Slipper slipping away

It suited the Right to act appalled at the "misogyny" of Peter Slippers' stupid and deeply embarrassing text messages to a staffer, and of course, it was not practically possible for Lefty politicians to defend the texts as acceptable.

But in truth, there is quite a lot of puffed up fakery in this:   as if there aren't thousands of things said every year by male (and female) politicians of a lewd, crude or ribald nature which would be deeply embarrassing if revealed to the public or other politicians. 

As far as I am concerned, the text message causing the most outrage is not an example of misogyny (a hatred of women) per se:  seriously, how often have drunk young women in a ribald mood talked to each other about how they think men's bits are not inherently attractive to them, and do we call them men haters?

However, there is also no doubt that the whole series of texts between Slipper and Ashby do show a character of great immaturity and poor judgement. It reminds me most of the Troy Buswell chair sniffing incident.  Even if he had done the act to an audience of men only after the woman concerned had left the room, surely people hearing it would think "what sort of mental 15 year old have we got doing this job?" 

Given Ashby's frequent ribald responses to Slipper's text, and his entire highly suspect and self serving way he has handled the matter, I think it's a very hard call to say whether it should be found to be sexual harassment by Slipper.   Certainly, if it is, Ashby deserves virtually nothing in compensation.

But regardless of the outcome, Slipper's character as exposed by the texts did render him as too embarrassingly immature a figure to be Speaker in the long run.   I think Labor would have moved to encourage him to resign anyway, but caught yesterday by Abbott's early move, they were in a difficult situation.

At least Abbot got to also shoot himself in the foot by, stupidly, using a similar refrain as Alan Jones.  What poor taste political judgement was that?   The Right in Australian politics at the moment is, to a large extent, very embarrassing in the way it is treating women politicians in Labor.