 Now, the Griffith Lecture, as you've heard, was established in 2003 and is designed to establish public awareness and community engagement on a social justice or public policy issue. And you will not be surprised to know that this is the issue that I wish to concentrate on this evening concerns women's equality. I spent most of my adult life arguing for women to have the same rights and entitlements as men and have documented both the progress towards that goal as well as the extent to which this has not yet happened. I've mostly focused on women's economic and political status, believing firmly that if we have economic self-sufficiency and the political ability to achieve necessary changes, then we can deal with most other things that life throws at us. But tonight, I want to discuss a very different aspect of women's equality. It is less tangible than the economic and political principles that I usually espouse, but I believe that it is just as essential. Women's integrity, including their sexual integrity, is not as easy to quantify or even to describe. But as events in recent weeks have shown us, this is a concept we need to come to terms with. It has to do with our well-being, but it may also well involve our very survival. Let me explain why I have come to this realisation. One morning a few weeks ago, I woke up feeling strangely disoriented. I was unsettled and restless. I was unable to concentrate on my work. I don't think I did any work at all that day. It was an unfamiliar feeling. It's highly unusual for me to be so incapacitated. I did not at first know what was wrong. But I quickly realised that the reason I was feeling this way was that I was completely and utterly overwhelmed by rage. It was an unfamiliar feeling. I know what it's like to be upset. I'm no stranger to anger. But I was not accustomed to being engulfed by this all-consuming and for a time immobilising emotion that I would define as a tent on the Richter scale of anger, and which I recognised as pure rage. Now, why was I feeling this way? Well, you might understand when I say that the day that I'm talking about was Friday, the 28th of September, less than four weeks ago, and that it was the day after both Dr Christine Blaisey-Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh had given their testimonies before the US Senate Judiciary Committee. This hearing to determine whether Kavanaugh would be confirmed as suitable to ascend to the US Supreme Court attracted global coverage, including here in Australia, so I'm sure you're familiar with what happened. But to briefly recap, the Senate Committee had reconvened on Thursday, the 27th of September, in order to hear testimony from Blaisey-Ford, who alleged that she had been sexually assaulted by Kavanaugh many years before when they were both in high school. Kavanaugh, who had already submitted to questioning from the committee two weeks earlier, returned to contest Blaisey-Ford's allegations and to try to save his nomination. Kavanaugh's demeanour during the second hearing was shockingly aggressive, whereas previously he had been biddable and courteous. Now he snarled and yelled and exhibited behaviour that was simply extraordinary from someone who was seeking to demonstrate he possessed the qualifications, including the temperament, to assume a lifelong position on America's highest court. We soon learnt that Kavanaugh's anger was totally infected. He had been coached by the White House Council to exhibit a grieved fury that his path to glory could be even temporarily blindsided by accusations of sexual misconduct from his distant past, and it had worked. As the New York Times commented, his fire and fury performance, saying to the senators on the committee, you have replaced advising consent with search and destroy, suddenly turned the tables. His anger and aggression swept away the empathy that many had felt towards Dr Ford after her heartfelt testimony. Even Donald Trump had said later that day that he found her a compelling and credible witness. Yet her painful story was totally buried by the avalanche of anger unleashed by Kavanaugh. Many of us watching him had found it utterly plausible that a man capable of that kind of aggression could attack a girl, but that consideration was not taken into account. I realised there were three reasons for the feelings of rage that consumed me the next day. First, I was thunderstruck at the sheer sense of entitlement exhibited by that man. I cannot recall ever seeing such a performance at a Senate hearing from the person who was meant to be the supplicant. Brett Kavanaugh's entire demeanour exuded not just confidence, but the kind of prerogative conferred by privilege. His words reinforced this. I went to Yale, he said. Yale! How dare anyone question his suitability for the Supreme Court, especially not a senator. Second, I was totally gobsmacked at the arrogance and sheer rudeness that Kavanaugh exhibited towards Senator Amy Klobucker, who's a Democrat from Minnesota, who asked him if he had ever blacked out while drinking. I don't know, have you? Was Kavanaugh's gone full reply? Could you answer the question, judge Kavanaugh, sorry, Klobucker shot back at him? He did not answer. It was a stunning display of contempt towards the senator, one of the people empowered to deny him the nomination. The naked aggression towards her was astonishing, and I do not think it was irrelevant that it was directed towards a female senator. The third reason for my rage was that I understood for the first time that day that the Trump administration was prepared to sacrifice its majority in the House of Representatives in order to ensure it controlled the Supreme Court for at least a generation. And a major reason for wanting to control, for wanting this control, was so they could end American women's access to abortion. The future of legal abortion, including the Roe v Wade decision of 1973, was what was at stake here. That had been clear from the questions directed towards Kavanaugh by senators, both in the public hearings and in their private meetings with him. It has been front and center of the issue of the mostly women's groups that have been leading the opposition to Kavanaugh's confirmation. Women have been politically energized in the U.S. ever since the election of Donald Trump. This was evident in the million-plus women who marched on the day after his inauguration in 2017. And it has continued to be evident since in the large numbers of women who have put themselves forward for public office. A record 529 women offered themselves for election to Congress in 2018. This is a considerable increase on the 338 women who offered themselves in 2016, the previous record breaking year. After the primaries, 262 women candidates remain. 262 women now running for office in the election, which is less than two weeks away. 239 of them are running for the House of Representatives and 52 for the Senate. Of these 262, 202 are Democrats and 60 are Republicans. There are many reasons for this mobilization, but defending women's right to choose is among the top reasons. Most of those women running for office in the midterm elections, among the Democrats at least, and of course, among many of the men too, have made preservation of abortion rights a key issue. Of the top five issues mentioned by candidates running in 2018, abortion rights ranked number four for women compared with number five for men. These women are running to save women's reproductive freedom. They know, as do we all, that without this freedom, women are indeed handmaids, unable to control their destiny. Women have seen their rights to abortion progressively whittled away by state laws restricting access. 45 of America's 50 states have at least some restrictions on women's access to abortion, and an increasing number have legislated to make the provision of abortion almost impossible by placing restrictions on how clinics operate. Many of these laws have been challenged in the courts, and many have been declared unconstitutional, often because of Roe v Wade guaranteeing women a constitutional right to abortion. It is now likely that some of these laws will find their way to the Supreme Court in the hope of having them upheld. It is more than possible that abortion in America could be severely restricted, if not banned, outright in many states, even if Roe v Wade remains technically in place. So my realisation of the ruthless calculation by the Republican Party and the Trump administration that winning control of the Supreme Court would more than compensate for losing control of the House of Representatives was like a body blow. These men, and I use the word advisedly, since it has been almost exclusively men who are responsible for this political calculus, have subordinated democracy. They have an effect said, it doesn't matter what laws you pass in Congress because we have the Supreme Court that can overturn them. This is an extraordinary expression of contempt towards democratic processes, but it is a particular expression of hostility towards women. And when you realise this, Kavanaugh's conduct, his display of entitlement, his contempt towards the female senator, takes on quite a sinister aspect. He is not even bothering to hide what is going on here. No sugarcoating required. This was a naked display of misogyny. It's no exaggeration to say that the world of the Handmaid's Tale, something we once saw as a dystopian fiction, is now a distinct possibility in modern America. Justice Queensland has, congratulations, at long last, voted to decriminalise abortion. Well done, all of you, thank you so much. Just as you have done this, removing it from the Crimes Act, the United States appears set to outlaw women from having ready access to abortion and hence their reproductive freedom. The Conservatives in the US have now achieved their long sought-after goal of gaining control of the Supreme Court. They will likely retain this control for many decades to come. Brett Kavanaugh is 53 years old, while Neil Gorsuch, Trump's previous appointee, confirmed in 2017, is just 51. There is no mandatory retirement age for judges in the US. My lassitude that day was instructive because while anger can be energising, rage has the opposite effect. My rage was I realised an expression of impotence. The previous day's hearings had shown me that despite more than 40 years of feminism, despite the progress we seem to have made, despite our many victories and our reasons for justifiable pride, we women are in fact still utterly powerless in the face of a torrent of raw male power. And that was probably the worst part of the day because I was forced to confront the fragility of our achievements and to ask myself whether it was futile to even continue the fight. I'm usually optimistic, even in the face of adversity, so this too was an unfamiliar feeling. Why was this rage so debilitating, so disempowering? Unlike anger, which is currently seen as energising and even liberating, rage seems to enfeeble us. Or is this just the case with women? In my new book Unfettered and Alive, I have a chapter called The Getting of Anger. The literary minded among you will recognise the allusion to The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson, one of the great coming-of-age books in the Australian canon. I use that title because I wanted to show how my anger developed in much the same way as Richardson shows how young Laura Rambotham loses her innocence in the brutal setting of boarding school. In my chapter, I set out a series of personal and political circumstances which in the mid-1990s produced in me an anger that I saw as justifiable and productive. It was meant to spur me and those I could persuade to resist what I described in the chapter. It was energising, it was good. My anger was prompted by two sets of circumstances. Politically, I was outraged by how the newly elected government of John Howard in 1996 began to systematically abolish or reverse so many of the reforms for women that had been enacted by the Whitlam, Hawke and Keating governments. From abolishing agencies such as the Women's Bureau, which had been established by the Menzies government to monitor women's employment and especially equal pay, to cutting the guts out of the Human Rights Commission and curtailing the operation of the Sex Discrimination Act, to changing taxation, welfare and other policies to the detriment of working mothers, the Howard government seemed intent on reversing virtually all of the gains women had achieved in the previous three decades. In my chapter, I outlined this in some detail and I make what I argue are the critical connections between Howard's white picket fence view of women's place, his support for Pauline Hansen and his welcoming, in a speech that changed Australian history, of the lifting of what he called the Paul of censorship that enabled Hansen to express vile racist views about aborigines or migrants and just 20 years later, allowed people to subject the country's first female prime minister to horrendous sexualized and pornographic abuse of a kind that had not previously been seen in our political discourse. This was the political source of my anger. The personal source was something that occurred in 1995 when I was editor of Good Weekend magazine. In June that year, I learned from a friend who was also in the media, albeit at another news organization, that there was widespread gossip in the industry that I had been or was about to be the subject of a sexual harassment complaint by a man who worked for me. I was at first mystified because I had no idea what behavior on my part could possibly be construed as meriting such a complaint. Then I learned it was supposed to have taken place at Good Weekend's Christmas party more than six months earlier. Now, Christmas party, as I'm sure many of you know, is legendary in the sexual harassment lexicon. I learned from a lawyer friend because people will believe that anything can and does happen at office Christmas parties and that normally well-behaved people can turn into depraved monsters once they've had a few drinks under the mistletoe. So this particular detail gave the story plausibility and encouraged its wide dissemination. So much so that by the time my friend rang me, I was apparently the only person in the media who did not know about it. Once I heard about it, I demanded the company confront the man who was apparently going to make this complaint to ascertain what it was I was supposed to have done. I needed information, I believed, if I was going to be able to contest this absurd claim. When confronted by Fairfax, our employer, the man involved said he had no plans to make a complaint and that there was no grounds on which to make the complaint. It was all BS in other words. But the rumor mill had already done its damage. It was in the media, it was seen in the media and it ran as a story for almost three months. The union became involved and there was industrial action against me, not just by the Good Weekend staff, but company-wide with all Fairfax journalists stopping work at one stage to protest my management style. Even after it was made clear that there was no complaint going to be made against me, there was continuous lurid speculation and gossip about what it was I was supposed to have done and people believed it. That was hurtful. But the way it escalated into a full-blown industrial dispute and became an excuse for all kinds of damaging things to be said about me soon made it apparent, to me at least, that this was a calculated and orchestrated attack. It meant you discredit me and drive me out of my job. My attackers apparently thought that the spread of rumor that I was going to be charged with sexual harassment would be the perfect way to derail and disempower a feminist occupying a high-profile position. And I have to admit, it was pretty good. Not only was I a feminist and thus automatically guilty of gross hypocrisy, if it could be established that I had sexually molested a man who worked for me, but also in a delicious twist, I'd actually had a hand in strengthening the sexual harassment provisions of the Sex Discrimination Act when I worked for Prime Minister Paul Keating in 1992. I'd really be hoist with the batard I had helped bring into being, exquisite. And although perhaps it didn't go to plan in as much as no complaint was ever laid, nor was there any conduct on my part that could have justified it, my reputation suffered, as they say, mud sticks. There must be something to it, people would of course say. These things don't just come from nowhere. Then I learnt there was another complaint, a real one this time, from some of my staff at the magazine. I was informed that I had a problem with male staff. I was told that I could not get along with men. I had no empathy I was told. And this was because I did not have children. I now found myself in a very familiar situation. I'd written a whole book about it some 20 years earlier. In Australia, women were, and perhaps still are, either at Madonna's or Hawes, or as I'd put it with my book title, Damned Hawes or God's Police. And here was I learning that in the eyes of some of my staff, this is in the media, the so-called left-wing Fairfax in the sophisticated city of Sydney, since I was not a mother, I must be a sexual predator. I guess if I hadn't been the boss, I would have been accused of screwing my way to the top. So how did I react to all of this? I became angry. I was angry to have been put through this ordeal of rumours and gossip. I was angry that I and my partnership role were forced to endure constant speculation and innuendo about my relationship, about my behaviour and our relationship. But most of all, I was angry that my performance in the job was being reduced to these sexual categories. I was not accused of being incompetent or lazy or tyrannical or any of the other performance failures that might be levelled against a boss. Instead, I was being called to account because of my sex, my gender, because I did not, in the eyes of some, measure up to what a woman should be. And this judgement was based on assumptions, I would say prejudices, about not just how a woman should behave, but about what a woman actually is. We still judge women by their maternal status. If a woman is not a mother, and especially if she's deliberately barren, to quote the disgusting phrase, former Senator Bill Heffernan used to describe then Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard, then she is fair game for all kinds of sexual slander. It seemed to me that if we can reduce the woman to her sexual being, we can disregard everything else about her. We can judge her and condemn her and not take her seriously. We can say she's bad at her job as a magazine editor. We can say she's no good at being a prime minister. We can discount her testimony against a man who says she tried to rape her. At the same time, by reducing her to her sexual being, we are discounting and undervaluing her sexual integrity. A woman has every right as do men to be a sexual being in addition to whatever else she is or does. She does not surrender her sexual being or her sexual integrity because of choices she has made about motherhood, employment, or whatever else she does with her life. These thoughts from my book and from my life were swirling around in my consciousness while I watched the testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. I was prepared to be angry. I knew the likelihood of this man being confirmed, this man becoming the one to tip the balance on the Supreme Court away from its former pro-choice majority to denying women the right to choose. I knew all that and I was angry about it. What I was not prepared for was that it would bring forth in me a rage that I had never known was there. A rage that was nothing to do with having some of my own sexual history triggered, although that certainly happened. I did not and do not think I suffered long-term damage from the many sexual assaults I endured as a teenager. Back then, in the early 1960s, before the term date rape was coined and we thought that rape was something done to you by a stranger, sexual predation was something many of us had to endure every time we went out on a date. Sometimes you weren't even on a date. A boy was merely giving you a ride home from a party but he still expected sex as payment. He wouldn't take no for an answer was the way we girls used to put it when we shared our stories. This was normal. This was what happened. This was just life. Before feminism gave us the tools to understand the power involved in relations between women and men and how so often that power was abused by men. He took advantage of me was how we'd put it. 20 years later, because of feminism, 15-year-old Christine Blaisey Ford had the language she described what happened to her. When a man pins you down on a bed, puts his hand over your mouth and stops you screaming and tries to remove your clothes, it's attempted rape, even if you know him. But on hearing Kavanaugh's testimony, I realised that my rage was due not to the sexual attack he was accused of, it was due to his sense of entitlement, to his swagger, to his utter expectation that he be given a job on America's highest court despite his lying, his drinking and his likely sexual attack on Ford. These were not seen as reasons to deny him appointment to the most prestigious judicial post the United States has to offer, and that enraged me. And then it got worse. Just days afterwards, when I'd calmed down, forced myself to understand, even if I did not accept the new given, Donald Trump, the President of the United States, as unbelievable as that is, publicly mocked and ridiculed Christine Blaisey Ford at one of his political rallies. Initially, he had described her testimony as credible. Now, he said to a jeering crowd in Mississippi, I had one beer. Well, do you think it was? Nope, it was one beer. Oh, good. How did you get home? I don't remember. How did you get there? I don't remember. Where is the place? I don't remember. How many years ago was it? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I probably saw this on television. Do many of you see this on television? The way in which he did it, it was very reminiscent of the way that he mocked that disabled reporter. He used his body language to reinforce what he was saying. But after he'd said that, he then said that because of Dr. Ford's allegations, it's a really scary time to be a man. He did. Women are Jezebel's is what he effectively said. All women are potentially liars intent on destroying the reputations of good men. Against all evidence, the numbers of false accusations of sexual assault remain low. The president of the United States gave credence to the idea that men are victims and women are predators. Sound familiar? In an interview with 60 Minutes on 15th of October, just two weeks later, Trump justified this attack on Blasey Ford by saying, if I had not made that speech, we would not have won. Meaning that it was pivotal to having Kavanaugh confirmed. As was the White House preventing the FBI from interviewing Kavanaugh when doing its report on Ford's allegations. They knew that Kavanaugh could not withstand an investigation into that incident. So the White House counsel instructed the FBI not to interview Kavanaugh or Ford, reportedly arguing, according to the New York Times, that doing so could imperil Kavanaugh's nomination. So it is crystal clear that the woman, Christine Blasey Ford, had to be discredited, sacrificed would be another way of putting it, so that the man, Brett Kavanaugh, could win. A man's life could have been ruined, Trump also said. What he did not say was that a woman's life was ruined. Christine Blasey Ford said she felt it was her civic duty when she first learned that Brett Kavanaugh was on a short list for consideration for the Supreme Court to make it known what he had done to her when they were both teenagers. She initially tried to remain out of the public eye, but her name was leaked and her life changed forever. She received death threats. She has had to leave her home. Her husband and children are living separately from her. Life will never be the same for her again. Donald Trump's response to questions from Leslie Stahl, the 60 minutes reporter about the damage done to Ford, it doesn't matter, he said, we won. Which brings me to the final part of my remarks this evening. Me too. Over the past year, since the initial allegations of sexual harassment and grave charges of rape and other forms of sexual assault were made publicly by famous named Hollywood actors against Harvey, against movie producer Harvey Weinstein, more than 100 prominent American men have lost their jobs as a result of proven accusations of sexual harassment. They range from the celebrated, an actor, Kevan Spacey, chief conductor of the Metropolitan Opera, James Levine, architect Richard Meyer, to just give a few examples, to many huge names in the media, Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly, Garrison Keeler, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, just to name the most famous, to dozens of men in acting, in publishing, in politics, in sport, in business and in countless other occupations. So is there a different narrative at work here? Does this contradict my argument about women and sexual agency? Are women finally being believed about sexual assault? Is justice finally being done, if not on the Supreme Court, at least in all these other instances? I wish I could give a resoundingly positive answer, but I can't, because already there is a backlash. The Me Too hashtag now has its male counterpart, him too. As described by Wired Magazine, the hashtag and its associated memes are Me Too's first major inversion popularised during Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation. It's become the all-lives matter of sexual assault. The hashtag identifies accused men as victims, using the same power in numbers technique that made Me Too a force to recast the movement as a widespread feminist witch hunt, forcing men to walk on eggshells. And in case anyone here is not familiar with this, all-lives-matter hashtag was created as a response and a rejoinder principally by police and their families to black lives matter. The hashtag created to draw attention to the large numbers of police killings of unarmed black men in the United States. So Me Too is being recast as Jezebel behaviour, evil predatory women intent on destroying good men. Sound familiar? Will it work? It already has to the extent that people, including women, are starting to say that Me Too has gone too far, that sexual harassment is not that bad, it's not like it's rape or something, and that men's lives are being ruined. So see what's happening here? Men are being cast as victims, able to be torn down in their lives destroyed by vengeful women. The tables are turned, the predator is now the victim. This is a stunning tactic. It's an attempt to change the narrative from one that describes the sense of entitlement that some men feel to lay their hands or other body parts on women who work for them and which attacks this behaviour to one that portrays that man as a victim. Now these men are saying they can't be in the same room as the woman, they can't take a meeting with a woman unless she accuses him of sexual harassment. Women would not be able to work in anything other than subservient roles if this rule were to be widely enforced. There's scant evidence to support the notion of men as victims here. Even when, as has happened, one of the female accusers of Harvey Weinstein has herself been accused by a man of sexual harassment, this does not invalidate her initial complaint. Nor if the complaint against her is found to be valid, does it invalidate the thousands, if not millions, of stories that women have told since the launch of this movement in October 2017. The power of Me Too is that it is a simple statement of empathy that was recognised and responded to by women around the world because it resonated with their own experiences. Some people have criticised the origins of Me Too saying that the experiences of a privileged group of Hollywood stars, all of them white, have no bearing on the lives of the majority of women. Interestingly, the majority of women disagreed. I would argue that it was precisely because of the celebrity of these women and that in our celebrity culture, we pay perhaps undue regard to the utterances of such people that their stories were listened to and believed. But more than that, their stories resonated with women whose lives were very different because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter whether the sleazebag who was threatening you with your job if you won't come across is a Hollywood legend or a restaurant supervisor or a factory floor manager or the editor of your newspaper, the behaviour is the same and women know it. But this does not mean that Me Too won't be discredited, that it won't run out of steam and lose its energy. Terana Burke, the African-American woman who first came up with the phrase Me Too in 2006, long before it was a hashtag, long before we'd heard of hashtags, has warned that the very term could lose its meaning if it is diluted and becomes a catch-all phrase and quoting her, she said, we have to help people understand the gravity behind the words and that it's not just to be used as, oh, look who got Me Too'd now, ha-ha, like a punchline. Similarly, we need to understand in order to combat the forces that stand in the way of women being able to press Me Too complaints. Here in Australia, the media has become reluctant to report claims, scared off by our country's ridiculously stringent defamation laws. I am puzzled by the media's reticence here. Editors used to pride themselves on figuring out how to skirt around defamation laws in order to publish stories they need to be accurate. I don't know why they're not doing so now. I intend to do my best to learn more about this while I'm here. It is simply not credible that sexual harassment does not exist in Australia. We were the first country in the world to legislate against it in the Sex Discrimination Act of 1984. In the more than 30 years since, thousands of complaints have been made under the legislation, and those who have had cases found in their favour are receiving average payments of around $100,000. I think that the current national inquiry by the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, which was prompted by Me Too, will reveal the extent of sexual harassment in Australia. But what we are lacking are the stories of individuals and the consequences for the guilty men that we have seen in the US. Now, let me conclude by, I've got 12 seconds, let me conclude by alerting you to something. In the past three, in the past year, in the past year, three unexpected terms have entered the American political discourse. Misogyny, patriarchy, and fascism. I say these terms are unexpected because while each of them might be in use by certain groups, I mean, women have certainly been talking about misogyny for quite some time, in Australia ever since Julia Gillard revived the term to describe the way she was being treated by Tony Abbott, they've not been in widespread general use. That appears to be changing, and that is not good news. The context for the change in language is a discernible change in American politics, one where the word fascism no longer seems old-fashioned or exaggerated. And as some of those who are warning us about the rise of fascism in America are pointing out, essential to fascism is patriarchy. A fascist society depends for much of its authority on the notion of male, not just superiority, but of male dominance. And for him to be dominant, there must be the dominated. And under fascism, there are several designated groups selected for this treatment, foremost among them are non-white people and all women. I'm unable to develop this thesis tonight, would take an entire lecture of its own, but let me just say that the racism and misogyny exhibited by the president of the United States is neither random nor accidental. It is central to his politics, and it is terrifying how much support he has for these sentiments. We saw a good sample of it in the way he treated Christine Blaisey Ford. We have a foretaste in what he has in mind for the women of America in the Supreme Court he has assembled that will remove women's right to abortion. His personal behaviour towards individual women, it deserves an entire chapter in the history of the Me Too movement. Now, those of us who don't just disagree with him, but are actually terrified of what he's attempting will have to do a lot more than become enraged. I learnt from that day back in September that raging about this is a luxury we can't afford. This is not a time for impotent emotions, this is a time for determined actions. We need the power and the energy and the focus that comes with anger. That is the only way we can save ourselves. Thank you.