Take a deep breath. It’s started and already doesn’t look good. Last week, real life tears caused flooding when it was announced former Prime Minister Julia Gillard was stepping into the chair of the mental health organisation beyondblue.
On Sunday she wrote her first comment piece, ‘Why I’ve stepped back into public life’ for the Sydney Morning Herald.
It is a huge shame they didn’t first run a poll asking whether the public actually wanted Gillard back in their lives. My guess is the results would have been categorical and emphatic…
Unfortunately, here she is – and in her very first piece she’s playing the predictable, rancid gender card.
Gillard speaks of enduring a time of reflection and says she made three big decisions. Sadly, we don’t even get to the third to be pulling our hair out in distressed fistfuls.
‘Firstly, that I would refrain from being involved in, or commenting on, day-to-day domestic politics. It was time for the next generation of leaders to take charge,’ she writes.
Sigh, if only that had lasted.
‘Second, I would do what I could to encourage young Australians, particularly young women, to think about the world they live in and understand their responsibility to be active in shaping its future.’
Boom.
There it is. Totally transparent, unapologetic gender bias.
Before taking the chair at beyondblue, it appears Ms Gillard did not take sufficient time to reflect on the damage that feminist ideology has done, and continues to do, in society.
Gillard has slipped into the chair wearing a hideous pink cloak and set fire to all things blue.
Beyond blue, apparently, there is pink.
Attempting to justify her new role, she delights in writing about her father who trained as a psychiatric nurse. She ‘occasionally visited him at work at Adelaide’s Glenside Hospital’, adding ‘my sister and I would go there and have Christmas parties with the kids. That was just our life.’
Never have eyes rolled so intensely or blood boiled so swiftly.
You do not become experienced in mental health by popping in to visit someone at work or stepping beyond the door and into social Christmas functions.
Isn’t it fascinating that this woman is leaning on the experience of a man, her father, while simultaneously playing the gender victim card?
Gillard continues, ‘What you won’t hear from me is biased critiques on the mental health policies of political parties.’
How about the outrageous gender bias and misandry that, largely thanks to the Real Julia, has warped policies and all political parties?
If you’re interested in suicide prevention, take a good look at the Family Court. Listen to fathers who are denied access to their children. Hear the men whose lives are destroyed by vengeful exes. Tell them their how valued their lives are.
Until you have listened, and truly, honestly understood, you are not welcome to preach about suicide prevention.
Until you recognise that feminism has blood dripping from its hands, we don’t want to hear your cleverly crafted ‘conversation about depression’.
Gillard notes that in 2015 there were 3,027 lives lost to suicide. Yet she makes no mention of the number of those that were male: 2,292 males (19.4 per 100,000) and 735 females (6.2 per 100,000).
Strangely, she doesn’t mention that it’s estimated between three and five fathers a day take their own lives because of family access restrictions, according to Lone Fathers and Dads in Distress.
She’s happy to reach out ‘particularly [to] young women’ in her call for change, but is allergic to using the word ‘male’ unless she’s screeching about sexism and misogyny.
If this entire nightmare appointment weren’t so unbelievably and hideously tragic, we would be laughing.