A short time ago I was chatting with the former deputy prime minister of Australia John Anderson about the sort of language politicians use. He drew my attention to the way prime minister Julia Gillard used (or misused!) the word ‘misogyny’ in her vicious attack on Tony Abbott under parliamentary privilege. This whole brouhaha started when Peter Slipper defected from the Liberal party and Gillard appointed him as Speaker of the House of Representatives. This effectively gave Gillard’s minority government another vote in the House of Representatives. On 9 October 2012, hundreds of text messages sent by Slipper were made public as part of legal proceedings instituted by his former advisor, James Ashby, who had made allegations of sexual harassment against Slipper. In moving a no-confidence motion against the Speaker, Abbott stated that Slipper’s texts were sexist and misogynistic and rendered him unfit to serve as Speaker, and implied that Gillard was hypocritical in defending Slipper’s continuation as Speaker. Knowing how vulnerable she was she decided the best form of defence was attack. In a vitriolic speech she said, ‘I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man; I will not…. If he [Abbott] wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn’t need a motion in the House of Representatives, he needs a mirror. That’s what he needs.’

She was playing with language with all of the verbal violence she had learned in Labor party factional battles. But of all the people in that parliament, Tony Abbott was perhaps the most innocent of misogyny – making Gillard’s speech a fictional invention and an abuse of the English language.

By trying to portray Tony Abbott as a ‘misogynist’ Gillard was, in a coldly calculated way, actually insulting Abbott’s wife and three daughters, and his chief of staff at the time (my friend Peta Credlin) all of whom knew Abbott and respected him as being the very opposite of misogynistic. This is an example of the fiery, and manipulative use of language by a politician (in this case, a politician who wanted to save her own skin).

‘Misogyny’ has been part of the English language since around 1656. The word means ‘hatred or dislike of women’ – an absurd claim to make of a man who had chosen a strong woman as his chief of staff and who had a wife and three daughters. But that is what politicians do to the language. In 1946 George Orwell published a famous essay called ‘Politics and the English Language’ warning of the damage being done to our language by politicians. He was right.