Leave it to the leftist gynarchy to try and defend the indefensible. Annabel Crabb is not just a feminist journalist, but an ABC feminist journalist, so naturally she strives with all her might to try and justify Albanese minister Anika Wells’s unprincipled plundering of the public purse.
Wells, as I have been reporting, has triggered a repeat of the 1999 travel rorts scandal that claimed numerous ministerial careers.
Even as Crabb admits that it is indefensible behaviour… she tries mightily to defend it.
For the last week, Wells’s press clippings look like someone’s typed “Show me anything Anika Wells has done in the last three years that looks like it might have been fun” into ChatGPT.
She ate expensive food in Paris, where food is expensive. She went to sporting events.
One newspaper reports, with neutral menace, that “Ms Wells has been to every AFL grand final since she became sports minister in the wake of Labor’s return to power in 2022”.
Extraordinary.
In recent days, Wells’s pub crimes have broadened from “going to sporting events” to “bringing her family to sporting events”.
That’s all well and good, but what Crabb is deliberately ignoring is that Wells did so with taxpayer money, which makes her subsequent whataboutism even more ridiculous.
One wonders how many of the thundering personages calling for ANSWERS over the Wells Ski Weekend have actually taken twin toddlers to the snow as part of a work trip.
Leaving aside that the answer is probably ‘none’ (indeed it speaks elitist volumes that Crabb regards this as perfectly normal behaviour), the obvious rebuttal is that they would have done so on the private employer’s dime. What private companies allow their employees to do with their money is a totally different kettle of fish to those living high on the hog on the taxpayer’s money.
Crabb’s femcel ‘nuanced view’ is even more sick-making.
Wells is – as a 40-year-old mother of three young children who also has a big cabinet job – a life form who 20 years ago pretty much would not have existed.
That is absolute bollocks, for a start. The Howard ministry in 2005 included nine women, at least three of whom had children. Way back in the 1940s, the recently widowed Enid Lyons, with 12 children, became the first female upper house MP, then a minister.
So spare me the feminist special pleading.
Not to mention the even-less convincing than usual whataboutism of comparing Wells’s troughing with Barnaby Joyce’s waka-jumping.
To Barnaby Joyce now, prime ballerina in the longest Dance Of The Seven Veils in Australian political history. The “pub test” of his defection to One Nation, long-trailed, is yesterday years old.
OK and so what?
There is, as already stated, no legal requirement for him to – having been elected as a National Party MP – remain one for his full term.
And the House of Representatives crossbench is historically replete with men who were once National Party MPs but then got cross. Bob Katter, Tony Windsor, Rob Oakeshott … there are loads of them.
Oddly, Crabb neglects to mention the loads of women who’ve jumped parties, too: Cheryl Kernot, Jacqui Lambie, Lidia Thorpe, Dorinda Cox and more. Of course Crabb tries to frame it through the tiresome, worn-out lens of feminist victimhood.
Can you imagine a female politician surviving a story arc in which she commences a relationship with a staff member and leaves her husband who has raised their kids and fibs about it to colleagues and then blows up her government with her resignation and then later passes out in the street, which is captured on video, and now quits the party that's sponsored her into parliament?
You mean, like when Kernot defected from the Democrats to Labor, at the same time she was having a secret extra-marital affair with Labor heavyweight Gareth Evans? Or Thorpe’s constant stream of indiscretions, including an inebriated foul-mouthed, racist rant after getting kicked out of a strip club?
Or is it just different when women do it?
