flaws is wrong.
It not only reduces all adults to the status of children, but claiming it is because women can't cope is insulting to the women.
This is the Minister's claim that offended me both from the wider rights perspective and particularly as I am an active feminist.
She suggests/presumes that anyone who opposes the universal compulsory income quarantining is complicit with patriarchy and evil men.
This claim creates an unnecessary gender divide which started with claims by Mal Brough that the original Emergency Response was because of widespread child sexual abuse.
Yet there have been no extra charges on that account either.
There is some evidence, for instance from the Sunrise Health Service, that quarantining is restricting access to food for some more isolated communities, and this is creating health problems.
I have also heard that many women feel really uncomfortable in having to join the Basicscard queues in supermarkets, rather than just go to any cash register.
There are also many women who have been responsible shoppers previously but now find their capacity to choose the goods and suppliers that they want is damaging their budgeting skills.
The needs and comments of these women don't seem to count but the ones who agree with the Minister are heard.
The research of the government's own one-year review panel proposed that quarantining be made voluntary.
None of this type of information sways the Minister, who appears not to trust the women in the prescribed communities of the Northern Territory to run their own budgets and lives.
So I find Macklin's claim to be a feminist as offensive as Phillip Ruddock wearing his Amnesty badge while at the same time making bad asylum seeker policies.
Feminism is about respecting the full humanity of women, not treating them as children who are in need of protection for their own good.
That type of treatment also has deep echoes of racism that needs to be noted.
marginnotes@nit.com.au
* Dr Eva Cox is a prominent Australian feminist and a lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney. Margin Notes is a monthly column in NIT.
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