An Aborigine, an Arab and a Jew enter a public bar. They look more worried than angry as they bear down on two Aussies who are having a quiet beer and chatting about freedom of speech. One Aussie, glancing at them, asks: ‘Is this a joke?’ The other says: ‘No, but I wouldn’t tell it if I were you.’ This cartoon by Leak sums up the controversy about 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act which makes it unlawful to offend someone. On the one hand are some hypersensitive and humourless minorities and on the other a vast majority who enjoy free speech, including humour, as their birthright. It is not beyond the wit of reformers to protect the minorities without restricting the rights of ordinary Australians. Deleting ‘offend’ from 18C would be a start.

Here is some International Women’s Day advice from an old hand. It was in a talk the other day by Sandra Jobson who has, she said, ‘street-cred’ because some 30 years ago she wrote an acclaimed book to advance the cause. It was Blokes. An Endangered Species? She interviewed 250 men in the early 1980s to see how they were coping with the resurgent feminism of the day. They ranged from black-leather-clad bikies with lots of zipped pockets (one produced a love poem he had written to his mum) to glug-glug-glugging cricket fans with great beer-guts (one was a gynaecologist.) Others included a prime minister (Bob Hawke said he used to have ‘a fair strand of m.c.p.-ism but…reading Simone de Beauvoir shook me up’), an artist (Paul Delprat preferred drawing ‘naked ladies’ to bedding them), radio personalities (Bob Rogers thought women must choose between nurturing children or sprinting flat-out in the rat race) and one beach-and-bikini inspector (Aub Laidlaw who was against marriage celebrants and thought Church marriage is good for everyone.) On the whole Jobson found the blokes of the time ‘confused’ but generally supportive of women’s rights. (One of the last hold-outs of male chauvinist pigs was journalism.)

There was a note of nostalgia in her depiction of blokes as an endangered species, no longer sure of their role as providers and householders. Progress has continued, Jobson said in her talk, although it’s still a man’s world. She was ‘delighted and proud’ when Julia Gillard became prime minister. But she was quickly turned off when Gillard began raving on about misogyny. You do not hear misandrist rants from Gail Kelly, Angela Merkel, Christine Lagarde or Janet Yellen. The new ‘monstrous regimen’ of women is turning the clock back. Jobson has no patience with those ‘überfeminists’ who say all men are rapists or those who send used tampons to Immigration Minister Scott Morrison in protest at the alleged lack of facilities for women on the Manus Island detention centre. There are too many sects now, she says, all clawing each other on Twitter and Facebook. (‘Not a pretty sight.’) Jobson’s International Women’s Day advice to all of them is, ‘Shut up and allow the rest of us to get on with our busy, productive lives.’

We all know that Australia has little or no clout in Ukraine. So what can we do to show support for the heroic (not too strong a word) Ukrainains of the Maidan who stood for weeks in freezing temperatures to affirm their right to self-government while Mr Putin’s spokesmen dismissed them as a gay, neo-Nazi or Jewish conspiracy, and Mr Yanukovych’s snipers picked them off one by one? The Australian government called in the Russian Ambassador in Canberra, scrapped official talks, cancelled visits, issued travel warnings and extended the visas of Ukrainians in Australia. The Prime Minister also called on Mr Putin to ‘back off’. Beyond that the Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has been circumspect. In her speech to the Sydney Institute last week on ‘Australia and the World’, she did not mention Ukraine at all. ‘Geography dominates our thinking,’ she said. She spent the time talking about our neighbours or partners in Asia and the Pacific. She defined her role as foreign minister as a ‘relationship manager.’ Not for her the denunciations by the US Secretary of State John Kerry of Moscow’s ‘lies, intimidation and provocations’, or the stirring speeches by Samantha Power, the US Ambassador to the UN, about ‘standing strongly and proudly with the people of Ukraine’. Australia fought for years for our non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council, but we appear to have had little of significance to say in its deliberations on Ukraine.

But inevitably our ‘relationships manager’ was questioned about Ukraine after her speech in Sydney. In her answer, her choice of words was extraordinary but revealing. Recognising the limits of our power to influence events, she said, we will continue to work with our ‘friends and allies’ who ‘take exception’ to Russian aggression. Take exception! Is this how we are to react to the suppression of democracy and a foreign invasion that could change the balance of power in Europe? Or does it simply mean that we and our friends recognise that Mr Putin has already won and the West has lost?

At one moment in her talk Julie Bishop was searching for the right word to sum up the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Some observers have called him a ranting, raving, blustering, lunatic. Others have found him a frightening, posturing, weirdo. The Foreign Minister settled on quirky! She is no doubt well aware that the crazed Supreme Leader brandishes intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach anywhere in Australia.