For all the good Australia’s Budget 2021 promises, it’s ultimately an “if you don’t vote for this, you’re a misogynist” manifesto.
Before dismissing this as an overreaction, digest these words from The Australian’s Glenda Korporaal,
‘After months of heated discussion about the Morrison government’s attitude towards women, the 2021 budget will go down in history as the first time that women have been so heavily identified in such a key economic statement in Australia.’
Korporaal added, ‘it’s not just the 81-page Women’s Budget Statement that puts a ‘gender lens’ on everything, it’s the explicit identification of women’s role in the economy.’
This is a sign, noted Korporaal, that the Morrison led Liberal National Coalition, are ‘taking responsibility for women’s economic and personal security.’
The budget rhetoric, wrote Korporaal, ‘expands the areas of perceived government responsibility into women’s safety.’
For the cynic, she said, it looks like the LNP are ‘trying to repair their image on women’s issues.’
I’m one of those cynics.
What the LNP are communicating is partiality.
So much for government neutrality, and with it, gender equality.
My cynicism isn’t unwarranted.
The party aggressively portrayed by its Leftist opponents, and fencing sitting opportunistic enemies, as being a party against women, are now the party for women.
If justifying my cynicism with the witch’s brew context the budget was boiled in, isn’t enough, note that I’m not the only one.
Author and veteran, ABC journalist, Quintan Dempster quoted ABC Insiders in a Tweet on the 9th of May, writing, ‘according to The Guardian Australia, the Prime Minister’s approval rating with Australian women has taken a “massive hit.”
Dempster then asked, ‘Will Tuesday’s budget will be a counter misogyny masterpiece then?’
Regardless of what you think of me or my fact-based opinions, Korporaal, and Dempster aren’t lightweights.
Read together, The Australian and the ABC agree.
This is a virtue signalling budget that will reap an ill wind for the LNP, because no matter how “woke” the LNP try to be, it’ll never be enough for the patriarchy hating Leftist vandals, who a large portion of this budget appears to appease.
In essence the 2021 LNP budget is payment for applause from the LNP haters who gaslighted them into splashing dollars they don’t have, on a rush to satiate the anti-woman propaganda, pinned on the LNP by radical adherents of, as Morrison said last week, the ‘moral corrosiveness of identity politics and cancel culture.’
Fair criticism of the Canberra bubble’s poor history in its treatment of women aside, is the national budget the appropriate place to go to war on behalf of its victims?
Sending the country broke for the sake of appearing “woke” is a dodgy gamble with other people’s money.
The only authentically clap-able decision in the budget’s women’s only cash splash, is the $1.1 billion dollars directed towards Domestic Violence services, some of which will go towards helping Indigenous Australian women.
That’s a positive. As are some of the budget’s more sober applications, such as funding opportunities through new apprenticeships, expanding manufacturing, bigger focus on defence, infrastructure, and healthcare.
The instant political win for Morrison is that budget did what it appears to have been designed to do: send the LNP’s political opponents into an unrecoverable flat-spin.
For example, Labor’s anti-women narrative is disarmed, and even the Radical Left Greens Party are struggling with how to respond.
The Greens seem stuck between celebrating the LNP’s new found partiality towards radical feminism, and the LNP not paying enough towards Ponzi schemes that support the Green’s mythos of “climate justice,” or their Ponzi operators whose ‘apocalyptic climate change’ scaremongering is shoved like a rushed vaccine down the throats of children, and the elderly, “for our greater good.”
The budget deficit isn’t a win for the Australian people.
Lower taxation looks great on the surface, but even that’s weighed down by an increase in superannuation from 9.5% to 10% after July 2021, increasing to 12% in 2025.
What this means is that those in Government, along with millionaires like Kevin Rudd, and Paul Keating, who bleat on about raising that compulsory contribution amount to 12%; railing, as they have, against proposals to allow workers access superannuation for use on a first home, benefit from the dollars they, and the unions they serve, can skim off the top.
It comes down to this: more of your hard-earned money for them, and the unions, less of it for you.
The Morrison budget was about government empowerment, not the self-empowerment of women.
It means more social workers, and more money to man-haters in women’s refuges, meddling in the lives of families, who don’t need the help, instead of putting social workers where the help is needed most.
This one-sided nonsense doesn’t help balance the family court system, which often pushes men into a corner through its own vicious partiality.
Why not add new funding to support Dads in Distress, and men’s shed projects as well?
Either the 2021 budget shows that Scott Morrison’s prowess in outplaying leftists is pure genius; or he’s a sell-out, playing quiet Australians for all their worth.
I bounce between the two, but lean towards the latter. Simply because getting in debt to satiate identity politics is plain stupid.
It’s not a good look. The same PM who rejected identity politics last week, has embraced it this week.
What’s more, as a Christian, identity – brokenness – sin – all the trash, whether self-inflicted or inflicted on us by others, is to be grounded and held accountable in Jesus Christ.
‘God’s grace in the flesh’ is where society, if both man and woman are to thrive and survive together, has to find its core identity.
There is no greater common denominator, or battlefield neutraliser than Jesus Christ.
That Biblical instruction which separates humans from machines at the mercy of bean counters, which, long before Darwin’s and Marx’s twisted religions came on the scene, asserted that men and women are not economic units to be solely identified with the almighty dollar, but are Divinely created beings made in the image of almighty God.
Such is the importance between living vs. earning a living preached by Solomon in Proverbs 27, where lives are put before livelihoods.
Solomon’s advice, in sum? Don’t be so caught up earning a living, that you forget how to live.
Plenty of people still adhere to this, it’s just the ones who see Government as god, and seek to use government as a god, who spell hell for the rest of us.
Without the same ‘Deus ex-Machina’ spike that magically coronated Joe Biden as President of the United States, Morrison’s “wokeness” gamble is a reckless one.
Inserting identity politics into the budget sets a precedent for entitlement through a “woke” woman over man, standard, that will divide Australia, not unite it.
First published on Caldron Pool, 14th May 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
In her 1981 magnus opus, ‘Public Man, Private Woman’, American political scientist and Lutheran, Jean Bethke Elshtain presented a painstaking analysis of feminism.
