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Evil flourishes when good men to do nothing. So, why the silence, gentlemen?

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been front and centre – for better or worse – in the gender debate. But why are so many other men keeping silent, asks  Madonna King

Mar 25, 2021, updated Mar 25, 2021
march4justice

march4justice

Where are the voices of our male leaders in one of the most important debates in decades?

Where are the CEOs of our top companies, willing to publicly endorse the sentiments of women who have bared the stories they’ve kept silent for decades.

Judges. Politicians. CEOs. Educators. Doctors and nurses. Athletes. Police chiefs. Full-time mums. All of them women, leading a debate on how we forge a new way forward.

And there’s hardly a male voice to be heard.

This is not a debate where males should be pitted against females.

It is a debate on how best to rid our workplaces and communities of misogyny and sexism. It’s a debate about how we kill a cancer that has been part of too many women’s lives, for too long.

This is a debate about leadership, devoid of male input.

Where is the State’s most senior male politician, deputy premier Steven Miles?  Or Ministers Mick de Brenni and Stirling Hinchliffe and Mark Bailey and Mark Ryan.

I don’t mean a couple of words in Parliament. I mean leading from the front.

Don’t they have a view on the rights and wrongs of porn and prawn nights, on workplace cultures where males photograph themselves in lewd desk acts, and on the sexual abuse and rape of thousands of Australian school girls?

How do they believe boys’ schools should handle that in Queensland?

There are other male Queensland ministers too, but you’ve probably never heard of them, and that says the world. In politics now, playing the small target, and keeping quiet, is the preferred position.

With some exceptions, that’s how many boys’ schools are responding, too. Nothing to see here. Look forward not back, boys. This will go away eventually.

But it won’t. This is not a political thing or a gender thing or a business thing. This is an everybody issue.

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It’s about how we make the world safe for women, how we allow women to take the positions their talent warrants, and how we explain the role of men in that.

And on the basis of the contribution made by males, so far, they don’t see they have a role. It’s not just the men in the Palaszczuk Government ministry.

State Opposition Leader David Crisafulli has daughters and it doesn’t even matter if he didn’t. He is a leader, whose public stance on this is important to hear. The same goes for his front bench.

What does David Janetzki think here?  John-Paul Langbroek? Jarrod Bleijie?

Yes, we heard some of them utter some words in Parliament yesterday. But it’s easy to get up and talk. But what about being a leader in this debate. What are their views on how their federal party is handling this? Would they dare go against their party machine and support quotas?

Just compare the contributions to this debate from men to those of Justice Margaret McMurdo who has spoken out about office walls with ‘girly posters’ and ‘bare-breasted women’.  She’s been joined by Annastacia Palaszczuk, Kate Jones and Deb Frecklington.

This avalanche of revelations will not stop. Speaking to friends in school pick-up lines and dinner parties, at work and in meetings, it seems almost every woman has a story.

Not all males are perpetrators, but all of those stories have a male perpetrator. And what would help end those stories for our daughters and their daughters is a chorus of male voices which match the outrage of their wives and daughters and mothers and work colleagues.

Perhaps, the term for it is ‘leadership’.

 

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