As I wrote recently, Anthony Albanese’s crass behaviour on a podcast may have been intended as a strategy to enhance his self-proclaimed ‘common man of the people’ image, but in reality it was pure cringe. Bragging about ‘shagging Kylie Minogue’ and ‘bonking like rabbits’ if your foot team wins, is the very definition of un-statesman-like behaviour. If Donald Trump had said it, the outraged screeching would still be sending us deaf.
What was even worse were the vulgar ‘jokes’ about Japanese PM Sanae Takaichi. Not only was Albanese grotesquely insulting the leader of one of our most important allies, he was demolishing any pretence that Labor is the ‘party of women’.
But then, Takaichi is a conservative. So she’s fair game. Just as the ABC lost its mind over depicting Jacinta Allan as a witch, but airily hand-waves away vulgar, sexually explicit snuff fantasies about Gina Rinehart, double-standards are the only ones the left has. Can you imagine, after all, the demented howler monkey chorus if Tony Abbott had said anything remotely similar about Hillary Clinton?
When Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi visited Australia in May, she brought her host a gift chosen with diplomatic care: Crown Melons from Shizuoka, the most prized fruit in Japan, to mark Australia’s decision in January to reopen its market to Japanese melons.
In Japan, a Crown Melon can cost more than a fine bottle of wine. Its perfection, based on the Japanese artisan spirit of takumi, is what you bring when you wish to honour someone.
And, in the epitome of the Ugly Australian, Albanese used them as the prop in a ‘joke’ even Benny Hill would roll his eyes at.
Two months later, on the Bush Deep podcast, Albanese recalled the gift as “strange” but ultimately quite good. Comedian Nikki Osborne likened the melons to Pamela Anderson. Albanese grinned, raised both hands to chest height in a cupping gesture and said, “She brought two. As you do.”
Consider who was being laughed at. Takaichi is the first female Prime Minister in Japanese history and she leads a country locked in its most dangerous confrontation with China in decades. After she told the Diet last November that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could threaten Japan’s survival, a Chinese consul-general posted, in a message since deleted, about cutting off her “dirty neck”. Each of Beijing’s military theatre commands issued statements denouncing her. This is the leader of Australia’s closest security partner in Asia and her state gift became a breast joke on a crude podcast.
What happened next is the real story, because almost nothing happened at all.
Albanese’s office issued a one-sentence written apology – but only for the Kylie Minogue remarks. He has never addressed the Takaichi joke, never confirmed any apology reached Tokyo and never repeated the written apology aloud. His acting minister for women declined to comment. Now-former Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan waved it away as “lighthearted”. This from the same government that, only weeks earlier and in Allan’s own defence, declared it “completely unacceptable to demean, objectify, belittle or offend women”.
Feminist commentators and the progressive press erupted over the Minogue comments – and said nothing about the Takaichi jibe. An crude insult to an Australian pop star’s dignity was a national outrage. Offending a Japanese prime minister was met with crickets from the usual offenderati. Demands for a direct apology to Takaichi came almost entirely from the right.
Their feminist sisters in Japan were no better, for the same base, political reasons: Takaichi is no feminist. She opposes separate surnames for married couples, gender quotas and a female emperor, and she also wants to revise the pacifist constitution. All causes Japanese feminists have long defined themselves against. Her model is Margaret Thatcher. To them she is not a sister under siege but an ideological adversary. The affair has barely registered in those circles.
None of this is new. Thatcher retrained her voice because it was judged too shrill. Theresa May’s legs made the front page. Golda Meir was snidely praised as the only man in her cabinet. Reducing a female leader to her body is one of politics’ oldest reflexes. For an East Asian woman there is an extra layer of Western caricature: decorative, submissive and sexually available.
All of it acceptable when the feminist-left establishment decides that the female target is on the wrong side of the political trenches.
