‘Like Fresh Meat: Detailing Rampant Sex Harassment in Australia’s Parliament.’

This was the lurid headline in the New York Times this week describing the Sex Discrimination Commissioner’s report into harassment and bullying inside Australia’s parliament. ‘A sweeping report lays out a cloistered, alcohol-fuelled environment where powerful men violated boundaries unchecked,’ it went on to claim.

Typical biased New York Times reporting. And just plain wrong.

Commissioner Kate Jenkins’ cooked-up survey revealed 61 per cent of the bullying was actually done by women. And there wasn’t that much difference between male and female sexual harassment rates – 42 per cent of victims were women vs 32 per cent men. The vast majority of people (75 per cent) who were sent the survey didn’t bother to respond. Only half of the self-selected people who participated reported experiencing any bullying or harassment, and 1 per cent claimed actual or attempted sexual assault.

As always, there’s blatant fudging of the data. The survey used the broadest possible definition of sexual harassment which included staring, leering and loitering, sexually suggestive jokes/comments, and repeated invitations to go on a date. The supposed ‘toxic parliamentary environment’ covered incidents occurring when people travelled for work or attended after-work drinks – far from the parliamentary workplace.

Pretty disappointing to only have a third of people claim harassment after casting such a wide net, eh?

The sexual assault questions include events the participants had ‘witnessed or heard about’ rather than personally experienced. The report quoted an example of a woman claiming an MP ‘grabbed me and stuck his tongue down my throat.’ Unpleasant, unwanted behaviour, indeed. But this is classic of the newly expanded definition of sexual assault being used to create the rape crisis narrative. All of this is a long way from Brittany Higgins’ lurid tale of being ravished on the Minister’s couch which led to Kate Jenkins’ latest boondoggle.

This whole pantomime stemmed from a desperate attempt by Scott Morrison to ‘throw the dogs a bone’ after being savaged by the feminist mob stirred up by Higgins’ story.

The media is dutifully promoting Jenkins’ demand that all her 28 recommendations must be accepted in full. We’re talking here about some very big asks, like a new Independent Parliamentary Standards Commission to police sexual misconduct rules. Sound familiar? Oh yes, this is yet another kangaroo court with authority to impose sanctions on people deemed to have broken their rules.

And then there’s the new quotas to achieve gender targets amongst parliamentarians, which are part of a ‘ten-year strategy to advance gender equality, diversity and inclusion’. What is the justification for this leap into broader social engineering? The report simply claims that a lack of diversity contributes to a ‘boys club’ culture, bullying, sexual harassment, and assault. They mouth the usual feminist mantra and it is taken as gospel.

Now the game continues, with the government considering the report’s recommendations – a process they will try to string out until the forthcoming election. The usual suspects in the media are already bleating that nothing is being done, and the Opposition will use the lack of action to beat up the government. People everywhere know this is all a lot of hogwash – a desperate attempt from a struggling government to keep the feminist mob at bay.

This reminds me of Solzhenitsyn’s famous story of the audience at the Soviet Communist Party conference not daring to be the first person to cease clapping after the speech honouring Stalin. On and on they clapped, fearing that the first to stop would be sent off to the Gulag – which is exactly what happened.

There are sinister echoes in Australia today to the world Solzhenitsyn describes, where people don’t dare challenge the ludicrous dogma being promoted by the Party. Endless denunciations and show trials are used to warn of the risks of not siding with the pack. Groupspeak becomes the only safe option.

Look at this headline used for a news.com.au article this week, reporting on a survey about attitudes towards gender equality in the workplace: ‘Survey reveals insane thing half of Aussie men believe’. The ‘insane thing’ which 50 per cent of Australian men believe is that, ‘reverse discrimination is occurring in the workplace, with women being boosted up the career ladder simply because of their gender’. How’s that for unbiased reporting? All the major media covering the story went to strenuous lengths to belittle men’s experience. They know they must keep clapping.

In The Australian this week, Janet Albrechtsen exposed another stunning example of our forced compliance to false dogma. She wrote about a report from Australia’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency, a thriving feminist propaganda unit receiving nearly $6 million in annual government funding. The Agency has made a submission to a review of the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012, which Albrechtsen suggests provides enough evidence of ‘misleading and deceptive conduct’ to justify the government putting the whole thing out to pasture.

Naturally, the Agency’s submission was all about the need to close ‘the gender pay gap’ which, as usual, is blamed on men, oppression, and discrimination.

As Albrechtsen points out, ‘more honest analysis of the gender pay gap would point to the economic consequence of the aggregate of all the differences that exist between men and women – their physiology, different skills and interests, different choices made about education and jobs, how hard and how long they choose to work and under what conditions.’ As Christina Hoff Sommers put it – ‘Want to close [the] wage gap? Step one: Change your major from feminist dance therapy to electrical engineering.’

Albrechtsen explains that the only way you can close the gender pay gap is by paying women more than men even though some women have less experience, skills, and commitment to the workplace. ‘That means demanding privilege, not equality for women,’ says Albrechtsen. It’s good to see that a lone conservative voice has stopped clapping, but the applause from the media for this feminist fabrication rolls on.

The final week of this bumpy year in parliament included a very telling moment where Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe was forced to apologise for saying to a female Liberal Senator, ‘at least I keep my legs shut’ during a Senate debate on disability. Apparently Thorpe was suggesting that would have ensured her colleague avoided having a disabled child.

Can you imagine if a man was to make such a remark? But Thorpe’s intersectionality credentials are impeccable… She is one of the first Aboriginal women in parliament and a domestic violence survivor, so her violation of parliamentary boundaries will have no serious consequences.

Then came the show trial.

Education Minister Alan Tudge has been stood down from his Cabinet post whilst the latest allegations from his former staffer Rachelle Miller are investigated. Miller is a married mother who acknowledged last November that four years ago she’d had a consensual affair with her boss – after the ABC’s Four Corners blew the whistle on their relationship.

Cheered on by the feminist leftists keen to impose maximum damage on the government just prior to the Christmas break, she’s gone public with a new story claiming this was an abusive relationship. Miller says she’d been drinking with Tudge, ended up totally pissed and naked in bed with him, unable to even remember if they’d had sex. She claims to have been woken by a phone call from a breakfast television producer, but when she took the call, Tudge yelled at her and kicked her out of his bed.

That a married woman would choose to go public with such a story defies belief. ‘Has she no shame?’ a friend blurted out – a thought which echoes across the nation even as the compliant media runs with her sob story that she suffered a ‘power imbalance’. No one dares point out to the poor pet that this is what happens when you bonk your boss.

Just as Stalin ultimately came unstuck as his policies proved disastrous, scepticism about the imposed feminist narrative is surely growing every day. We can only hope sanity returns soon.

Read more of Bettina Arndt on Substack.