Economics.org.au

1. [Unsigned editorial], “Discriminatory nonsense,” The Australian Financial Review, January 30, 1981, p. 12. Given its style, subject, judgment, venue and references, Paddy McGuinness probably wrote it; but generalising like that is what results in those who reason thus getting called ageist, sexist, racist and/or homophobic.
— That editorial provoked three particularly interesting letters-to-the-editor, by: (a) “national secretary” of “Woman for Individual Liberty” Jocelyn Maxwell; (b) “president” of the “Anti-Discrimination Board” Paul Stein; and (c) “chairman” of the “Equal Opportunity Advisory Council” Lady Matheson.
—— 1a. Jocelyn Maxwell, “Prejudice may go underground,” The Australian Financial Review, February 17, 1981, p. 13, as a letter to the editor.
—— 1b. Paul Stein, “Discrimination entrenched,” The Australian Financial Review, February 25, 1981, p. 13, as a letter to the editor.
—— 1c. Lady Matheson, “Fight the evils not the fighter,” The Australian Financial Review, March 5, 1981, p. 13, as a letter to the editor.
2. [Unsigned editorial], “Is the cure worse than the disease?,” The Australian Financial Review, January 13, 1986, p. 6.
3. P.P. McGuinness, “Talkback v hate-back: a censorship issue surfaces,” Times on Sunday, November 22, 1987, p. 2.
4. P.P. McGuinness, “Germaine, even in silliness, commands respect,” Times on Sunday, December 6, 1987, p. 2.
5. P.P. McGuinness, “A blast of the trumpet,” The Australian Financial Review, February 3, 1988, pp. 44-43. #5 & #11 both reference Günter Grass.
6. P.P. McGuinness, “The facts about sex,” The Australian Financial Review, June 29, 1988, pp. 76-75.
7. Padraic P. McGuinness, [untitled “McGuinness” column], The Australian, March 23, 1989, p. 2.
8. Padraic P. McGuinness, “Enforcing false equality insults women’s intellect,” The Australian, December 8, 1989, p. 2.
9. Padraic P. McGuinness, “Sisters in suits equal to none,” The Weekend Australian, March 7-8, 1992, p. 2.
10. Padraic P. McGuinness, “New feminists want the Old Boys’ privilege and power,” The Australian, July 30, 1993, p. 13.
11. Padraic P. McGuinness, “Law a bad substitute for manners in age of political correctness,” The Australian, November 24, 1993, p. 12.
12. Padraic P. McGuinness, “Feminist law reformers out of their depth,” The Australian, August 17, 1994, p. 13.
13. Padraic P. McGuinness, “Understanding the ethnic lobby’s lack of diversity,” The Sydney Morning Herald, December 13, 1995, p. 14.
14. Padraic P. McGuinness, “Why equality won’t work,” The Sydney Morning Herald, November 1, 1997, p. 38.
15. Padraic P. McGuinness, “Some wimminists are stupid,” The Sydney Morning Herald, February 13, 1999, p. 41.
16. Padraic P. McGuinness, “And the winner of the Meredith Award is …,” The Sydney Morning Herald, September 4, 1999, p. 40.
17. Padraic P. McGuinness, “We’re blinded by the slight,” The Sydney Morning Herald, September 30, 1999, p. 15.
18. Padraic P. McGuinness, “The law gone mad — again,” The Sydney Morning Herald, November 25, 2000, p. 40.
19. Top 4 other Aussie writings on discrimination/affirmative action

1.
[Unsigned editorial], “Discriminatory nonsense,”
The Australian Financial Review, January 30, 1981, p. 12.

Possibly the most sensible suggestion of the recent report of the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board on Discrimination and Age was that the age of consent should be lowered. At least that recommendation showed some awareness of social conditions, and has nothing to do with economics.

For the rest this document of some 250 pages has to be counted as one of the most ineffably silly products of the kind of trendy advisory bodies governments appoint. What it is saying is that sometimes employers and others are not very careful in looking for exceptions to the simple rules of thumb expressed by age limits.

It is not true that everyone should retire at 65; it is not true that all men over 45 are unemployable, despite the fact that job advertisements frequently specify a 45 upper age limit; it is not true that all people under 21 are irresponsible, and so on.

This is fairly obvious to most people, and does not require an extensive deployment of phony sociology and pointless surveys to establish. Nor does it require thousands of words of waffle, of which the following paragraph (5,157 in the report) is a typical example:

“Sometimes, in seeking an experienced person for the job, an employer may be seeking something more general than experience in a specific skill. This may be general experience in such things as being in the workforce, maturity and confidence in decision making and ability to relate to older people. Clearly, a school leaver is unlikely to have much of this experience. However, as with specific skill experience, it is something which should not be assumed from someone’s age and should be necessary for the job, not just a means of excluding young people. If the nature of the work is such that people of greater maturity are needed and it is necessary to use age as an indicator of such maturity, an exemption can be sought under section 126 of the Anti-Discrimination Act. Such exemptions are for a specified time and may be subject to certain conditions.”

Note the vagueness of the ideas and the implied threat of legal action against employers who do not meet non-specific criteria.

What the Anti-Discrimination Board has done has been to construct a whole extensive new area of interference in the way ordinary people and ordinary business carry on their affairs, without any analysis worth serious consideration. They are of course carrying through the kind of absurd “equal opportunity” notions which have plagued American legislation and American business over the last decade or so.

Not surprisingly there has been not only no attempt, but not the slightest apparent awareness of the need, to estimate the costs of implementing, enforcing and complying with a whole complex of anti-discrimination regulations, in this case dealing with the problem of prejudice against people because of their age. Nor has any serious attention been given to the reasons for such discrimination.

It needs to be said at once that discrimination which has no basis other than in prejudice is of course objectionable. In fact, in most cases it exists because of demands made by employee organisations rather than by employers. Thus there are many cases of valuable employees over 65 who retire only because of legislation or award conditions requiring that they do so.

There are also examples of not very well founded beliefs that only young people, or mature workers, or old people, are fit for particular jobs. But for the most part age criteria are simply the codification of general experience.

If the committee were simply proposing that legal age discrimination ought to be removed except when it can be shown to be absolutely necessary it might have a case. Not much of a case, for it has to be remembered that it is likely to be fairer to most people to be judged on objective criteria than by a committee of bureaucrats.

And, as has been pointed out by Hayek and others, it is less devastating to one’s self-esteem to be penalised by accident of age than by the considered judgment (which history shows to be just as likely to be wrong) of a committee of one’s peers who just happen to have access to the levers of power.

But the whole thrust of the report, as of similar reports of this board and its sister committees or boards elsewhere, is to create a whole new area of regulation and interference in the affairs of the community generally.

Research in the United States on the activities of such regulators has shown that they either do not know or do not care much what is the short term impact of their activities on employment. One thing they do is raise the costs of employing any mix of human beings, and hence lower total employment in the relevant industries. Another is to entrench discrimination in more pernicious forms.

Thus, if an 18-year-old goes to court claiming he or she has been discriminated against in promotion on grounds of age the most likely result will be a tacit policy of not employing 18-year-olds. Nobody wants litigious employees. Similarly, it is obvious enough that one of the reasons why there is real discrimination against young employees is frequently ill-considered minimum wage legislation which makes them unprofitable to employ.

There is in our society a good deal of discrimination and prejudice, on age and other grounds. But it is a pipedream to imagine that it can be bludgeoned out of existence, particularly by people who show no lack of ignorant prejudice themselves.

The Anti-Discrimination Board, and its siblings, effectively demonstrate that the legal profession and the sociologists have nothing but foolishness to offer on the real ills of our community. They are, after all, one of the ills.

***
1a.
Jocelyn Maxwell, “Prejudice may go underground,” The Australian Financial Review, February 17, 1981, p. 13, as a letter to the editor.

SIR, Congratulations on your devastating leading article entitled “Discriminatory nonsense” (FR, January 30).

We are in whole-hearted agreement with its conclusions.

As you are no doubt aware, one of the Anti-Discrimination Boards’ favourite hobbyhorses is discrimination on the grounds of sex.

While a good deal of prejudice on this matter does exist in the community, WIL is convinced that any attempt to bludgeon it out of existence using the law as a weapon can only cause such prejudice to go underground and reappear in a more pernicious form.

JOCELYN MAXWELL,
national secretary,
Woman for Individual Liberty,
Red Hill, Qld.

***
1b.
Paul Stein, “Discrimination entrenched,” The Australian Financial Review, February 25, 1981, p. 13, as a letter to the editor.

SIR, Your editorialist of January 30 concedes that age discrimination is widespread. He states: “It is not true that everyone should retire at 45; it is not true that all men over 45 are unemployable, despite the fact that job advertisements frequently specify a 45 upper age limit; it is not true that all people under 21 are irresponsible, and so on.”

He then makes the strange statement that this is fairly obvious to most people and does not need to be established through sociological surveys.

However, the reverse is true. Age discrimination is so deeply entrenched that the concept is not obvious to most people.

Assumptions about age go unquestioned so frequently that they become ingrained in laws, management practices, regulations and policies. Potentially, age discrimination affects everyone in work, education accommodation or consumer affairs.

Under section 119 of the NSW Anti-Discrimination Act the board was charged with reporting on age discrimination. Its findings have been sensationalised by the popular press, which has concentrated almost entirely on the proposal to lower the age of consent to 14, a recommendation which your leader writer applauds.

However, the distortion in the Financial Review editorial is just as great. Equal opportunity programs are ridiculed, as are complaint procedures, without any evidence being brought forward.

Far from encouraging litigious employees, the Anti-Discrimination Act emphasises non-judicial investigation and conciliation. It also provides for education and research.

Unfortunately, the editorial is a collector’s item of confused thinking, and pejorative language. Anti-discrimination legislation becomes just another opportunity for the writer to advocate laissez-faire managerial prerogatives and to attack minimum wages for young people.

To claim on the one hand that discrimination based on prejudice is objectionable, and on the other that age discrimination is somehow objective and fair, is editorial nonsense.

PAUL STEIN,
President,
Anti-Discrimination Board,
Sydney.

***
1c.
Lady Matheson, “Fight the evils not the fighter,” The Australian Financial Review, March 5, 1981, p. 13, as a letter to the editor.

SIR, Your editorial entitled “Discriminatory nonsense” (FR, January 30) admits the existence of a good deal of discrimination and prejudice in our society, but maintains that this cannot be “bludgeoned out of existence” by legislation.

The word “bludgeoned” evidently attracts your correspondent Jocelyn Maxwell (FR, February 17) who uses the same phrase to express her disapproval of anti-discrimination legislation.

Prejudice and discrimination are long-standing evils and unless we are to accept them for ever, some form of resistance must be attempted.

If legislation is not the way to do this, what is? It would be helpful to have some constructive suggestions.

Is education the answer?

Does your leader writer believe the pen to be mightier than the sword (or the bludgeon)? If so, shouldn’t he be using it to fight the evils themselves rather than the other fighters?

What successes could be won if he did!

LADY MATHESON,
Chairman,
Equal Opportunity
Advisory Council, Vic.

***
2.
[Unsigned editorial], “Is the cure worse than the disease?,”
The Australian Financial Review, January 13, 1986, p. 6.

Legislating to reduce discrimination is like sitting on a see-saw — it is extremely difficult to keep the bar perfectly balanced.

A new monograph by Dr Gabriel Moens, published this week by the Centre for Independent Studies — Affirmative Action: The New Discrimination — is likely to send that see-saw into a spin.

The author argues that affirmative action measures can be used to implement ideals of equality that are incompatible with each other, or even mutually exclusive. Or to put it more straight-forwardly, to redress past discrimination against members of one sex is very likely to necessitate discrimination against the other.

Whatever one’s views on affirmative action, it is impossible to deny that discrimination on gender grounds has existed and still exists.

Two main types of affirmative action program are in operation in Australia. The first, soft affirmative action, aims at removing any artificial barriers to employment or promotion opportunities by such measures as improving recruiting procedures and introducing new training programs.

No believer in equality of opportunity and in the need to maximise the efficiency of employees could possibly disagree with such actions.

The second, hard affirmative action, is more controversial. It takes the form of imposition of hiring and promotion targets or quotas to be filled exclusively with persons from groups identified as victims of past societal discrimination.

Unlike soft measures, these aim at more than equality of opportunity. Their whole rationale is equality of result.

As Dr Moens and other critics of affirmative action have pointed out, these measures raise a host of fascinating and important questions.

Why, for example, are equal employment officers almost invariably chosen from one particular sex? Doesn’t this suggest that the majority sex is being discriminated against by the criteria being used to select such persons?

Doesn’t such an imbalance imply that one sex is less capable than the other in applying such principles? What hard evidence exists to support such an implication?

Questions can also be asked about the requirement that applicants for public service jobs be familiar with EEO principles. Ignoring the question as to how a selection committee decides whether candidates have such attributes, are such attributes really essential for a civil engineer, computer programmer or for a deputy superintendent of a boys’ training school? Surely, competency in the skill required should be the criterion used to select people for such positions.

The issue received rare publicity in 1984 when the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney, Professor John Ward, questioned the wisdom of bringing educational institutions under the rubric of State imposed selection criteria.

If appointments and promotions in such institutions are officially and openly made according to criteria other than academic ones, and there is evidence that this is already occurring, won’t this mean that the most academically able person will not automatically get the job?

Similarly, should private sector employers have their traditional right to decide who is the best person for a particular job rescinded? Certainly, it is a dangerous state of affairs if the State tells employers that they should choose or promote employees according to particular social and moral values, as interwar Germany showed only too well.

The author raises interesting questions about what is called the role model argument. This calls for the promotion of members of one sex to senior positions to encourage other members of that sex to raise their career goals and aspirations, thereby helping in the long-run to increase representation of the minority sex in such positions.

If the reason why members of the minority sex tend to be least qualified for various positions is because of prior patterns of discrimination, then those who are now most qualified will tend to be those who have been discriminated against least in the past.

In other words, there is a genuine danger that a policy of preferential treatment of one sex will invert the ratio of past harm to present benefit because it picks out for special treatment those present members of that sex who least deserve compensation.

Indeed, Dr Moens argues that this practice can actually stigmatise such persons, and in doing so, prolong the existing stereotypes rather than challenge them.

For example, if preferential treatment is given to one sex, then employers and fellow work mates of either sex may feel that this is an insult to persons of that sex who have succeeded purely on their own merits, without the assistance of such treatment.

In short, he says instead of improving relations between the minority and majority sexes, such treatment could well worsen them.

Furthermore, how can preferential treatment of one sex which has been discriminated against in the past, penalise those members of the opposite sex who did the discriminating? Why should the “sins of the fathers” be visited on their offspring?

As the Stalinist argument that a whole generation of Soviet peasants had to suffer to make life superior for future generations showed, arguments for social reform which require one generation, social group or sex to suffer at the expense of another, are fraught with danger.

Hopefully, the arguments raised by this monograph will at least generate more debate on such matters. For this reason, it should be welcomed by all libertarians and believers in reasoned argument.

***
3.
P.P. McGuinness, “Talkback v hate-back: a censorship issue surfaces,”
Times on Sunday, November 22, 1987, p. 2.

Wowserism is alive and well on talkback radio. I was appalled and amused by the program heard the other day in which it was seriously suggested that teachers marking HSC papers should not be permitted to drink.

Marking examination papers is a boring, tedious job at best, and why the people involved should not have some relief and relaxation I can’t imagine. Of course the job should not be done drunk — but a few drinks is not, despite the wowsers, tantamount to incapacitation.

The amazing thing is that the complaint was treated seriously, not simply dismissed with a laugh.

But talkback radio has always been the target of the cranks — and too often the disc-jockeys involved are among the crankiest. The worst prejudices of the community are often exposed most clearly there. Perhaps it therefore serves as a useful safety valve, as well as a reminder of the range and depth of existing prejudices.

It’s not peculiar to Australia. About a year ago I was on a talkback radio program in Paris, which arose out of the showing of Peter Weir’s film The Last Wave on television. The thing that shocked me and the information officer from the Australian Embassy was the amount of hatred for Australia expressed by some of those who phoned in. Of course this is not typical of the French, or even of the present French Government. But it certainly made us think about how Australia is perceived by some foreigners.

This kind of shock can be a good thing, and it is a reason for listening at least occasionally to the talkbacks. They are genuine vox populi stuff. There is selection — a crazy, ranting neo-fascist tends to get a similar response from the listeners; a paranoid everything-is-a-CIA-conspiracy left-fascist attracts an audience which has a taste for that brand of nonsense.

And somebody such as Mike Carlton, the most intelligent, most talented and sanest of all the talkback performers, evokes a degree of decency in his audience which can be very touching and reassuring.

Wowserism is the least of the present problems. Racism, which has emerged in one of its uglier forms on the talkbacks recently, is far more serious. Of course there has always been a degree of racism in Australia — it takes many forms, from standard redneck prejudice through to the anti-racists who are simply exponents of reverse prejudice.

Racism, I believe, is definitely on the rise in Australia. I have heard comments about Asian immigrants, particularly Vietnamese, from the type of people who a couple of years ago would never have dared say such things in company, even if they thought them. This is not a matter of rednecks in a country pub, but of educated professionals in the city centres.

Even the old chestnuts about cats and dogs disappearing into Chinese restaurant kitchens have been trotted out and given credence, instead of being dismissed with the contempt they deserve.

Inevitably, the expression of such stupid prejudice has given rise to demands for censorship, for muzzling those who peddle it in its worst form. A particularly absurd variant of this is the proposal that “minority” groups should be allowed to say what they like about majorities, while members of the majority should be punished with the full weight of the law if they say nasty things about minorities.

This a variant of the modern, “progressive” brand of racism and discrimination, which argues that a wrong should be corrected by another wrong. If it is wrong to expose Aborigines to hatred and contempt — as indeed it is — it is equally wrong to give some people the right to peddle hatred just because they are Aborigines, or speak for them.

But the question of what kinds of restraints can be placed on free speech is a delicate one. The classic rule of thumb is that of the United States Supreme Court judge who pointed out that the right to free speech must stop short of shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre. Just what kind of racist propaganda amounts to shouting “Fire”?

In some democratic countries certain propositions cannot be legally advanced. In France it is an offence to publicly espouse the neo-nazi line that the holocaust is an invention of Jewish propagandists. The obscenity of this line, and the encouragement it gives to those who would revive anti-Semitism, is such that it is considered dangerous in Europe.

There might be a case for extending the rule to deliberate and irresponsible fomentation of hatred of specific groups, as is the case in Britain. I can’t help having sympathy for this — but as is always the case, there is a tendency for the distinction between legitimate expression of opinion and fomentation of hatred and unrest to become blurred.

Often the trouble is that those who propose censorship want to prevent any serious discussion, not just expressions of gross and hateful prejudice. The controversy over intelligence testing is a good example. Another is the question of whether there are any differing racial characteristics.

It is likely that the proceedings of the Royal Commission on the deaths in prisons of Aborigines will be dogged by this problem. But that issue is simply too serious for any possibility, however shocking, to be excluded. Are there sufficient murderers among Australia’s police and prison staffs to explain all these mysterious deaths?

If most of the deaths are indeed suicides, why do Aborigines tend to commit suicide more often in jail than others? Clearly all the most sensitive aspects of the historical, social, racial and anthropological characteristics of Aboriginal — and white — Australians are involved.

There will surely be those who will attempt to rule out some hypotheses because they would seem to reflect unfavourably in some way on some groups. This is a situation in which free speech should be absolutely untrammelled — but the potential for disgusting racist and similar assertions will be immense.

Plenty of offensive rubbish will be around in the community as a whole, of course. I include in the category of offensive rubbish the notion that all Australian police and prison officials are violent and murderous racists. But certainly recent revelations about the prison system are hardly a cause for complacency.

The quality of the talkback shows on this issue has illustrated their best and their worst. It is difficult to imagine any crime bad enough to justify exposing offenders, young, old, black or white to the fate that, it seems, awaits them as a matter of course in our jails.

But never trust anyone who talks about institutional violence or institutional racism. That is only a way of pretending that rational reform and improvement is impossible, or indeed of justifying different forms of violence and racism.

***
4.
P.P. McGuinness, “Germaine, even in silliness, commands respect,”
Times on Sunday, December 6, 1987, p. 2.

Not long after she had achieved world fame with the publication of The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer came back to Sydney for a visit. An old acquaintance, the long-deceased intellectual mentor and drinking buddy of my youth, Ian Parker, looked up from his beer at the bar of the Newcastle Hotel.

“Hello, Germaine,” he said, “have you been away?”

This was just like the reaction she got when she spoke at the 2GB “Credibility lunch” last week. For all most of the assembled audience knew about what she has been doing and thinking during the past 15 years or so, she might never have been away.

Admittedly Mike Carlton set the tone of non-seriousness which Germaine accepted, and which was taken up by most of the comments and questions. But there was a note of the old tendency of Australian men to denigrate a woman who was clearly superior intellectually to them, and a lack of awareness of the fact that the kind of feminism represented by someone such as Germaine Greer is a long way from the crude and demanding feminism which has been espoused by so many Australian women.

She, of course, replied partly in kind — she always was good at puncturing the vanity of posturing males — and her remarks on the fluffy, brushed over the ears hair-styles which were to be seen around the room were both funny and woundingly accurate. That didn’t make them like her more.

But there is much more to Germaine than either brittle fencing or the kind of whingeing litany of complaints which passes for feminism on the ABC. There is a breadth of humanism which makes it possible to agree with her across a wide range of her attitudes, and a degree of intelligence which makes it impossible to ignore her even when she is not only wrong but wrong-headed and silly.

Her book Sex and Destiny is an excellent example of this. I read it with alternating feelings of admiration, enthusiastic agreement, discovery, irritation and fury. Almost in the middle of a paragraph, Germaine can slide from brilliant and perceptive analysis into arrant nonsense. The same is true of her articles, as reprinted in the recent collection The Mad Woman’s Underclothes. (Typically, the provocative title turns out to refer to a perfectly sensible anecdote.)

She has always had, and still retains, a tendency to “Pilgerism” when it comes to dealing with authoritarian leftist regimes.

Similarly, she bears the traditional, white, middle-class guilts about the bloody and unpleasant facts of history, especially when it comes to dealing with the Australian Aborigines. Does she ask for an invitation to live in England from the original inhabitants? Does she believe that recent black arrivals in England have no rights of birth to stay there?

Of course she is too clear-sighted to fail to realise that it is not a simple matter to discuss. When speaking on her talkback program to Paul Coe of the Aboriginal Legal Service, she referred to the experiences of the Indian tribes of North America and indicated that she was well aware of the extent to which they have become the darlings of the radical chic. But she shares a lot of the romantic fantasies about Aborigines which are part of the petty change of what passes for serious analysis of the role and nature of nomadic peoples.

Nevertheless, listening to some of the crude racism which was reflected in the comments addressed to her by her radio audience, it is impossible not to feel that her large sympathies are to be preferred to the narrow defensiveness of so many suburban Australians.

So it was with her other talkback topics. She dealt with the problems of menopause in a way that was enormously attractive to her listeners, because she got to the heart of the issue — that middle-aged ordinary women are often treated, especially by their doctors, with a contempt and callousness they do not deserve.

And unlike many of those who had to struggle out of the bonds of a Catholic childhood, she has been able to look back and see that there were many things and especially many people — such as some of the dedicated religious women — who were worthy of love and admiration. It is not necessary to accept the religion to respect the religious.

That is, unlike many of the feminists, Germaine has been able to grow out of her original revolt without rejecting it. She does not hate, detest or fear men; she has always argued that men suffer as much as women from the false positions into which the emotional and social structures of the past have frozen them.

Nor, as far as I know, has she been one of those feminists who invent complex systems which ape the worst practices of the old male world — matching old-boy networks with feminist networks, substituting for the clandestine operation of groups such as Freemasons clandestine and equally unfair groupings and promotion criteria.

While I am sure she would, like me, treat with hostility any proposals that women are inherently unfitted for anything they might wish to do intellectually or socially, any job or position, I do not think she would support the crude affirmative action programs which assert that women of lesser merit should be promoted in preference to men. It is true that there are many past injustices still to be felt; but you do not correct the wrongs of the past by simply inverting the evil system of discrimination which produced them.

I am of course not sure that Germaine would agree with me to this extent. I cannot recall have seen any discussion by her of the issue of “positive discrimination”. But I am sure that I would have something to learn from her disagreement, because it would not spring from hypocritical fear of the inadequacies of either herself or her sisters.

Germaine Greer’s feminism is of a kind which I think any rational human being could — and should — share. It derives not from a sense of resentment and personal injustice, but rather from a respect for all women, including those who are mothers and wives, parts of societies which are quite different from ours, and indeed for women who think quite differently from her. And it includes men, too.

She is not a trivial person — even when she is wrong or silly. If my daughter should turn out to be a feminist of Germaine’s kind I might not agree with her — but I would be proud of her.

***
5.
P.P. McGuinness, “A blast of the trumpet,”
The Australian Financial Review, February 3, 1988, pp. 44-43.

The affirmative action reporting season is upon us. Over the next three months, companies with 1,000 employees and over are going to have to account for their policies; 300 or so equal employment opportunity officers will have to submit their accountings. And open season on the many more companies with between 500 and 999 employees has commenced.

How much sense and how much nonsense is involved in the drive for equality of employment opportunity for women? And how much benefit can the community derive from such attempts at social engineering?

The first thing that ought to be said is that discrimination against women is a reality. Further, a separate issue, but one which inevitably becomes involved because of its use in keeping women out of the competition for “men’s jobs”, is sexual harassment.

It should not need to be argued that women should be treated as having the same rights of entry to, mobility within, and departure from, the workforce as men. Yet there are both men and women who deny this. They are the reason why something like an affirmative action program is necessary.

A few basic facts have to be asserted, simply because they are often forgotten. First, strange as it may seem, men and women are different. Women bear children, men do not. This means that the work-history of a child-bearing woman will be different from that of a man. This crashingly obvious fact, combined with the fact that sexual activity with or without marriage no longer has to result in child-bearing, means that the cost of children to society has risen.

A woman now has a clear choice as to whether she wants to bear children or not. She can make the choice never to have children herself (parenting of other people’s children is still possible). If so, a woman who wants to have a male-style career path should be judged purely on her ability to meet the criteria of that path. The fact that she is female is irrelevant. Apart from asking her to behave in a reasonably restrained sexual fashion in a work situation (the same demand which is made of men), there ought to be nothing more to be said.

Any discrimination on the ground of being male or female is unjustified and unjust. But it is nevertheless true that many women will want to have babies. It is also true that many men will want to change their jobs.

One of the most interesting statistical results of research into quit rates of men and women in the United States and Australia is that when account is taken of education, training, income, and similar factors, men and women’s quit rates, whether to go to another job or to leave the labour force to have children, are about the same. That is, from the point of view of an individual employer, investment in training, experience and promotion is equal cost as far as men and women are concerned.

So there is no sense in not employing young women on an equal basis to young men.

What about the women who drop out of the workforce to have babies, or stay in in while taking maternity leave? It is clear that this makes them less attractive as employees, since there is a period (which may not be long) during which they cannot contribute fully and, more importantly, frequently a stretch of years during which they do not participate in the normal male experience-pattern, bonding, promotion, crawling to the boss, or whatever you call it.

Maternity leave is something which society is going to have to face up to if we want the net reproduction rate to remain above zero. Countries in Europe, of which West Germany is an excellent example, are already experiencing the problems of declining population because the cost of having children is becoming too high for the majority of their population.

(There is an excellent novel by the greatest living modern German writer, Gunther Grass, Headbirths, subtitled The Germans are dying out, which depicts the problem, with an eternal debate between husband and wife summarised as “yes to baby, no to baby”.)

Now there is no way that women could or should be terrorised or forced back into bedroom, kitchen and church.

This is the problem that a sane affirmative action policy needs to address, above and beyond the basic question of allowing women the free choice of their own pattern of life.

Many women are going to willingly choose to be women in the traditional mould. Few feminists have given such women the respect they are entitled too. But few of the traditionalists have given sufficient attention to the issue of free choice, and the cost that this will impose on society.

The mistake of many of the feminists has been to suppose that these costs can easily be shifted onto business or employers generally without generating inevitable counter-reactions of avoidance.

The test for the 1986 Affirmative Action Act is going to be in how the costs of the program fall.

The 300 or so companies which report are going to have to give a statistical account of how women are represented at various levels and occupations, and what steps they have taken to improve this representation. Unlike the tertiary education institutions, and the Public Service departments, the cost of any mistakes is going to fall on them, not on the taxpayer and the community generally.

That is why there is some caution, and why many companies will be accused of discrimination against women when, in fact, they are taking action slowly to protect their female employees and their shareholders.

To promote underqualified or incompetent women to jobs in a university or government department involves losses which do not immediately or obviously impinge on those bodies. To do it in an enterprise which has to make a profit can be disastrous in the short term.

That is why the more sensible advocates of the affirmative action program made sure to impose no penalty — apart from naming in Parliament — upon a business which does not meet targets of improvement. Nor is the criterion of merit displaced by criteria of sex. Thus the 1986 Act specifically provides in Section 3(4) that “nothing in this Act shall be taken to require a relevant employer to take an action incompatible with the principle that employment matters should be dealt with in the basis of merit.”

This must upset quite a few males, who would prefer promotion to be based on seniority (in which non-child bearing males will always have an overwhelming advantage). But it also displeases those women who want to impose quantitative targets.

For the notion that women should ever approach 50-50 representation in any specific category of employment (apart, of course, from those in which they are traditionally overrepresented, like nursing — perhaps there ought to be targets for male employment in these) supposes that recruitment for such a category can be drawn from a pool which is 50-50 male-female. The truth is, of course, that the proportion of men in any promotion-possibility pool will always be far greater than 50 per cent.

This is simply because, short of babies grown and raised in bottles, women have to bear babies. As the reality of discrimination lessens, the cost to society of inducing, bribing, paying or seducing women into child-bearing and raising will rise — but that means that the promotion pool will be correspondingly reduced.

The numerical targets overlook this. This is fine for accelerating the promotion of women in the Public Service, but not appropriate for the private sector, in which most women, particularly those who do not have the benefits of university education, must live.

The test for the first stage of the 1986 Act is going to be in the public reception of the very narrow, and non-comparable, statistical results which it produces.

If there is a witch-hunt against corporations which do not meet the maximalist demands of the extreme feminists, then the Act will harm women in general far more than it benefits the few high-income female beneficiaries.

***
6.
P.P. McGuinness, “The facts about sex,”
The Australian Financial Review, June 29, 1988, pp. 76-75.

Very soon now the Government is going to have to decide what to do about reporting companies that have not lived up to affirmative action requirements and submitted adequate statistical returns on their employment of women and efforts to overcome discrimination.

The efforts made by the Office of Status of Women and others in setting up this affirmative action programme were commendable, but it must be said that its results are already being prejudged by many proponents of affirmative action as inadequate, regardless of the real progress made.

All too frequently claims of sex discrimination are made by women on the basis of totally absurd criteria — for example, that the proportion of women in any category of employment should in principle be about 50 per cent. This would be fine if there were 50 per cent of women employed in any occupation, who were equally qualified on average as the men.

The fact that there are not may be a result of past discrimination, but that is not a justification for promoting women who are less able and qualified than men — for a commercial business, that is a recipe for loss; for a government, it is a recipe for inefficiency and bad government.

But what are the facts? For a start, it has to be realised that there are far fewer women in the full-time, full-year labour force than men. Of the total such labour force in 1985-86 of 4.7 million people, only 26.8 per cent were women. This would immediately suggest that a 50 per cent target by categories would be unachievable in general, and very difficult in most occupations. Some occupations have a much higher proportion of female employees, and we are entitled to expect that the proportion of women in senior categories should reflect that — but no more.

Even in the age groups from which promotions will be drawn, the proportion of women employed on average is still about one-quarter: 26.6 per cent in the 25-34 age group and 24.1 per cent in the 35-44 group.

These figures, like the others cited below, come from the Australian Bureau of Statistics 1986 Income Distribution Survey publication on persons with earned income (catalogue 6546.0), published in May, and apply to the year 1985-86.

They are virtually the only major source of information on the changing trends in income equality of the sexes, and they serve to dispel quite a deal of the propaganda which seems to surround the subject. The statistics are far from perfect — but they are the best we have.

They show, for example, that although it remains true that working women (for the present I confine myself to full-time, full-year workers) are paid on average less than men, the discrepancy is rapidly declining. Thus in 1974 the mean gross earned income for women was 71 per cent of the average for all persons. In 1979 it was 78 per cent; in 1982, 80 per cent; and in 1986 just over 82 per cent.

For some reason there are many propagandists of the women’s movement who deny that any progress has been made. I think we should rejoice in the clear evidence of progress towards equality. It must, however, be asked whether as long as the majority of women have broken workforce experience, and many have therefore less experience and less commitment to the workforce, it will ever be possible for the average female wage to rise to complete equality with the male.

Some women will and should of course earn more than men. The issue is the average. It is clearly true that the average for all women is pulled down by the fact that many women do not intend to stay in the full-time workforce, and do not acquire the same qualifications.

So what of those who are qualified? One indicator is the ratio for Canberra, where there have been conscious affirmative action programmes in operation for some time. There it appears that female mean income is 84.5 per cent of the average for all persons, as against the figure of 82.2 per cent for the whole of Australia. It is worth noting that the average female income is more than 22 per cent higher in Canberra than in Australia as a whole.

But these figures include the higher proportion of female graduates in Canberra, and do not take account of different age distributions.

However, if we compare the age group 15-24, with university or college degrees, we find that average female earnings are 90 per cent of all persons in the same category. Since the available pool of females is only 44 per cent of the total employment in that group, this suggests that there may be discrimination in favour of women — however, it may also be the case that a higher proportion of men are undergoing further education or training.

But when we compare the age group 25-34 we find that the ratio of female to all persons earnings, with degrees, is still 90 per cent, but the proportion of females in the work-force has fallen to 31.6 per cent. Again, this suggests that women are doing pretty well.

In what might be called the “executive” age group, 35-44, the proportion of women is only 25 per cent, and their average incomes only 79 per cent of all persons (and only 74 per cent of those of males alone). Clearly, if there is discrimination against educated women, this is where we should look for it. But it has to be remembered that statistically even if the women are just as good as the men on average in every respect, there is still only one of them for every three men qualified for promotion.

So the real issue for the group of mature, educated women is whether there is any good reason for their being paid, on average, less than men, even though if selection for promotion is fair there must inevitably be more men in “staff” jobs. If selection is fair and no other factors are operating, this should not affect the average too much.

It is clear, however, that women are likely to have on average shorter periods of continuous employment, and will be affected by household and child-rearing responsibilities more than men. In certain occupations it would be fair to compensate women for these disadvantages (unless we want the human race to die out), but not in all.

In some occupations performance is not related to time in or out of the workforce, and no compensatory action for women ought to be considered. Since these tend also to be occupations in which the highest skills are required — for example, surgery — payment ought to be entirely on merit, with no compensation for time lost even considered. (Indeed, penalties might be in order for very expensively educated people who drop out of the workforce.)

However, the evidence, which is far from complete, is that educated women have succeeded in overcoming virtually all significant discrimination against them on purely “sexist” grounds. It is no longer a problem.

Where there is still a genuine problem of sexism in the labour force is among the less educated groups, and in segmented sections of the labour force.

These groups, of course, are those who complain least about sexism and who are more likely to move in and out of the full-time labour force for the purposes of having children or making homes, or indeed opt for part-time work. The demand for “equal pay for equal worth” involves a concept of equality which has little to do with any rational approach to sex discrimination by employers.

***
7.
Padraic P. McGuinness, [untitled “McGuinness” column],
The Australian, March 23, 1989, p. 2.

Just for a moment this week I thought of laying a complaint under the NSW Anti-Discrimination Act.

The occasion was a visit to one of those clubs where they ape English gentlemen’s clubs, and consume food and drink inferior to that to be had in any decent hotel for the sake of exclusivity. These establishments tend to have special places where males can cringe in mutual fear, protected against the incursion of the dreaded female sex.

Indeed, it was sex discrimination I had in mind. I arrived to attend a lunch in a private room, perfectly respectably dressed. But, since it was a warm very humid day, no tie. Without this scrap of cloth, I was told I would not be admitted to the hallowed premises. But, I asked, what about the lady who had just come to meet me — where was her tie? It was a clear case of sexual discrimination.

The real surprise was that anyone should continue to insist on such absurd (and discriminatory) dress rules. I suppose one must accept them in pathetic establishments like those I was attempting to enter. Oddly enough, I had had dinner there only the previous Friday, wearing a tie, a green one with shamrocks. I had forsaken the much better non-discriminatory establishments where St Patrick’s Day was being celebrated to address the Alumni Association of the Australian Graduate School of Management.

Of course such cases of discrimination are too trivial to care about. I have no objection to private single-sex bars or clubs, or clubs which insist on drag. There need be no legislation to deal with such matters.

Unfortunately, trivial complaints are all too common in matters of alleged discrimination. It can, however, be a serious matter; and in the case of race or sex I quite agree that discrimination should not be practised in any public place. But the tendency to appeal to the coercion of the law as first resort instead of last is typical of the proliferation of heavy-handed moralism in ordinary life.

Discrimination is now considered to be a bad thing in itself, without any sensible appraisal of what is actually going on.

Legislation of sledge-hammer ferocity is introduced without any serious analysis of what a problem is and how it might sensibly be alleviated.

Like many people, I was shocked when a Melbourne hospital declared that it would not accept AIDS sufferers. But instead of inquiring further, the Victorian Government immediately invoked legislation forbidding discrimination of AIDS sufferers.

To the degree that AIDS can be transmitted by blood, a hospital is clearly a place where special precautions ought to be taken. It is repugnant that any hospital should reject an AIDS sufferer — but it is entitled to take due precautions, especially the testing of all patients for AIDS before surgery.

Legislation to protect AIDS sufferers against discrimination outside hospitals is simply going to make the community more fearful: it is an excessive response.

Last week the question of discrimination against the aged, especially in employment came up in public discussion. Predictably, we did not have to wait long before someone proposed legislation to make age discrimination illegal.

This is not such a new proposal. A few years ago the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board published an extremely silly discussion paper on Age Discrimination, and the need for legislation to combat “ageism”. This whole business of “isms” is getting out of hand. Racism and sexism, though much abused terms, at least mean something. Speciesism meaning discrimination against non-humans (that is, thinking human suffering is more important than animal suffering) is a particularly silly extension of this usage.

Along with ageism we could have generationalism, or redhairism, or any derogatory implication or fine distinction described as an ism. How would you describe discrimination against the overweight? Fatism? And should it be illegal? The serious problems of discrimination ought not to be trivialised in this fashion. In the case of age, a little analysis, preferably by non-lawyers, reveals what the problems are.

Older people find it difficult to get jobs for a number of good reasons. One is the fact that long-service leave, sickness and insurance provisions are likely to make them more costly as employees per year of expected working life than young people. Another is that while the cost of training will be no less in the case of an unskilled worker, the returns to training may well be less because of a shorter time in the workforce.

There is genuine prejudice against older people in the workforce, too. Young women often do not like to work with older women: young people generally find it difficult to deal with older people unless they are in positions of authority. Employers often fear that taking on a new employee above a certain age will mean that there will be problems of authority and of adaptation.

These are issues which derive from social attitudes which may be mistaken, but which are not easily addressed by coercive legislation. The place to start is where the social attitudes can be broken down.

Obviously, the greatest problems with employing older people derive from regulations and restrictions which make work difficult for them. Many older people would like to work part-time — the obvious thing to do is to relax union and legal restrictions and financial penalties on part-time work — but the financial penalty makes it impossible.

The economic value of a person over fifty, with no special skills, is often less than a younger person of equal competence simply because of legislative requirements. This inevitably leads to discrimination. The remedy is to remove such impediments.

Then it might be possible to do something about genuine discrimination by the young, and the already tenured aged, against older people seeking work. But the crude bludgeon of legislation should not be the starting point for changing attitudes.

Neither ought it to be in the case of all forms of race and sex discrimination, though these issues are much more serious. The real undermining of such discrimination comes from policies designed to achieve genuine equality of opportunity.

If people want to form exclusive groupings and clubs, this must be accepted as proof of social inadequacy, and the mild disorder of snobbery. As such, they deserve some sympathy, nothing more.

Equally, if men want to resort to establishments, whether they be bath houses or gentlemen’s clubs, which protect them from the “monstrous regiment” of women, this is entirely a matter for themselves. If they insist on antediluvian and discriminatory dress and segregation rules, let them. Why use a sledgehammer to crack a nut?

***
8.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Enforcing false equality insults women’s intellect,” The Australian, December 8, 1989, p. 2.

The affirmative action bandwagon is rolling again. The High Court has just delivered a majority judgment upholding the decision of the NSW Equal Opportunity Tribunal in favour of a group of women workers dismissed by Australian Iron and Steel (AIS). The Commonwealth Office of the Status of Women has launched a witch-hunt against companies who believe that the application of the affirmative action legislation against them is irrelevant. And a group of women academics at the University of Sydney has launched a case in the tribunal to establish that women have been discriminated against in that body.

On the last, the intellectual credentials of the claim have not been assisted by the newly appointed Vice-Chancellor of the University of Western Australia, Professor Fay Gale. I have nothing against Professor Gale, and academics whom I respect (there are a few) have spoken well of her. But if she is quoted accurately as saying that “on any logical deduction you would expect universities to have a 50-50 sex ratio”, she has intellectual problems. On any logical deduction, you would not.

It is perfectly clear that the pool of women qualified for university appointment (and God knows the standards are low enough) is not as big as the pool of men. That is simply because not as many women as men are qualified in mathematics, science and technology.

In addition, even in the best of all non-discriminatory worlds there will always be a smaller pool of potential women academics, since many women still make the traditional choice to opt first for marriage and child-bearing, and only secondarily for employment. No one has the right to criticise women who make this decision, whether for religious, traditional, or other reasons.

So it will never be appropriate to argue that there should be a 50-50 sex ratio in the academy, simply because the pool of talented women who want to be academics will always be smaller than the pool of talented men. To insist in such a ratio will only ensure that women of mediocre and inferior talent are given preference over men — as has happened already in a number of our universities. This is of course an insult both to women of first rate intellect and to the principle of equality of opportunity.

However, the High Court has just thrown a new consideration into the whole argument. For it has effectively decided (by a majority of three to two) that affirmative action should act retrospectively. So much for the principle that innocent actions should not be made punishable by retrospective legislation.

At the same time the High Court has introduced an entirely new element into workplace industrial relations. It has effectively outlawed one of the most hallowed of industrial traditions, the Last In-First Out (LIFO) rule, whereby when a company is compelled to retrench its workforce the most recently employed workers are laid off first, in order of what is called “gate seniority”.

For all practical purposes this is now illegal.

The argument which the High Court has upheld is that because there was discrimination against the unemployment of women by AIS in Port Kembla before 1981 (which no one denies, although one could well ask why the unions which insisted on such discrimination are not being asked to contribute to the damages awarded) the LIFO principle inevitably meant that women were unfairly penalised because they were for the most part lacking in “gate seniority”. In other words, the company which has been penalised for past discrimination is now expected to adopt policies which would be reversely discriminatory in favour of women.

This is despite the fact that as Justice McHugh in his minority judgment, by far the most logically argued, pointed out the difference in the proportion of men and women retrenched was virtually non-existent.

In October 1982 the company retrenched 93.73 per cent of female ironworkers and 93.23 per cent of male ironworkers employed after January 6, 1981. The majority decision of the High Court boils down to the proposition that because women were subjected to negative discrimination before April 1980 (when the initial complaint of discrimination was made) they should now be subject to positive discrimination.

That is, the company should have set out to penalise men more because of the fact that fewer women were employed in the company. Although most rational people would agree that the old discrimination against the employment of women was objectionable, at the time the great majority of people (men and women) believed that this was the right thing to do. Now, however, they are being retrospectively punished for acting in according with both the law and social conventions applying at the time.

Nor does it make any sense to endow the women who have been employed by AIS since April 1980 with any special preference. There is absolutely no reason to believe that they are any better and more productive workers (or any worse) than the men. That is, they are being rewarded for the wrongs putatively done to their older sisters.

When this principle is applied to universities, or indeed to the professions, the problems are obvious. It is a principle of discriminating in favour of the less qualified simply because of past injustices not done to them personally.

However in the case of academics it is not even established that there has been in the past sex discrimination to any significant extent. I am certain that there has been some — but how many women have not offered themselves for academic jobs, or not achieved promotion, simply because they have not fulfilled the formal requirements of the university departments, like number of publications or a doctorate?

While I agree that many of these requirements are silly, they have acted to exclude men just as much as women who are clearly of sufficient scholarship and intellect to deserve appointment but who have not grovelled to the right people or collected the right certificates.

This may well be a reason for criticising universities, but it is not evidence of sexual discrimination. It is also true that it is harder for women who raise children to meet these formal requirements; but that is in itself not a justification for appointing women who have not. It is harder for a woman with children to become an engineer; but that is not a good reason for appointing an under-qualified woman to design bridges.

The arguments put forward by the majority of the High Court in upholding the decision of the NSW Tribunal are illogical and senseless. It is a classic case of the court making social policy with inadequate understanding of the economic and social implications of what it is doing.

But, although this is not what the court had in mind, it will not be such a bad thing. For arbitrary rules of retrenchment like the LIFO rule have always been the resort of lazy managements and traditionalist unions. When a company reduces its labour force, the most sensible thing to do is to sack the weak, the incompetent, the unproductive, the marginal and the old first. The High Court has now ensured that social considerations in sackings must be ignored lest a company fall foul of the sex discrimination laws.

***
9.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Sisters in suits equal to none,”
The Weekend Australian, March 7-8, 1992, p. 2.

International Women’s Day is tomorrow. Precisely what this celebrates or commemorates is lost in the murky past of socialist history; for years it was only celebrated by the various communist, or communist-front, women’s movements all over the world at the behest of the Stalin regime.

When I was working for the Soviet bank in London in the 1960s — and, despite the allegations of a Trotskyite writer for one of our Sunday papers, I was not responsible for the fall of communism — they used to celebrate International Women’s Day by giving the female employees a day off. The rest of the year they were treated appallingly.

But it is as good a time as any to reflect on the achievements and failures of the women’s movement. That is a pretty vague phrase in itself. United States cultural imperialism ensures that the Australian Left will follow whatever silly fashion achieves popularity in the American Left; and the fact that young women are now no longer subscribing to the loonier forms of feminism promoted during the 70s is seen as somehow a reaction against women’s equality.

It is not. Rather, it is a return to sanity after the days when the wives of many of my contemporaries ran away from home to indulge in lesbian adventures with other women, dressed in boiler suits, and claimed that somehow they could make a life without men. Many did not go quite so far but demanded that they should be given access, regardless of education and skills, to senior positions in business and government. “Sisters in suits”, in the phrase used by a feminist writer.

There was an important element of justice in the demands of the women’s movement. This is that it is absurd to deny a woman equality of opportunity in every sense of the term, to deny girls as good an education as boys, according to their abilities and interests, and to discriminate in employment and promotion against women purely on the grounds of their sex.

There have been many injustices done to women in the past; and many are still being done. But the allegations of continued discrimination, of “glass ceilings” to promotion of women, only rarely have any solid foundation these days. And sexual harassment, contemptible when it occurs, is more a myth than a reality as far as adult women are concerned.

There are certain uncomfortable facts which those who would advocate “positive discrimination” or “affirmative action” to correct past injustices have to face. One of these is that there is virtually no apparent discrimination in terms of white-collar salaries against women these days in Australia.

That is, when you take comparable groups in terms of age and education, the salaries of tertiary-educated men and women in their 20s these days are the same. An academic study has shown that even when you take a broader definition of the workforce, only about a seventh of pay differentials can be explained as due to sex.

One of the authors of this study, Bruce Chapman of the Australian National University, has also in the past shown that it is foolish for employers to discriminate against women on the grounds that they have a higher quit rate (that is, resignation from a job on whatever grounds, whether to go to another job or to have children) than men.

If you look at men and women of the same education, work experience and salary level, rates are about the same. (Men often leave to go to other jobs.)

It is perfectly true that in the past there has been genuine discrimination against women in the workforce. But these days the evidence shows that while older women still suffer, young women are almost totally free of it.

But of course there will never be 50-50 (or 51-49) representation of women and men in the workforce, particularly at senior levels. This is simply because many women still believe that families and motherhood are more important than male-type careers. To insist on equality of outcomes in terms of employment and promotion is to demand that women be preferred over men. That is not genuine equality.

The real issue is that women who want to acquire education, who want to follow any career or occupation (as distinct from religious vocations, where there are separate issues of doctrine and tradition), should be able to do so to the extent that they have the ability and training necessary.

This is something these days generally agreed on by most schoolgirls, who would resent bitterly any discrimination against them but who ridicule old-fashioned aggressive feminist propaganda.

We have, to use another American term, already entered the “post-feminist” era. Those who want equality in male terms have it. Those who want to follow specifically “feminine” pursuits can also do that. But this is not enough for the sisters in suits who want more than equality, but a redress of all injustices past, present or future, whether actual or fancied.

There are not enough female managing directors? Look at the intake into business or similar qualifying courses 20 years ago and you have the explanation. It has nothing to do with present discrimination. There are not enough female professors? Look at the publications and other required criteria, the numbers of female entrants into universities 20 years ago, and compare the professional careers of male and female applicants.

It is true that women who want both children and satisfying family lives and a traditional male career that does not require child-bearing and rearing absences from the workforce have greater difficulties than men. This is no more than to restate the truism that men and women are different. To complain about this is about as sensible as if I were to complain about the fact that I am not 2m tall, thin, black and handsome.

If a society wants children, it is sensible to compensate women for this. It is the best foundation for arguing that childcare costs for working women should be fully tax-deductible. That is, high-paid women (in higher tax brackets) should receive greater deductions than low-paid women. To do otherwise is to penalise highly trained and highly intelligent women for working and favour the less economically valuable. It also implies that childcare should not just be a government service but as much a matter of choice as schooling.

Far from the complaint that women are being conned into accepting less than the demands made by the sisters in suits 20 years ago being justified, all the really important and justifiable demands of the women’s movement have been won. There remain plenty of silly men who believe that women are inferior, or who are surprised when they encounter a woman better than they are at their jobs. There remain plenty of silly women who carry on like fools when they encounter men like that, instead of simply laughing at them in scorn.

And there remain plenty of sisters who do not believe in equality at all, but believe that they should be more equal than men. Witness the difficulties of the Goss Government. When some women demanded that private men’s clubs be opened up to women, that government not unreasonably asked the private women’s clubs if they would open up to men. The answer was a resounding no.

I cannot imagine why any group of men should want to cower in a bar hiding from the terrible threat of female company. But if they want to, why not let them? What has that got to do with equality?

***
10.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “New feminists want the Old Boys’ privilege and power,” The Australian, July 30, 1993, p. 13.

The present national wage case, in which the Industrial Relations Commission is fighting to justify its continued existence, has an interesting sidelight. This is the argument which is being put by official feminist lobbies that the award system is of special benefit to women.

The argument goes along the lines that any further abandonment of the arbitrated and imposed award system will be of disadvantage to women, since they are more weakly organised in general and are less likely to be considered in the negotiation of a collective bargaining agreement, and that moreover their special interests may not be considered where working hours, overtime provisions and “flexibility” of work arrangements are concerned.

Thus while it is obvious (or ought to be) that it makes sense to negotiate away a rigidly fixed working day in favour of variability of hours, according to the needs of a business within a framework of an annual wage and an annual number of hours, such an arrangement may well not suit women, who are more likely to have binding family commitments. Thus, it is not as easy for female workers to agree to a 12-hour working day as it is for males.

The obverse of this, however, which is not so easily accepted, is that it is preferable for many women to work part-time, casual or split shifts.

However, the implications of the submissions (by the Victorian Equal Opportunity Commission) are interesting. They are that it cannot be presumed that the unions in a workplace where enterprise bargaining is under way are interested in the welfare of women workers, nor is it in the interest of women workers to have flexible working and pay conditions.

The former proposition is true enough. Unions in general have been, and still are, the enemies of working women. Originally this was a matter of simple male prejudice, sometimes based on the belief that women should not normally be in the workplace, and that married women in particular should not be allowed to compete with men for secure or well-paid jobs. However, there has been a subtle change in the way in which unions are harmful to women workers. This is the rise of articulate and highly prejudiced middle-class feminism.

It’s a pity there is not a better descriptive term than feminism, since that is an honourable movement to which most women subscribe to varying degrees. Feminism, when it means the claim to equality of opportunity and removal of discrimination on the basis of sex, is something to which most civilised people these days subscribe — but “feminism”, when it means the package of politically correct reverse discrimination which claims the name these days, is mostly obnoxious and silly. Perhaps “wimminism” would better get the flavour. So when I use the term from now on, wimminist feminism is what I am criticising.

Thus it is the “wimminists” who are those really concerned with maintaining the traditional award system, just as they see themselves getting control of it through their advancing representation in the trade union movement. Like the unions traditionally, they are much more interested in asserting the privileges of their members than in defending the genuinely weak, but the rhetoric of solidarity makes an excellent smokescreen for what is being done.

It has always been in the interests of the majority of women workers to work in an unregulated system, since this has always offered much more flexibility than an award-governed system. Indeed, one of the main reasons for the growth of female employment at the expense of male — and full-time award-governed employment — has been the lesser degree of regulation of part-time and casual work.

But it is not necessarily in the interest of women to work in a non-unionised system. When unions are well run and genuinely responsive to the needs of their members, they can offer the kind of support which any workplace needs to prevent abuses of authority, and not least the occasional occurrence of sexual abuse and discrimination. But most unions have traditionally supported or turned a blind eye to real cases of abuse of authority.

What the “equal opportunity” lobby is on about — and equal opportunity is the last thing they are really interested in — is the acquisition of women, who have been successful in entering the award system, of the same kind of protection against unorganised women as the male unionists acquired in the past against women. Again, it is in the name of high principle.

Thus most of the legislative and award protections which male unionists acquired were expressed as being in the interests of protecting women against exploitation of work beyond their strength; and sometimes these were expressed as being for the purpose of protecting the family. Most differential wage rates were based not on any belief that women were necessarily worth less, but on the male unionists that a man, who could be expected to have or be about to have dependants, had greater needs than a woman.

These are no longer valid assumptions. For the most part, any prejudgment of a woman’s needs, strength or ability cannot these days be taken for granted. The proper response to this is not to look for more regulation, but for less.

Some regulation does remain justified. Thus it is absurd for women to claim that women should be employable equally with men in circumstances which present a special threat to women through possible harm in pregnancy, for example, in certain processes involving chemicals. Only if they were prepared to waive all compensation claims (and they probably would not be entitled to waive all claims affecting an unborn child) would women have a rational case for non-discrimination in these forms of employment.

Some, though not the majority, of the traditional sex prohibitions on women workers have a rational basis. (Equally, if it is true — which is not yet established — that working in nuclear power establishments had an adverse genetic effect on the children of male workers, there might be a case for confining such employment to women, especially past child-bearing age.)

The point is, however, that the “wimminists” approach to the national wage case hearing has nothing to do with either the rational demands of the trade union movement, or the welfare of the female workforce, but is simply an attempt to shore up a newly acquired area of privilege — which is of benefit primarily to educated, white-collar females rather than to women as a whole.

Essentially, what the “wimminists” are about is the repetition, the replication, of obsolescent male structures like the Old Boys’ Club (networking), like regulations which serve to restrict entry and competition, and like union structures which condemn a substantial proportion of the workforce to unemployment by imposing minimum wages and conditions.

The real losers from this will be the unskilled, uneducated, unorganised, working class and migrant women, as well as the girls who will find all the potential avenues of employment closed off by tenured middle-aged wimminists.

***
11.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Law a bad substitute for manners in age of political correctness,” The Australian, November 24, 1993, p. 12.

If the multiplication of legislation and rules about anti-discrimination and anti-vilification does not soon have a limit put upon it, it will become impossible to discriminate against or vilify anyone who is not statistically average or normal.

The normal have always been targets, of course. When I was young and in the Sydney push, middle-class girls who wore panty-girdles and twinsets were known as “Daphnes” and their male counterparts were “Roys”. The clean-living decent working-class man was known as an “Alf”, and his counterpart as an “Ethel”. (There was great hilarity in the Royal George when the Sydney Morning Herald gardening correspondent began her column with the immortal words, “Daphnes must be carefully rooted.”) And of course Barry Humphries founded a whole career on holding up to ridicule characters who began as normal Moonee Ponds residents, Sandy Stone and Edna Everage; even Les Patterson began life as a run-of-the-mill Labor politician.

What the anti-vilification legislation intended to do, of course, is to protect defenceless minorities from abuse and ridicule which might tend to stir up violence against them; and I have a certain sympathy for this even though it is a cast-iron certainty that the legislation will be used to harass the unorthodox as well as the prejudiced and to repress free speech. French law penalises those who attempt to revive the vicious anti-Semitism of the past, and for good reason.

But the use of anti-discrimination laws to try to impose a social order which appeals to the namby-pamby fashion of political correctness is more worrying. It is true that the ridicule of political correctness has been overdone, in that what the better exponents of the fad are trying to do is to impose good manners on public discourse and behaviour. Unfortunately, good manners which do not spring from a genuine desire to behave in a civilised fashion but which are observed as a result of compulsion breed hypocrisy, dishonesty and the cult of the informer.

As Hugh Mackay recently pointed out, much modern social legislation is the result of a desire to reimpose social, religious and moral norms which have already broken down and which now have no accepted underpinnings. But the law is a lousy substitute for faith, morals or good manners. All we are really doing is creating a tawdry, secular equivalent of a theocracy.

The recent decision of the NSW Parliament to extend the anti-discrimination law to discrimination on the basis of age is another classic example of ill-considered legislative meddling which will do considerable harm to the people it is meant to benefit, and to the community as a whole. Not surprisingly it has emanated from the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board, a particularly loathsome example of its kind. (Vilification of bullying bureaucracies is not yet an offence, and the High Court decision throwing out the law which prevented criticism of the Commonwealth Industrial Relations Commission is a lonely guarantee of freedom of speech in this respect.)

Most of the problems of age discrimination are, of course, those of discrimination against the old or ageing. The NSW law’s inclusion of discrimination against young people in matters like the extension of credit is just humbug. It is fascinating to remember that the generation which has invented the tort of age discrimination is the very same baby-boomer generation which created a whole religion of vilification of the aged and the experienced. The old were all “gerontocrats” as long as they occupied positions or jobs which were envied by the young.

These same people are those who, now they are ageing, fear the same descriptions being applied to them, and above all fear the prospect of being shoved aside, derided and removed from their jobs in the same way that they insisted on their seniors being treated unless they were impregnably entrenched. The notion of anyone over 50 as being a dinosaur, or ignorant of the world, or inflexible, or reactionary, or on the brink of senility, or obsessed with the past is itself a creation of the past 30 years. As always, it sometimes has justice. Gerontocracy has always been a reality.

But age discrimination as an offence is quintessentially the offence of the baby-boom generation. Now, however, that they are on the brink of age themselves they are concerned to protect themselves against the effects of the prejudices and propaganda they so assiduously cultivated in their younger days. The cult of youth has now become a cult of longevity and the Peter Pans of yesterday are the Struldbrugs of tomorrow.

Thanks mainly to the baby-boom generation, age discrimination is a reality. A man over 45 without a job is already permanently on the scrapheap. A woman over 40 and outside the tenured workforce is virtually in the same position. Anybody over 50 without special connections (like bureaucrats who become “consultants”) is finished. This despite the fact that such people often enough have skills and experience which are valuable and which remain so. (The basic skills of literacy and numeracy, including a real grasp of English grammar, are now rare even among the younger exponents of crafts like journalism or teaching where they should be essential.)

It is a good thing that attention is now at last being paid to overcoming the prejudice and discrimination against age. Even though it is a self-interested invention of the baby-boomers, it is not without value. But the problem of ageism is not something which can be dealt with simply by the bludgeon of anti-discrimination legislation. It will require the honesty to face up to the fact that discrimination and exclusionism in the workforce is the very stuff of our trade union and industrial relations system, and there is no evidence that either white-collar or blue-collar unions are doing anything about breaking down the practices which give effect to it.

For example, for years I employed as a casual sub-editor on the Financial Review a man who was far more literate than most of his juniors; but because he was over 65 he could not be employed full-time. This was a union rule. Are the unions now going to accept that the elderly should stay in the job as long as they can usefully be employed? Are they going to accept that there are many men and women of 70 who are more able in other than tasks requiring brute strength than their competitors aged 30, 40 or 50?

It is typical of the anti-discrimination industry that it ignores the real issue of the prejudices and rules of the workforce, and instead pretends that the problem is all the fault of and to be charged to the employers. So, of course, the costs will be built into labour costs, and hence create even more subtly disguised forms of discrimination and unemployment.

***
12.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Feminist law reformers out of their depth,”
The Australian, August 17, 1994, p. 13.

The great German writer Gunter Grass once wrote a long novel in which a group of feminists put on trial the fish who is the key figure in one of the Grimm stories, usually known as The Fisherman’s Wife. In The Flounder, Grass satirises the more ridiculous elements of the women’s movement.

I felt I was back in the pages of The Flounder as I read the latest report of the Australian Law Reform Commission, Equality Before the Law: Justice for Women. Mainly produced under the direction of Justice Elizabeth Evatt, this report seems to have been intended to be an elaborate parody of all the worst victimology and demands of the women’s movement — perhaps it was designed to discredit sane feminism.

For like the fisherman’s wife, there is a growing sense of disproportion — one cannot help feeling that the main defect of the law in the eyes of the ALRC is that it does not accept that the supposed historic injustices inflicted by men upon women have to be reversed by thrusting men down into an oppressed class whose main function in life is to redress the grievances of women.

There have been many real injustices done to women in the past, though trying to redress the balance of evolution seems a pretty futile endeavour. Certainly we should accept that equality of opportunity is a central principle of our society, and no self-respecting schoolgirl these days would accept anything less. But this does not mean equality of outcomes.

It is merely absurd to assume that every occupational category in society should be equally filled by men and women, or that women are being deprived because the different psychological and biological make-up of men and women lead to some differences in outcomes. So long as opportunity is not denied women, so long as there are no barriers or glass ceilings (so called because they are invisible and undetectable, like the dark matter of the universe) operating to deny those women who do not want to be maternally and domestically occupied from filling any job at any level, then there is a fair degree of equality.

Of course, this is not accepted by those middle-aged and mediocre women who resent not having the power and possessions they would like. So they end up in sexist (count the staff ratio) institutions such as the ALRC inventing social theories — what it calls a “contextualised theory of equality”, whatever that means. (In fact it means whatever the ALRC wants it to mean.)

For the main characteristic of this report, like so many of the reports of the ALRC, is that there is no serious research underlying it. The extent and the seriousness of the problem it wants to address is an article of faith, supported by many horror stories (many of them derived from the numerous “confidential”, and therefore unverifiable, submissions it receives); by sheer weight of verbiage it tries to establish that the wrongs it imagines to exist, or can discover in particular cases, are widespread.

Indeed, when it comes to discrimination there is a wonderful piece of double-think — discrimination is bad when supposedly suffered by women, but good when it is directed in favour of women, since it redresses supposed past disadvantages.

The result of all this unfounded propaganda and semantic gobbledegook is a set of propositions which might go well in a fascist political system, but which are hardly appropriate in a pluralistic democracy.

All rights, all liberties, all social tolerance are, according to this report, to be subordinated to its lunatic schemes for “equality” of access to — meaning control of — the law. The fact that some of these derive from the absurd antics of the international bureaucrats who base themselves on CEDAW — the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women — is hardly a justification. It is just one aspect of the madness.

Religious freedom is one of the first casualties of the recommendations which the report makes for amendment of the Sexual Discrimination Act. The ALRC recommends that religious educational institutions should be forbidden from requiring conformity with the moral standards of their religion by their staff. In other words, a school run by a religion which disapproves of female homosexuality, of extramarital sexual relations and of pregnancy without marriage should be compelled to employ women who reject these moral principles.

Of course, this would deprive all traditional religions of their rights to insist on their own standards of morality in their own institutions — “the right to enjoy culture and religion must be balanced with the right to equality and with the principle of non-discrimination”. Why? So long as it is not compulsory to belong to the religion, why should anyone who does not share that religion’s beliefs have the right to muscle in on its internal affairs?

Voluntary bodies should not be allowed to discriminate. Thus an all-female sauna club would be forbidden to deny entry to men. Or would it? Oh no, that is positive discrimination — only men are to be denied the right to huddle together in homosexual security. (I have a friend who some time ago broke up with her husband of nearly 20 years — one of her main complaints was that he would never leave her alone with her women friends. Surely men, too, are entitled to unisexual company occasionally?)

Women must not be excluded from “male” sports. Some are butch enough to play rugby, therefore men should not hog the changerooms.

Discrimination, according to the ALRC, can be indirect. That is, when you cannot prove that it exists, you assume that it does when there are fewer women in a given place than men. Like at the urinals.

And if anyone says this is absurd — why, the ALRC wants to change the law to place the burden of disproof on the accused. No wonder the ALRC has become a laughing stock among serious lawyers, male or female.

***
13.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Understanding the ethnic lobby’s lack of diversity,” The Sydney Morning Herald, December 13, 1995, p. 14.

It did seem a bit like a set-up, when the Anti-Discrimination Board and Ethnic Affairs Commission organised a forum in Sydney which started off with a couple of newspaper editors drawn only from the Murdoch papers put up as Aunt Sallies for a series of professional “ethnics” to throw things at. Perhaps it was not meant in this fashion, but that is what it looked like in advance, and that is what it proved to be, at least in the morning session.

The forum was entitled “Reporting Diversity — Getting it Right” and was supposed to be “interactive”. There was not much genuine discussion between the mass media representatives and the various people who began by saying, “My name is X and I represent such and such a community” — all Nesbies (Non-English speaking background), by the way. The relationship between the organisers and the ethnics was clearly demonstrated by the president of the NSW ADB, Chris Puplick, who addressed them all by their given names. It was all in club.

It is, of course, the case that there are many genuine and well-founded complaints which the various ethnic groups, both recent immigrants and the long-established, have to make about the way in which they are depicted in the popular media. There were all kinds of accusations of prejudice, bias and stereotyping — but oddly enough there was no reference to the worst example of ethnic and cultural bias which has appeared in the media all year, the disgraceful attacks on the French.

Perhaps no representative of the French community was invited.

Why the editor-in-chief of the Sydney Telegraph-Mirror and Sunday Telegraph, John Hartigan, and the editor of The Australian, Malcolm Schmidke, should have been singled out was unclear. If there were to be any attacks on anti-ethnics bias in the media, the leading targets would have to be commercial radio on the one hand and the ABC on the other: they are different sides of the same coin. But there were no Aunt Sallies from radio or television. Hartigan, incidentally, is also in charge of the Sportsman, a relic of past days, and someone made a weak joke about Sportspersons — but I have not noticed the venerable British weekly, now stridently feminist, changing its name to The New Statesperson.

From the litany of complaints and charges, the main thing to emerge was that the ethnic communities are rightly annoyed about the frequent insensitivity and ignorance displayed by many in the mainstream media.

Insults and slights are treasured and magnified by their representatives, just as the unions continually hark back to the evils of uncivilised capitalism — it is a great way of promoting solidarity among your followers. Bodies such as the ADB also provide feedback on this, since exaggeration of problems is its bread and butter.

Certainly all newspapers could do better — but gradually as immigrant communities become established and their children grow up through the Australian educational system with fluent written English, they are establishing a presence in the media. Look at any issue of The Sydney Morning Herald or The Age, for example. I can remember when Catholics were excluded from the old Fairfax papers; it was considered remarkable when The Australian Financial Review came to be dominated by Irish names. Incidentally, on the face of it, yesterday’s issue seems to indicate a conspiracy against those of bog-trotting origins — only one token Irish name. But I won’t both complaining to the ADB.

The forum was dominated by representatives of the most recent immigrant communities, which is not at all surprising since they are the points of greatest unfamiliarity and the silliest snap judgments by media of all kinds. They are also the most visible, as a result of appearance and costume; and they have a genuine complaint about the way they are often lumped together with the minorities (often much smaller percentages than in the general population) of their people who get into trouble. But they reciprocate the ignorance typical of the genuine population. Few of us have studied the excellent Encyclopaedia of the Australian People, edited by Jim Jupp.

Since someone complained of the way in which the 19 different communities of the Pacific Islands are lumped into a common basket, I checked the Jupp reference. I could not count 19 peoples there, unless you subdivide Melanesians and Polynesians. And I certainly would not expect many native-born Australians, let alone more recent immigrants from other regions of the world, to even be clear about the difference between them.

The complexity of the ethnic communities was nicely illustrated by the afternoon forum of editors and representatives of the ethnic press. One of the things which is described in Stanley Karnow’s history of the Vietnam War is the highly politicised and factional nature of Vietnamese communities, and this was clearly on show. How can we deal with defamation within ethnic communities, especially in languages which are rich in double entendres and obscene puns? The internal politics of all ethnic communities are extremely important to them.

It was really was a pity that so few journalists from the general media were present at this discussion. It would have served to remind them just how diverse and how impenetrable linguistically the ethnic press is, and how many good stories there are which are neglected. But perhaps such more sophisticated reporting is not what the ethnic lobbies really want. Rather they succumb to bodies such as the ADB which seem to me to foment more conflict than they resolve.

***
14.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Why equality won’t work,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, November 1, 1997, p. 38.

Equality of the sexes and races is far from having been achieved, though immense progress has been made this century and especially over the past 30 years. However, in the process of overcoming gender discrimination and racial discrimination a lot of apparatus and dogma has developed which may be either ineffective or positively inimical to overcoming the problem, as well as harmful to the supposed beneficiaries.

Affirmative action in its various forms is an example of this. From being a perfectly reasonable attempt to encourage people who have in the past been discriminated against, it often becomes a matter of oppressive bureaucracies setting targets which have nothing to do with any sensible considerations. As a result, there has begun a strong backlash against it which is not without some justification.

A typical goal, often stated as if it were self-evidently obvious, is that there should be a 50-50 sex ratio in any occupation you care to name.

Politics is one example; law another — the mantra was recently thoughtlessly repeated by the President of the NSW Bar Association commenting on the low proportion of women in the most recent batch of appointments of senior counsel in NSW. That there is a lot of old-fashioned crude male bias in the law is undeniable — one visible evidence of it is the painting of a woman masturbating which the bar association insists on keeping on display in its offices. What about a painting of a male judge masturbating in a railway station to hang on the opposite wall? But in setting 50-50 targets it is relevant to ask whether, in fact, half the candidates for top jobs, or even some occupations at all levels, will be women even under conditions of complete equality of opportunity.

It is perfectly open to women to nominate for parliamentary election — but of course some political parties have male-dominated pre-selection processes.

However, the pre-selection barrier does not apply to the most interesting election about to take place, that of delegates to the Constitutional Convention early in December. In this election there are no political parties presenting themselves (officially, at least — it is clear that the Labor Party supports the Australian Republican Movement), and it was open slather for anyone to nominate himself or herself individually or as a member of a group (which could number as few as two members) in a Senate-type election. This can, as a result of preference distribution, often produce quite unexpected successes. The only barrier to nomination was the fee of $500 which, while not negligible, would deter only really frivolous candidates.

This election produces clear evidence that a 50-50 sex ratio in politics is inappropriate. Nothing like half the candidates for the Constitutional Convention are women. Of the 609 candidates for election in Australia, 426 are men and only 179 women (there are four candidates of unknown gender). That is, in this totally open, no-barriers election, only 29 per cent of candidates are women. The proportion varies from place to place. The highest female candidature is in South Australia, at 58 per cent of total candidates; the lowest, unexpectedly, is in Canberra, with 7 per cent. Female candidature in the big eastern States is about 45 per cent; in Tasmania and Western Australia, much lower.

This implies that the political class must always be majority male, since more men than women want to be part of it. Since the political class in any case constitutes only about 5 per cent of the population, according to the Civic Experts group survey a few years ago, it could be that the proportion of women who want to be politicians or convention delegates is much lower than 45 per cent.

Of course, in this particular election, just about all the candidates and groups are ratbags to a greater or lesser degree so it might say something about the greater propensity of men for ratbaggery. If so, this would imply also that female ratbaggery was most common in South Australia — which matches some casual empirical observations.

The lower proportion of women offering themselves for employment, and more so for promotion, in “traditionally” male occupations is a real stumbling block for the 50-50 affirmative action advocates. It implies that such an outcome would necessarily lower the overall quality of the top echelons, since the female promotions would be coming from a much smaller pool than the male. While I have a great deal of sympathy for the feminist saying that equality will be achieved only when as many incompetent women as men are promoted, the 50-50 rule must ultimately imply more incompetent women at the top than incompetent men.

There certainly has been a lot of male exclusion of women from “male” occupations for reasons which are childish and objectionable. The only occupations or, better, workplaces from which women ought to be excluded are those like certain chemical laboratories where fertile women and their pregnancies would be endangered. Yes, lesbians or nuns should not be subject to such exclusions. There is also good reason to crack down hard on sexual harassment of women in the workplace, which often has the subtext of “keeping them in their place”.

But it remains the case that there is a substantial proportion of women who will not be available for any 50-50 rule simply because they either do not want promotion, or do not participate regularly in the workforce, preferring to put a higher priority on children and family. Some of this might be a matter of accepting the seemingly inevitable, but there is considerable sociological evidence that a lot of women prefer domestic occupations. They cannot be bullied, persuaded, or consciousness-raised into changing these attitudes.

***
15.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Some wimminists are stupid,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, February 13, 1999, p. 41.

“Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung,” as Hamlet said. It seems that the jades of column writing do not like being galled, and winced loudly in a concerted female columnists’ attack on me last weekend. The heavy humour employed indicates that they are as thin-skinned and humourless as male columnists such as Phillip Adams, who never quite forgave me for describing an attack he launched upon me as like a chihuahua peeing on one’s foot.

But it did lead to a fascinating approach from one of the more energetic publishers around, who suggested an anthology of the worst of women columnists. Tempting as this sounds, it has obvious problems — not least that they and their host newspapers would claim copyright. It did remind me, however, of the regular column which used to run in the English satirical-anarchist Private Eye in its great days. This was a selection of “loony wimminist rubbish”, quotations from the silliest and most trivial of the ideologues of the craziest fringes of the feminist movement.

Indeed, it is tempting to produce a book of such quotes, and I have begun fishing around in the CD-ROMS to identify a few of the really absurd things that have been said in recent times. It is a rich lode to mine. Almost like taking candy from a baby. There are certain obvious sources, such as The Australian Financial Review’s “corporate woman” column, which has itself anthologised most of the more ridiculous notions of wimminist feminists as if they were serious arguments; then the other obvious sources in newspapers and magazines, not to mention academic scribblings, almost name themselves.

But my appetite for nonsense, however entertaining, is limited. So I would like to ask readers to contribute examples of the really egregious nonsense, or knicker flashing, they happen to come across. You can post them to me at GPO Box 4788, Sydney 2001, or e-mail me at ppmcgozemail.com.au. Depending on available finance, there will be the occasional award of a bottle of (real, French) champagne and the grand prize at the end, for the best/worst of all, will be a box of Havana cigars, the only industry not wrecked by Cuban socialism. Some of the best sources are the pseudo-academic journals, such as The Australian Feminist Law Journal (although I haven’t seen this lately), as well as the various “cultural studies” publications. A typical example, written I am afraid by an old friend, was the assertion that there were no female butchers because men did not trust women with knives. As you will observe in any kitchen. Of course, in the old days, and still quite often, the butcher’s trade required the strength to lug around heavy carcasses.

Despite the determination of the sillier feminists to pretend otherwise, I am far from being an enemy of sexual equality. There are many intelligent feminists, and many valid complaints by women about past and present male attitudes. There are still far too many men who are gross in their thinking and behaviour and imbued with sexist prejudice. (Like a former senior public servant, noted for his support for affirmative action. As a number of women told me, this meant promoting the ones who said yes.)

Feminism, when it means the identification of past abuses and opposition to current ones, is perfectly justified. So long, that is, as the complaints are well founded. Too often the supposed disadvantages involve the denial of reality. Thus the small proportion of female butchers is not really the product of discrimination, but of the fact that men are on average stronger than women. Many of the other apparent imbalances are the result of the simple fact that although women “hold up half the sky,” as that well-known patron of ceiling-students, Mao Zedong, put it, quite a large proportion of them simply do not want to pursue high-pressure professional careers at the expense of family life and parenthood.

Then there is the invention of supposed facts. An American feminist writer, Christina Hoff Sommers, in her book Who Stole Feminism?, has documented numerous examples of this kind of thing. A favourable review of this book by the Sydney University philosophy lecturer Stephen Buckle was followed by his ejection from his job by a classically academic tactic, a redefinition of the job description. The wimminists and their SNAG allies got him. Truth is the first casualty of wimminism. It is the same in many areas of government. Even the once impeccable Australian Bureau of Statistics has started to produce meaningless statistics about the value of women’s work in the home, as if this were part of the market sector. And even the once reputable National Health and Medical Research Council in a draft report, which has since been withdrawn, falsified the changing incidence of abortion to argue that there had been no increase. This has been well documented by a Canberra economist, John Coochey.

Then there is the “have your cake and eat it” syndrome. My favourite example of this was the argument about whether women before menopause should be employed in battery factories, where a high lead exposure could threaten the baby of a pregnant woman. This was clearly gender discrimination. Would they then accept that women of child-bearing age should accept the risk? No, they could still sue for compensation even if they knew the risks.

Let me emphasise: there are many highly intelligent feminists, and gender should never be considered a disqualification for any job. But some of the most intelligent are slightly crazy (like Germaine Greer), and some wimminists are just plain stupid. And it is true that some of our best-known feminists have slept their way to the top.

***
16.
Padraic P. Mcguinness, “And the winner of the Meredith Award is …,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, September 4, 1999, p. 40.

It’s been a good week for left-handed compliments. The other day Patrick Dodson described the prime minister’s parliamentary resolution expressing regret for the harms done to our first people as the “Paddy McGuinness apology”. This was not meant to be a compliment, but since it implies that I have contributed towards a giant step forward on the path to reconciliation, it suits me. Equally I later received an “Ernie” award for best statement in the media offending the loony feminists, the wimminists.

So I can claim to be, in the terms of that commonest of dreadful clichés, “an award-winning journalist”. Indeed, it is not the first time I have been awarded this particular distinction. Not that I have many journalistic awards to my name, for the simple reason that I never apply for them. One of the many dirty little secrets of the Walkley Awards, for alleged distinction in journalism, is that you have to nominate yourself.

By dint of repeated application you might get something, which will go, without detail, onto your curriculum vitae for evermore. Indeed, I once saw a job application from a journalist who described herself as “three times nominated for a Walkley award” — a charming self-description. In principle, prizes awarded by a union committee are as worthless as their ethical judgments, and when they are awarded for fashionable conformism or the publication of leaks instead of real reporting, they are unimpressive.

The same goes for the many prizes awarded for writing propaganda. Thus the United Nations Association gives out annual “peace” prizes for grovelling reflection of its own nonsense, the medicos give out prizes for reports which reflect what they want to hear, as do the lawyers, the scientists, the environmentalists, and many others including industry associations. These can be quite lucrative and are often accompanied by free trips, which do not of course detract from the objectivity of the recipient.

This will no doubt ensure that I will be placed on the list for a new award, no application necessary, named after its first recipient, the Richard Carleton prize for getting up the noses of other journalists. Perhaps there should be another called the East Timor prize for journalists who get themselves and others into trouble through their own foolishness and self-righteousness.

The Ernies are awarded not by any selection process, evaluation of merit or voting, but by the outraged howls of a mob of drink-inflamed feminists meeting at the State Parliament under the gaze of the late Che Guevara. Well, I suppose he did after all like women quite a lot.

The top award was by the volume and length of the howls and hand-beatings given to the unnamed magistrate who has been getting a lot of stick for pointing out that male violence against women was not always unprovoked. There are nagging women, though fortunately I have never lived for any length of time with one, and there are men stupid, inarticulate and guilt-ridden enough to see no recourse other than to violence. This is always and everywhere to be condemned.

Physical violence cannot always be condemned, since there are occasions of immediate self-defence (as when a woman stabs you or points a loaded policeman’s gun at you, both unforgettable experiences), but even then ought to be strictly limited and proportional. In most cases it is better to simply walk out of the relationship. But that is not always what the woman wants, nor is it always possible.

The sheer irrationality of the attacks on the fortunately anonymous magistrate is remarkable. He (or she) did not say that violence is ever justified, but that sometimes men resort to it when they are angered or insulted and cannot think of any other way to behave. This is so obviously true as to make one wonder what all the fuss is about. It would also be recognised as such by most women, other than the members of organisations or ideological movements such as the Society for Cutting Up Men. Additionally, most women know that there are some women who enjoy violence and get their sexual jollies from it directly or through inciting it between men. Any sensible man avoids these like the plague.

But truth is no defence against the wimminists. When responsible social researchers demonstrate that there is just about as much domestic violence by women against men as by men against women, they flatly deny it. While men are on average physically stronger than women and therefore can be more effectively violent, it is not all one way. Domestic violence cannot simply be defined as violence against women.

In my own case, I was howled at for having written, “Some of our best-known feminists have slept their way to the top.” This is true, but for defamation reasons one cannot name names except under parliamentary privilege, which I will do if the Legislative Council cares to set up an inquiry into the issue. And, of course, as is usual the wimminists neglect the context in which such a comment was written.

Equally, my friend Michael Thompson, author of Labor Without Class, was howled at most loudly in the political category for having accurately quoted the results of a survey, reported in the Herald, which found that “at least four out of every 10 Australian parents believe working mothers with children are ‘the cause of many problems’ in society”. (Not unusually, this was misquoted.)

He went on to add, again citing a serious source: “This perception is consistent with a statistical correlation observed between female employment and serious crime rates.” Deny the facts if you will, question the perceptions, point out that correlation does not mean causation, but why kill the messenger?

Perhaps I will set up a new set of awards, to be known as the Merediths, for examples of biased, ideological and stupid feminism. There will be an all-female jury.

***
17.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “We’re blinded by the slight,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, September 30, 1999, p. 15.

Some old Christian values have lost their currency in today’s culture of complaint.

Everybody has heard the conceit that if Jesus Christ were to appear in the world tomorrow, he would be treated as a dangerous agitator, locked up and probably eventually crucified again in some modern variation of the old Roman method of executing criminals. [A Modest Member of Parliament heard it.]

These days, in any case, there are quite a few people who believe that as the millennium approaches, be it in 2000 or 2001, there is a fair chance that Christ will return to the world to wind up the whole business.

But just suppose the Christ was again wandering around with a bunch of dropout disciples, spreading the doctrines of love and charity, care for the disadvantaged and the disabled, working the odd miracle, and forgiving people their transgressions. He would be in strife with the Anglican Church for a start, as the example of the Right Rev George Browning, Bishop of Canberra and Goulburn, shows.

Poor Browning had a one-night stand with a female parishioner 15 years ago. There is no question of rape or any other criminal offence. She did not get pregnant or cop any disease. He undoubtedly committed a grave moral error by his own lights, and suffered (as did his wife if he was unwise enough to tell her) accordingly. But it seems that subsequently this woman has pursued him for reasons of her own, aided and abetted no doubt by the Anglican sisterhood.

She has been allowed to shame him and his family publicly while at the same time enjoying anonymity. Was she or was she not a consenting party? The Anglicans ought to remember that Jesus said to the accusers of the woman taken in adultery, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.” When the Pharisees had skulked off, he turned to the woman and said, “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.” It seems that the Pharisees are running the Anglican Church. If this woman wanted to destroy the bishop, she should have been required to cast the first stone publicly.

Then there is the odd miracle. Well, of course, first up, if Christ had gone around healing the sick, the lame, the halt and the blind, he would have got into trouble with just about everybody. There would be a race between the AMA and the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission to crucify him for practising without a licence, or for excessive use of certain procedures. He would be persecuted by the practitioners of alternative medicine for refusing to charge through the nose.

He would be sent up by battalions of university students singing The Ballad of Joking Jesus, “To make the blind see I throw dust in their eyes, to make the lame walk I say get out of bed …” (I quote from memory Professor John Anderson’s version). Only if Jesus demonstrated total failure to effect any cures would he be elevated to the post of Professor of Alternative Quackery at the University of Western Woop Woop.

But that would be only a beginning. We are forgetting about the lawyers and the cult of victimology. It has to be remembered that those we so slightingly describe as the handicapped or disabled are merely the alternatively abled.

They not only have their own dignity, a proposition to which Jesus would have heartily subscribed, but they think their disabilities give them rights. They do not want itinerant do-gooders like Christ doing them any favours.

Thus a blind man is taking legal action for discrimination against SOCOG for not having issued a braille version of the Olympics ticket book. Clearly Jesus would have been in grave error, since he never proposed to preach the Gospel in braille. Moses, too, for not having brought down an edition of the Ten Commandments graven in braille.

Only two possible solutions to the problem presented by the blind sports fan would have presented themselves to Jesus: he would have sat down with him and read out the ticket book for hours, or cured him. The first would be patronising charity, not the wasting of public money as of “right”.

But the latter would get him in trouble, too. After all, there is a culture of the blind. H. G. Wells got it right in his story of The Country of the Blind, in which a sighted man wanders into a place entirely inhabited by blind people, remembering only the saying, “In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.” However, he is assimilated into the culture by being deliberately blinded.

Ask Dr Bruce Shepherd, who has expended enormous effort teaching deaf people to speak, or the developers of the Cochlear implants, who have set about restoring hearing.

The deaf “community” that is devoted to its own “culture”, which includes the sophisticated means of communication known as Auslan (Australian sign language), do not want their deaf children to be taught to speak or have their hearing restored. And they would not want an interferer like Jesus going around curing people out of charity.

Instead, they would proclaim a legal right to have money spent on catering to their problems. The Pharisees of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission would take this seriously, and would tell people who felt that human compassion had a place in all this to rack off. Tough for Jesus. And just imagine the case Lazarus could mount against Jesus for raising him from the dead without asking first! Lifetime support would just be the start. Or imagine the ruckus if Jesus said to someone in a wheelchair, “Take up they bed and walk”, instead of spending millions providing ramps and lifts that destroy the architectural fabric of public buildings. Or the Good Samaritan, facing a lifetime of bills from the innkeeper and the lawyers, not to mention the victim.

The problem is that the attempt to legislate abstract justice and charity not only produces absurdity, it makes these virtues irrelevant and worthless. If doing good is compulsory, where is there room for virtue, morality or forgiveness? Poor old JC would be litigated out of the picture if he came back tomorrow.

***
18.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “The law gone mad — again,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, November 25, 2000, p. 40.

If the law is frequently an ass then anti-discrimination law is an ass’s ass. A whole new area of jurisdiction has been invented in the name of some concept of human rights which has created a thriving industry of stupid intervention in private and community affairs. The latest manifestation of this is the decision last week by Judge Catherine Branson of the Federal Court that drug addiction is a disability which attracts the protection of disability discrimination provisions of the law.

The case related to the treatment of a member by a licensed club. Wayne Edward Marsden, a heroin addict who was on methadone treatment, had given cause for concern to the club, the Coffs Harbour Ex-Services club, because of his behaviour. The club remonstrated with him but agreed to continue admitting him if he refrained from drinking alcohol while on the premises. Subsequently he was observed drinking, and he got angry after losing on the pokies and had a row with club officials. He refused to attend a committee hearing on the issue and the club expelled him.

Now this seems a fairly normal day in the life of a club. The unhappily defunct journalists’ club treated expulsions or suspensions of members for misbehaviour as standard, and few regulars ever served a penalty. Undoubtedly some of them were drug addicts alcohol and nicotine being the usual substances of addiction. But no-one was silly enough to complain. However, in this case Marsden claimed he had been discriminated against and went to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Instead of telling him to rack off, the commission set up a formal inquiry, but even that body, showing unusual commonsense, found it difficult to decide that he had been discriminated against.

So, with the support of the NSW Legal Aid Commission (yes, I am not joking) this trivial complaint was appealed to the Federal Court, where the full weight and dignity (such as it is) of the law was brought to bear. After due deliberation, Branson decided that under the Commonwealth Disability Discrimination Act, Marsden did have a disability, namely opioid (methadone) dependency and that he had been discriminated against on that ground. She found the applicant had been treated “less favourably” than any other trouble maker because he was suffering from this disability. In fact, the HREOC inquiry commissioner did not even take into evidence minutes of the club which would have made possible a comparison of the applicant’s treatment with that of other, non-addicted, miscreants.

Despite this lack of evidence it was decided that “disability” under the act did include addiction, as well as treatment for addiction, and because the club had thought it was not a good idea for an addict to drink in the light of his misbehaviour, they nevertheless expelled him. Maybe methadone treatment has nothing to do with exacerbating the effects of alcohol. The club made a layman’s judgment that it probably did, and they may well have been wrong. However, it simply does not follow that he was discriminated against because of a misdiagnosis of the causes of his misbehaviour. Is the learned judge saying that he would not have been disciplined if he had not been an addict, regardless of his behaviour? Or is she saying that he should have been given special and more lenient treatment, that is positive discrimination, because he was an addict, unemployed on account of his addiction?

Such are the absurdities of anti-discrimination law. Most sensible people would agree it is unfair to discriminate in such a matter against a person solely because of his addiction. And there is every reason to believe the club was perfectly happy to allow him entry to the club so long as he behaved himself.

The decision that a disability for purposes of the act includes addiction to a drug of dependence is an alarming one. Does it mean that a known alcoholic should be given specially favourable treatment in a pub or club when displaying signs of drunkenness, and so escape the law requiring refusal of service? Does it mean that if the barmaid knows the customer is an alcoholic there is a higher standard of proof of drunkenness than that required of a casual drinker? Is it discriminatory and therefore punishable under the act if a club refuses service to an alcoholic before he gets drunk, on the basis of known past behaviour? And if, in fear of this ruling, a club serves an alcoholic enough to make him drunk, have they any defence against prosecution for it? Unlikely.

Moreover, this definition of disability extends much further. Its implications for employers are alarming. Should an airline pilot who has become a heroin addict be excluded from employment as a pilot? Or one who is on methadone treatment for heroin addiction? According to the Branson Rule, you would have to wait until he crashed a plane. Should drunken lawyers be excluded from practice, or would this be disability discrimination?

This decision is typical of the “heads I win, tails you lose” approach of anti-discrimination law. My favourite example in another area relates to pregnancy discrimination. Most sensible people agree that pregnancy is not a disability and pregnant women should not be discriminated against in employment. But what about jobs in which the health of the foetus might be affected — for example, in a lead battery factory? No, say the lawyers, you may not discriminate against a pregnant woman even if the work is dangerous to her unborn child. As I once asked one of the doyennes of anti-discrimination law, surely then the woman would have no case for compensation against the employer for any damage? On the contrary, she said, the mother would be entitled to compensation even though she had insisted on doing the dangerous job. Catch 22.

This is not a rational approach to human rights and equal opportunity, it is madness. But profitable madness for the lawyers. We must hope this decision will be appealed with the support of the Registered Clubs Association. How high up the judicial food chain does this madness run? And how long will the Legal Aid Commission squander taxpayers’ money like this?

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19.
Top 4 other Aussie writings on discrimination/affirmative action

• a) Antidiscriminate this — John Hyde, “Senator Ryan’s new law will work against women,” The Australian Financial Review, October 14, 1983, p. 13. The entire opening paragraph reads: “Years ago, I removed my right arm.”
• b) John Singleton, True Confessions (Stanmore: Cassell Australia, 1979), pp. 65-67, chapter titled “Talking of Government Stupidities,” on anti-discrimination laws. Sample quote: “I personally couldn’t give a stuff whether people were black, blue, brindle or where they come from or where they’re going. But if someone, say a Jewish person, doesn’t want to employ, say an Australian, because the last 25 Aussies he has employed haven’t bothered to lob, surely that is his right. Like it is his money. And Australians have become a race of bludgers.”
• c) Thomas Sowell, McGuinness, Aborigines and other minorities — Padraic P. McGuinness, “Why ‘positive policy’ harmful,” The Australian Financial Review, September 29, 1988, pp. 92-91; and Padraic P. McGuinness, “Helping the Aborigines?,” The Australian Financial Review, October 11, 1988, pp. 96-95.
• d) Viv Forbes, “The Right to Discriminate,” first published in Business Queensland and Common Sense in 1990.