This week, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson lost her case to overturn a ruling that she had breached the Racial Discrimination Act by telling Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi to ‘piss off back to Pakistan’. Justice Angus Stewart found the comments were offensive because they were a variation of the slogan, ‘Go back to where you came from’, which he deemed a ‘racist trope’.

An ABC film clip which calls for the sexual torture and murder of Australia’s most successful businesswoman and prominent philanthropist, Gina Rinehart, is, however, acceptable because it is okay to offend people unless they come from a racially or ethnically protected group.

In the video clip, which is still hosted on the ABC’s website, the film-maker asks the audience, ‘will you know exactly how to shove a stick right up Gina Rinehart’s butthole, stirring it round, mixing her guts up nice and smooth, making her into one big sausage roll, to make something out of nothing?’

Dr Alice Jill Edwards, an Australian lawyer, is the UN’s first female Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Edwards most recent report underscored the need for a reassessment of how sexual torture is perceived, noting the frequent impunity for perpetrators. Perhaps a copy could be sent to ABC Chairman Kim Williams, and Australia’s Minister for Women, Katy Gallagher.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says sexism is ‘totally unacceptable’ because ‘we want to encourage women to enter public life’. He energetically denounced advertisements that attacked former Victorian premier Jacinta Allan, calling on Victorians to ‘Ditch the Witch’. As it turns out, it was her Labor colleagues that ditched Allan this week before Victorians had a chance.

The PM, however, has been silent about the ABC promoting the torture of women who don’t share his political views. Indeed, he appeared to join the attackers, denouncing Rinehart’s gift of an aeroplane to One Nation leader Senator Pauline Hanson, which he claimed showed Hanson wasn’t for the ‘battlers’. Neither is Albanese then, judging by the donations the Labor party has received from multiple billionaires including Anthony Pratt, Lindsay Fox, Kerry Stokes, Andrew Forrest, and Harry Triguboff.

Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek followed the PM’s lead, attacking Nationals leader Matt Canavan on the basis that he was a friend of Rinehart and despite the fact that her donation was not to his party. She even attacked Hanson for meeting ‘convicted criminal’ Tommy Robinson, which is a bit rich, given that Plibersek’s husband is a convicted criminal who received a nine-year sentence for dealing heroin.

Still, expecting consistency on sexism or anything else from the Labor party, or the labour movement, would be foolish, judging by what has been exposed by the Commission of Inquiry into the CFMEU in Queensland. Last week, Queensland Attorney-General Deb Frecklington extended the inquiry until the end of 2027 to ‘get to the bottom of the corruption, the misogyny, the bullying, the intimidation and the close contact between the former Labor government, their ministers and the CFMEU’.

Australian Workers Union Queensland secretary Stacey Schinnerl, the first woman to hold the position, told the commission that she and her children and AWU organisers had had their lives threatened by CFMEU members.

Queensland executive director of the Property Council of Australia, Jess Caire, said tradespeople had been forced to tolerate a ‘culture of toxicity, misogyny and bullying’ trying to ‘deliver the homes and infrastructure that Queenslanders desperately need’.

The shenanigans have apparently been going on since the Palaszczuk Labor government introduced the hilariously named Best Practice Industry Conditions (BPIC), aka the CFMEU tax, in 2018. They were turbocharged when Albanese abolished the Australian Building and Construction Commission shortly after he was elected in 2022.

Queensland, however, is small potatoes compared with Victoria, where the CFMEU template was developed, according to Geoffrey Watson SC, by former secretary John Setka. Watson’s report documents how Victoria’s infrastructure boom became a cesspool of drug deals, strippers, bribes, bikies and ghost shifts.

In view of all this, new Victorian Labor Premier Ben Carroll thought it prudent to point out that he wasn’t Dan Andrews or Jacinta Allan. (In fact, given that he is backed by Labor right royalty including Stephen Conroy, Steve Bracks, John Brumby, and Bill Shorten, he will likely be a tougher opponent than his Labor predecessors to dislodge at this stage.)

As Australian gold medals pile up in Glasgow, Victorians are left to ponder how all they got out of the Commonwealth Games was a bill for $500 million not to host them. No one should be surprised. The Andrews government was first elected in 2014 on a promise of paying out $1.2 billion not to build the East-West link. At last count, Watson estimates that Victoria’s Big Bad Build has transferred 15 billion dollars of taxpayer money into the pockets of corrupt union officials and other organised criminals.

Is the CFMEU era over? Who knows? Apparently, the practices continue to operate on Snowy 2.0. Indeed, only last month, the Albanese government introduced changes to industrial laws so that the Commonwealth can legally discriminate against businesses without a union agreement on federally funded projects.

Last week, Albanese dined at Mandalay, the harbourside mansion of a Chinese billionaire donor whose father has been accused of tax evasion. On the guest list was none other than former Victorian premier and friend of the Chinese Communist party Dan Andrews. Did the two discuss the CFMEU on the road to Mandalay?

As for sexually denigrating women, it is apparently acceptable, even if the woman comes from a protected racial or ethnic group, if you happen to be the prime minister. Albanese lectured Hanson for bringing Australia into disrepute internationally when she criticised Australia’s immigration policy during a podcast she recorded with Robinson.

Albanese was untroubled, however, about bringing Australia into disrepute internationally when he recorded a podcast making lewd gestures and comments about the breasts of the Japanese Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi. Indeed, why worry when it would have scored him brownie points with the Chinese Communist party?

Hanson faces the likelihood of paying Faruqi’s substantial legal bills unless she wins an appeal to the High Court. Justice Stewart was born in South Africa, but unless Hanson wins her appeal, it would be imprudent to offer him any advice about a return visit to his homeland.