To illustrate this point,
Crikey asked three high-school-aged girls to share examples of sexual harassment they’ve experienced in recent days, months and years.
At a high school in Sydney, aged 16: “A boy in the year above approached me around 8.30 in the morning and asked me for pictures of my feet. It told him it was inappropriate and he walked away.”
On Instagram, aged 16: “I got sent a message saying, ‘You looking for a sugar daddy to take care of your needs and spoil you financially without any sexual activity and pay you weekly allowance’.”
At a park in Sydney, aged 12: “A group of older boys threw rocks at me and my younger sister. We were really scared.”
A protesters holds a placard during the Women s March4Justice in Canberra (Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas)
Australian politics got very personal this year. The injustices women have been battling for decades have been exposed at the heart of government: sexual assault, sexual harassment and workplace inequality. Women were treated as political inconveniences, minimised and denied.
In response, we rallied and marched, created petitions and demanded change. We don’t stand before our political leaders as blank slates, listening to their deflections and denials with equanimity. We come as women and girls who have already been harmed by the systems they govern. We have already been harassed walking on public streets and online, possibly at work. So many of us have experienced sexual and domestic violence.
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(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)
Defence Minister Peter Dutton has issued defamation threats to a number of social media users who labelled him a “rape apologist” after he made dismissive comments about Brittany Higgins.
Dutton has targeted a wide range of people with letters from his lawyers, from unemployed Twitter users to prominent politicians including Greens Senator Larissa Waters (who later apologised).
We shouldn’t be surprised. This is the same man who in 2016 demanded a photo of him lurking in the shadows be removed from the internet. In typical internet fashion, that demand resulted in a flurry of photoshopped images of him as Pennywise and Hannibal Lecter.
Was the debacle of the vaccine rollout always inevitable?
Looking at the government’s track record, it’s hard to avoid the sense that it was never going to be done well.
There’s no doubt a mass vaccination campaign is a complex, almost wartime-like challenge: source sufficient supplies, choose in advance between different options without clear evidence of efficacy or safety, and then get them to recipients via three separate distribution arms primary health care, aged care and the state and territory health systems (the last, of course, being outside the control of the government).
And all as quickly as possible.