As you know, I am renowned for my commitment to diversity and equality of opportunity and the eradication all forms of prejudice and discrimination, whether it be racism, ageism , sectarianism, sexual prejudice, harassment, anti-transism or any other form of bias that rears its ugly head. For instance I yield to no man in claiming that I am the first to help old ladies struggling to get on the tram. And if I meet anyone remotely diverse, I give them a cheery ‘hello’ and perhaps a dollar or two to help pay for their Netflix subscription.

So far as I can recall, my commitment to these causes springs from the groundbreaking work I did as attorney-general in devising a definition of the word ‘leer’ which is still used today, has effectively warned off many potential leerers from leering and, I venture to say, saved many young women from the scourge of sexual harassment. Thus, I can safely say that my work and commitment have enabled us to make great strides in the eradication of prejudice, if you will excuse the toxic masculinity invoked by mentioning that male garment. But it is my melancholy duty to tell you that, despite the progress we have made in promoting these reforms, there are still pockets of stubborn resistance that show our work is far from complete. I was thinking of this unfinished work the other day when I was seeking moral and political guidance from reading the Age, as I often do, and in particular an article by Jacqueline Maley. But she grievously fell down on the job when she came to discuss that modern phenomenon, just revealed by painstaking academic research, that women are becoming more progressive, while men are becoming more conservative. Look, she exclaimed, women were ‘lurching’ from right to left, and young single women in particular, were doing an extraordinary amount of lurching.

I was even more shocked to see that the Age did not dismiss this perverse argument as the eccentricity of one columnist, but elevated it to headline status by thundering, ‘Women are lurching to the left’. I greeted this news more in sorrow than in anger. How could a female journalist and one who, like me, had seemingly been at the forefront of reform, bring herself to say that women were engaging in this pejorative activity of ‘lurching’? And, how could the Age endorse it?

Perhaps I had misconstrued the meaning of the word, although I had never had the problem of defining words correctly when working on my epoch-making definition of the ‘leer’. I made sure that any man who even looked as if he were thinking of leering would be caught in the encircling tentacles of my definition. Nevertheless, I checked with all the respectable dictionaries on the meaning of the lurch and found that I had its meaning absolutely correct. A ‘lurch’, I discovered, is not a careful and judicious assessment of arguments and evidence leading to a rational conclusion. No, it is a sudden rolling around to one side or the other by a person who is  ‘staggering’ and swaying in discomfort or in a helpless plight, like Barnaby Joyce wandering around Canberra after a night on the tiles and lurching into stray planter boxes. So here we are, barely into 2024 in the modern era, with its sunlit uplands bathed in a new dawn of equality, and a leading female commentator in the Age was actually alleging that when women were working their way to a political position they were only staggering around and bumping into the intellectual furniture in the dark.

And what, you may ask, are the men doing while the women are lurching around in this zombie-like state? Well, according to Ms Maley, they are ‘marching’ off to the right, as if the only way that men could be described was by a military manoeuvre, an activity by definition ‘requiring skill and care’.

When you put the two together, the meaning is clear enough according to the gospel at the Age. Men, it appears, carefully weigh up the merits of competing political positions and march off to war with skill and care, while women are simply ‘lurching’ from one erratic position to another. Women, it seems, are incapable of rational thought like men; they are unable to look at the evidence, make a cognitive analysis and go with the facts. No, they simply lurch about as the mood takes them. Moreover, popular social history has given its own assessment of Lurch, the eponymous butler to the Addams Family who was always ‘shambling’, ‘gloomy’ and communicating via an inarticulate moan, according to cinematic observers.

As I have said, I was saddened to read this analysis that women were simply lurchers. It would have been a great leap forward to equality if the Age had said that women calmly analysed the facts before reaching a political decision to move gracefully from right to left. But ‘lurched’? In any event, the only lurching being done today in politics is by a man, Anthony Albanese, who seems to spend his time lurching from one erratic position to the next. Yesterday, he promised the full stage three tax cuts; today he lurches into cancelling them. Yesterday, he promised lower power bills for all; today, he lurches into giving us higher ones. Yesterday, the Voice was paramount; today, he has lurched into forgetting it. Yesterday his word was his bond; today his word is as reliable as a Bitcoin broker.

I thought we had got beyond this facile categorisation and judgmental attitude to women. But it seems we will never have complete reform while we have media like the Age and its regressive columnists preaching the old dogmas. All we can do is hope and pray that they come to their senses and stop labelling women in this degrading way. For my part, it will certainly not stop my own relentless campaign to usher in an era of true equality for all women, despite the Age.