Women on top

-Why so many prized jobs are now in female hands.

A picture speaks a thousand words. Look at this line-up, showing all the ACT Supreme Court judges. This formidable female-dominated bench wouldn’t exactly inspire confidence if you were a poor sucker facing a last-ditch appeal of a guilty verdict following a false rape accusation.  

All the more so when the bench is led by Chief Justice Lucy McCallum who recently grumbled in a newspaper interview about the “intractable problem” of “ensuring an accused person has a fair trial.” Women’s groups are working hard to solve her problem, with all sorts of inventive solutions that do away with any notion of a fair trial – like an alternate court system with a lower standard of proof.

Whenever there’s a big job announced in Australia, you can bet your bottom dollar that the prize will fall to a woman – even when that means the newcomer is decades younger and less experienced than her predecessors.

Gender is the trump card wiping out all other merit-based considerations. It must be rather maddening to be a high achieving Australian man clawing your way up the ladder knowing that the top rung is no longer available.

Often the result is just absurd. Here are the governors of the six Australian states – once again, there’s just one token man. The recent announcement of “equity advocate” Sam Mostyn as Governor General really took the cake, particularly when Albo announced this week he was proposing an astonishing $200,000 increase in her salary.

Perhaps none of this would matter if we could be assured that this new breed of female top dogs would simply do their jobs, without using their positions to constantly promote women at the expense of men. But across the board we see women in power misusing their positions to stitch men up or grind them down.

Queensland Chief of Police Katarina Carroll was forced out of her job when officers began to revolt. The police service had been found by the state's anti-corruption watchdog to have engaged in "corrupt manipulation" to achieve a 50 per cent female hiring target. The report found 200 meritorious male applicants missed out on joining the force due to this corrupt practice.  

And it is hard to forget that Australia’s very first female top cop, Christine Nixon, also ended her career in 2009 thoroughly disgraced when it was found she spent the morning of Black Saturday, Australia’s worst bushfire, with a 90-minute appointment at the hairdresser followed by a 45-minute meeting with her biographer. In the evening, as the town of Marysville burned to the ground, she was having a leisurely meal in the pub.

And then there was NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb who desperately needed a reset after a series of unforced errors plagued her leadership. She was renowned for being an appalling communicator, failing to promptly address the media when police officer Jesse Baird was murdered, and following the tasering of a 95-year-old grandmother. Luckily, she was given a reprieve when she was able to bask in the glory of a female police officer’s heroics in the Bondi Junction attack.

Now she is making a name for herself tackling the scourge of domestic violence. She’s launched a series called Operation Amarok – where so far more than 3,500 domestic violence offenders have been rounded up and arrested. Nothing like scooping up thousands of wife batterers to win applause from the media. No one is going to bother to ask about the evidence supporting these arrests.

Clearly our female top cops haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory; and it is interesting that men have been slipped back into the job in Queensland and Victoria. Right now, Webb is the only remaining female chief.  

There are interesting questions to be asked about whether, generally, women do these jobs differently from men. “It's only been in the last 30 years that we've had the opportunity to see what female dominated large institutions would look like - it's historically unprecedented. We have no idea what pathologies or advantages those systems might have,” said Jordan Peterson.

How about we look at the federal regulatory and oversight agencies enforcing rules for business and the economy? Women now run 33 of these vital organisations.

Here are the four women heading up Australia’s Digital Platform Regulators. The blond is eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, who’s now hit the world stage taking on Elon Musk in increasingly outrageous attempts to control the world’s internet content, threatening to fine the billionaire owner of the social media platform X more than $700,000 a day for refusing to remove a video of a terror stabbing.

Her crazy overreach even prompted a song encouraging a fightback. Have a look here It’s pretty funny.  

I first wrote about Inman Grant two years ago, pointing out her eSafety team was systematically downplaying the risks to boys and men from online abuse, ignoring the sexploitation of boys which Federal police were naming as an alarming, growing problem.  She’s still at it, endlessly banging on about gendered online abuse, claiming women have a unique perspective on online safety because of the “sexist, gendered vitriol levelled against us”, and rarely a word about protecting men and boys.  

It's interesting how many of these regulatory bodies now being run by women are concerned with “safety”:

• eSafety Commission

• Civil Aviation Safety Authority

• Aged Care Quality & Safety Commission

• Safe Work Australia

• Aust Radiation Protection & Nuclear Safety Agency

• National Offshore Petroleum Safety Authority

• Aust Maritime Safety Authority

• National Rail Safety Regulator

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Janice Fiamengo – the excellent men’s rights advocate and fellow blogger – wrote recently about the risks of women, particularly feminist women, being in charge of our safety. Focusing on the Covid lockdowns, she pointed that it was feminists who pushed hardest for lockdowns and all the rest. “Covid mania was the definition of caring. Who screamed the loudest on Twitter about masking, hand-sanitizing, distancing, keeping children out of school, … who was most adamant about the need to shame, isolate, exclude and penalize the unvaccinated?”

Fiamengo suggests women are a population conditioned by fearmongering, with Covid providing a dramatic illustration of “the ease with which terrified and self-righteous women could be mobilized through irrational safetyism and scapegoating”.

Fiamengo’s warning that many women seem hard-wired to seek a “safe” rather than a “free world” surely has implications when it comes to putting women in charge of so many of our regulators.

But who are we to complain when the powers that be find new and exciting ways to celebrate our matriarchal society? Just look at the names of 10 most recent River Class ferries in Sydney:

• Ethel Turner

• Ruth Park

• Cheryl Salisbury

• Lauren Jackson

• Liz Ellis

• Kurt Fearnley

• Olive Cotton

• Margaret Olley

• Esme Timbery

• Ruby Langford Ginibi

Just one token male – Kurt Fearnley, the Paralympian. Oh well, presumably there have been hundreds of ferries named after men. It’s no big deal rectifying that particular imbalance.

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Where I do object, is the recent proposal floated at the ANU, which currently has a female Chancellor and Acting Vice Chancellor, seeking suggestions for new names to replace the titles of the university buildings named after men. Men like my father, the eminent economist H.W Arndt. Now that is surely going a step too far!

Even more concerning is the decision by another female Vice Chancellor, Queensland University of Technology’s Margaret Sheil, to remove merit as  the principal consideration in hiring staff. Sheil argued it was appropriate to move towards "more inclusive suitability assessment” which would focus on gender and ethnic background.

Sheil is the highest paid Queensland Vice Chancellor, but has been under fire for attacking “freedom of speech, diversity of thought and empowerment of teams and individuals” and for “a toxic culture of bullying and intimidation” leading to a situation where “most staff have lost all faith in the university”.

And so it goes on. We have a situation where male university enrolments are plummeting across the country.  Men are in the minority at all but two Australian universities and their share of enrolments has fallen to a record low. The latest 2022 data shows that for the first time male students made up less than 40 per cent of domestic enrolments. Even though male participation has been declining for years, the education department is now suggesting more men are actively choosing not to go to university – downplaying the fact that education is failing so many boys who don’t get the requisite school results or drop out of school. 

The fact remains that our universities are making zero effort to determine why males may not be interested in a university education. They remain obsessed with getting more women into their top jobs and providing female only job positions and scholarships. Clearly feminist goals trump any concern about males feeling unwelcome in tertiary institutions.  

Then there’s the family court system which is currently grappling with the impact of the new family law legislation, which so clearly discriminates against fathers. You might have thought this isn’t exactly the best time to introduce a swag of female judges. But no. An astonishing 23 of the 28 newly appointed judges in Federal and Family Courts have been female.

Sure, many of these women may prove excellent judges, doing their jobs with scrupulous fairness. But the Family Court has an absolutely lousy reputation due to persistent bias against men – as evidenced by the dismal failure over the last half century to enforce orders enabling fathers to see their children, as a starter.  

For anyone with the slightest concern about cleaning up this toxic mess, merit-based promotion into top jobs should be an absolute no brainer.