"Difficult."

What's the point of Anthony Misogynese?

I had a bad dream last night. There was Anthony Albanese in a smoking jacket, a cigar in one corner of his mouth and a smirk in the other, twirling a scotch on the rocks in his hand. “Difficult!” he declared, his word for women who refuse to stay silent in the face of abuse. The men in the room chuckled as the dulcet tones of my sleep tracker woke me. For a moment, I thought it was just a dream.

But then I remembered it was real. Only it wasn’t some smoke-filled gentlemen’s club, it was some equally stuffy Herald Sun event, and moments after describing former Australian of the Year, advocate for children and survivor of child sexual abuse, Grace Tame as “difficult,” he went on to describe a man found liable for rape by a court, and facing accusations of child sexual abuse himself, as “President.”

[Hold for laughter]

Anthony Albanese did indeed hold for laughter, and the room gave him what he so desperately craves, APPROVAL! (from his right). Gawd, he is so fucking desperate to be liked by people who despise him that he’ll go ahead and haze himself.

This is the world we live in. A former prince, accused of child sexual abuse, gets “Grub.” A felon rapist, also accused of child sexual abuse, gets “President.” The abusers get a wink, and the survivor gets the word misogynists have always used to describe women who won’t comply.

If there is one lesson any sane world leader should be drawing from the Epstein files, it’s that women should be believed. Everything the survivors alleged about Epstein and his cabal of powerful ‘associates’ is true. And when the history of this moment is written, it will be written by those of us who remember who kissed the ring of the Epstein class and who stood with the survivors. Albanese, on that stage, in his invisible smoking jacket, made it clear (yet again) which side he’s on.

Grace Tame didn’t choose to be sexually abused as a child by her school teacher. But she chose to do everything she could to ensure it didn’t happen to other children, too. That fight literally changed Australian law. It gave survivors a voice where they had been silenced before. Her defining strength is more than surviving; she survived and refused to be silenced.

Grace Tame wasn’t awarded Australian of the Year for being polite and agreeable. She is celebrated as one of the great Australians because she is ungovernable in the face of systems that depend on suppression. Which makes it all the more grotesque that the political and media class continue to attack her and attempt to do exactly that.

But they never wanted her to keep going. They wanted a neat little moment that showed they were listening. A cute little happy snap pinned to the national fridge for twelve months, then quietly replaced. Grace didn’t get that memo, although they did get a couple of great photos for the fridge:

Instead of complying, she kept connecting the dots. The systems protecting predators are the same systems silencing dissent. And if you actually care about children, you can’t carve out exceptions for the ones being bombed and starved because their suffering is geopolitically or culturally inconvenient.

As a wise woman once said:

“You can buy bombs. You can buy politicians. But you cannot buy the truth. You cannot buy our compassion or our love. That is what we have. Those are our weapons.”

In that same speech, that same woman (Grace Tame ICYMI) also used the word “intifada.” A word that literally means ‘shaking off’ in Arabic. The call to “globalise the intifada” means to shake off colonial oppressors. But the people conducting that oppression apparently get to decide it is a call for violence against them, and the media just nods along. The people dropping the bombs get to define which words are violent. The people doing the colonising get to tell the colonised what words in their own language actually mean. And the Australian media gets to tell a woman who has spent her adult life fighting violence that she is, in fact, the violent one. Come off it.

And where was Albanese in all of this? Not defending her. Not correcting the record. Waiting. Reading the room (Murdoch’s room), then agreeing to their terms, as though they won’t plaster photos of him pulling a rude head on the front cover of their rags the moment he implements a policy they don’t like. He is so desperate for Newscorp’s approval that he’ll sit on their set and shit-talk an Australian of the Year on the off chance his bully might lay off giving him wedgies for a few days.

And the tragedy (in the Shakespearean sense) is that he was once one of us. He (as he likes to remind us, ad nauseam) grew up in public housing, after all. He joined the supposed party of the workers. He marched for a free Palestine. Once upon a time, Anthony Albanese was someone who broke the silence with a megaphone in hand. But as his proximity to power grew, his willingness to speak truth to it waned. He clambered his way to the top job and shed each value, each belief, each conviction on the way up. Now he presides over a country marred by such growing inequality that soon it will be impossible for a boy from public housing to become Prime Minister.

Mostly just because there will be no public housing to speak of.

He could have used his massive mandate to go down as a PM of great reform. In a few decades, people might have happily drunk a beer with his face on it. Instead, he’ll go down as a PM with the moral integrity of an empty tinny…

The world is run by abusers and the people who protect them. We have survivors to thank for proving that, for speaking up when it cost them everything, for speaking truth when every institution told them they were liars. The least we owe them is to heed their voices. The most we owe them is to raise ours alongside theirs and stop the abuse entirely.

Power requires silence > silence enables abuse > abuse concentrates power.

Survivors who speak up challenge that cycle. That’s what makes them dangerous, not to the public, but to the powerful, and that’s why their retaliation is so reliable. Sometimes it comes as a meek little word on a stage, “Difficult.” Sometimes it comes as legislation designed to criminalise the act of speaking up at all. Sometimes it comes as pepper spray in the eyes, or a baton across the spine, or a bullet to the head or a bomb raining from the sky. Silence is the condition on which their power depends, and every voice that speaks truth to that power is a threat.

Grace told us what our weapons are, and they’ve been coming for her ever since. But as she said, our weapons can’t be bought, and they don’t require permission. But they do require being courageous, the adjective Albanese should have used to describe Grace. Damn, imagine if we had a courageous PM for once…

To finish, I’ll borrow the words of a random TikTok comment I saw with 18.6k likes: “Grace deserves another Australian of the Year for always standing on business.”

She does.

The rest of us need to start standing on it too.