Last Sunday was International Women’s Day, a socialist jamboree, adopted by the United Nations. But it said little about the women of Iran, where showing a lock of hair can get a woman beaten to death.

Then again, why would it when the UN has said so little and done less about the Iranian regime’s violent crackdown on thousands of protesters in December and January?

On Wednesday, 11 February 2026, UN Secretary-General António Guterres went so far as to congratulate Iran on the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

It followed hot on the heels of Iran’s election, unopposed, as vice-chair of the UN Commission for Social Development.

The role of the committee is to pass sisterhood resolutions calling on member states to achieve gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls, by removing barriers that prevent women from accessing the labour market, such as gender stereotypes and gender-based violence.

Alireza Jafarzadeh, deputy director of the US office of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, observed dryly that, ‘Having the Iranian regime in the leadership of a UN body tasked with promoting democracy, gender equality, tolerance and non-violence is… like a fox guarding the hen house,’ adding that, ‘The vast majority of the Iranian people are calling for regime change because the mullahs are the world’s leading human rights violators, misogynist to the core, and they slaughter the voices of dissent by thousands.’ Touché.

It was left to the Israeli mission to the UN to mark the day by honouring four brave Iranian women who have spoken out against the regime, one of whom, Raheleh Amiri, was blinded in one eye after being shot by security forces during the 2022 protests.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles demonstrated their commitment to International Women’s Day by surrounding themselves with a bevy of biological women in the parliament. There wasn’t a trans woman in sight, as far as one could tell, so perhaps that is progress of a kind.

But there wasn’t a whisper either about the women of Iran in general or the Iranian women’s football team competing in the Women’s Asian Cup in Brisbane. The whole country was up in arms about the Lionesses – brave young women who had been branded traitors on state-controlled Iranian television after refusing to sing their national anthem before their first game at the beginning of the week.

Iranian firebrand Mohammad Reza Shahbazi, television presenter on Iran’s version of the ABC, responded to their silence by snarling: ‘In times of war, traitors must be dealt with more harshly. Anyone who takes even a single step against the country during wartime must face stronger consequences.’

Just in case anyone was wondering who he was referring to, he said, ‘Take this issue of not singing the national anthem in our women’s football team… This is no longer some symbolic protest or demonstration. In wartime conditions, going there and refusing to sing the national anthem is the height of shamelessness and betrayal. Both the people and the authorities should treat them as traitors in a time of war, not as individuals staging some kind of symbolic protest. The disgrace of this shameless betrayal should remain on their shoulders, and they must be properly dealt with so that others take a warning from it.’

What that meant in practical terms was that the women faced the possibility of prison, torture and even being beaten to death.

But watching the response from Canberra was like watching a rehearsal for a small-town production of The Wizard of Oz starring the Prime Minister as the Cowardly Lion, the Foreign Minister as the Scarecrow, and the Minister for Immigration and Home Affairs, who truly seems to lack a heart, as the Tin Woodman, turning a tin ear to the crisis.

If the female footballers had been Isis brides, one of Tony Burke’s backers would have been rushing to organise visas for them. But nobody keen on getting Burke re-elected had any interest in saving the footballers from the tender mercies of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong, doing her best impression of a straw woman in an ill-fitting suit, told the ABC’s Insiders, on International Women’s Day, that the government stood in solidarity with the men and women of Iran, ‘particularly Iranian women and girls’ but that she did not want to ‘get into the commentary’ about the footballers despite acknowledging that the regime had ‘brutally murdered many of its people’ and ‘brutally oppressed many Iranian women’.

As if to reinforce the government’s indifference, Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs Matt Thistlethwaite said the team would receive ‘no preferential treatment’ if they sought asylum. ‘They must meet all of the conditions for the visa, and that includes a security check and a health check. So, there’ll be no special circumstances granted to anyone that’s competing in the Asian Women’s Cup. The normal rules that apply to visa grants in Australia, including those important security checks, will apply.’

Finally, sometime late that day or the next, the penny (no pun intended) dropped. The government realised that the Lionesses were a vote-winner. Burke travelled to Brisbane to meet the footballers. During discussions on Monday evening, the Iranian guards who had the footballers under hotel arrest rushed out looking for five of them who had escaped.

At 2 am, moved by a tweet by student activist Drew Pavlou, who in the past has courageously denounced Chinese Communist party thugs bullying students at the University of Queensland campus, President Trump telephoned Albanese to tell him the Australian government was making a big mistake if it didn’t offer the footballers asylum. Albanese was able to tell him and the media, later that morning, that ‘Australia has taken the Iranian women’s soccer team into our hearts’.

Suddenly, the government was transformed. Burke beamed like a man saved by a heart transplant as he stood beside the defecting Lionesses. Albanese found the courage to stand up to the left wing of the Labor party, the Greens, the Iranian-funded loudmouth army of pro-Palestinian protesters, and Iran’s ally China. And why? To save young women from a brutal fate? Hardly. To court the votes of mainstream Australians who are horrified that young women could face the death penalty for refusing to sing their national anthem. There is rarely any courage in the political theatre of Oz. But Iran’s lionesses finally shamed the government into doing the right thing with their silent roar.