Culture

Nope, Tony Abbott Still Hasn’t Worked Out How To Talk To Women

LEARNING.

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Remember in August last year, when video started circulating of Tony Abbott, your minister for women, interacting with one of those women in the fire station she was apprenticing at?

“You’d be the most popular girl in the place, I ‘spose, wouldn’t you?” he asked, creepily. “Not really,” she answered, fairly. “HA.HA.HA,” he ejaculated.

It was a great moment for everyone.

The video got over 110k views on YouTube, and circulated Twitter as quickly as we’ve come to expect whenever the Prime Minister says or does something hideously awkward, sexist, or both.

Like that time he described his own daughters as being “not bad looking“, and his own candidate, Fiona Scott, as having “sex appeal“. And that time he challenged Julia Gillard to “make an honest woman of herself“, and had his photo taken in front of protest posters that called her a “witch” and a “bitch”.

And that time he said abortion is the “easy way out“, and that women were physiologically unsuited to leadership. And that time he proved it by inviting only one of them into his cabinet.

There was also that time he started a sentence with, “What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing…“. And that time he was talking to an aged sex worker, and made his “I’m-talking-to-an-aged-sex-worker” face:

You’d think he’d have learned better by now, right? What with the newspapers and the TV and the social media? And the fact that he has a whole lot of actual staff to tell him what not to say before he says it? But nope! No learning! Not he!

On last night’s Insiders, footage was aired of the Prime Minister visiting a Queanbeyan factory in New South Wales.

He had the pleasure of finding a woman there. Rather than taking the opportunity to not say what he said last time, he chose to do exactly the opposite, and repeat himself word for word.

What a winner.