Progressives need to have a hard think about victim feminism

Decades ago, the left developed the concept of “structural violence”, to show a state could willingly kill people in ways other than shooting them. The cuts to Western public sectors of the Thatcher/Reagan years, and the evisceration of services in the Global South under the “Washington consensus” and the global debt bomb, made it clear the withdrawal of health services, social care and employment could cause deaths and illness and destroy lives — and were not random with regard to the social classes they hit.

Since the 1917 October Revolution, the right based its political morality on policing the divide between politics (where amoral killing was possible) and economics (where, they argued, it simply wasn’t). The Republicans’ desperate move in Congress last week, condemning “socialism” and tying Joe Biden’s mild social market policies to Stalin, is an example. 

But then, on the left, a funny thing happened. The notion of “violence” began to expand in another direction: the personal level. An increased focus on domestic violence from the 1990s onwards caused an examination of the wider context in which it occurs, and the way in which physically violent (and non-violent) men used verbal abuse, mind games, financial control, etc, as part of a suite of techniques to control women, some of whom they also physically assaulted.

In the 2000s this prompted a redefinition of the idea of “violence”, which drew in developing notions of trauma and non-war PTSD to suggest the permanent psychological imprinting of fear constituted a form of violence in its own right. This was arguable, but it also quickly became over-extended. Verbal or emotional haranguing, social media bullying and revenge-posting became violence. 

This extension of violence was a policy disaster, relying on a Victorian-era victimhood model of women. In the past few years, it has been wound back to notions of abuse such as emotional and financial, but the sense of it has hung around, due to our contradictory residual notions of gender. 

Which brings us to the question of Rachelle Miller. Miller, the former adviser to Alan Tudge, gave evidence to the robodebt inquiry last week. Grizzled viewers of the inquiry had already seen a parade of public servants whose blithe recitative of the cruelty and bastardry they applied on behalf of politicians, without objection, tended to revive one’s respect for Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” argument. 

But Miller was something else: coldly, disdainfully talking about the “left-wing” media in purely political terms, as she detailed doxxing critics and feeding isolated welfare cheat stories to News Corp mouthpiece Simon Benson. This was what the Liberal Party looked like. It doesn’t like or care about the poor, and it doesn’t much like or care about you.

This was the same Rachelle Miller whose affair with Tudge and its subsequent fall-out became a media fixture after the first of two “Canberra Bubble” Four Corners episodes, the first mostly about Miller and Tudge, the second about the Christian Porter rape allegations. The former was largely a lame story about their rather teenage affair (judging by the released texts) and some alleged poor treatment of Miller by Tudge. She also described being made to feel like “an ornament” at the 2017 Midwinter Ball; arriving in a red dress, she was encouraged by Tudge to walk in with him, despite both wanting to keep their affair on the down low.

Miller then became some sort of victim-hero. Yet many people still have not twigged that the “woman in the red dress” and the cool robodebt operative, who detailed how the life-and-death situations of the poor and disabled were being used for spin, are the same person. 

We always knew Miller was in Tudge’s office while the robodebt systematised cruelty was going on. Yet as soon as it became alleged that she might have had some oppressive treatment in a male-female workplace relationship with an imbalanced power dynamic, progressives and the left picked her up as a hero. The notion of interpersonal emotional violence was deployed in Miller’s favour and as a knock against Tudge — even though Miller was clearly a Team Tudge/ScoMo player — and the entire notion of “structural violence” was forgotten.

This woman was a willing and enthusiastic participant, using her skills and contacts, in advancing and defending a system that has directly caused suicides, self-harm, psychological breakdown and immense misery. Her inquiry appearance shows she’s smart and presumably good at her job. Those skills helped extend the robodebt scheme when it was under attack. She has a share in those deaths it caused. 

How was it that a Liberal became such a standard-bearer for the claim that we should prioritise this form of oppression — that of professional-class, usually white, women — over others? Well, firstly, because the notion of structural violence has been occluded by the interpersonal politics of “abuse”. In a society where many material relations are invisible, allegations of personal abusive behaviour seem more real than, say, gendered poverty. But it’s also because a division opened up some time ago between the interests of professional-class white women and many other social groups, who they once were in alliance with and had common conditions of oppression.

Miller’s fairly anodyne case was thrown in amid more serious allegations by many progressives. “Where has the woman’s rage of 2021 gone?” an article by Caitlin Fitzsimons asked in The Sydney Morning Herald:

Parliament House became a lightning rod for a national conversation about the treatment of women as Brittany Higgins, Rachelle Miller, and Kate [Christian Porter’s alleged victim] became household names (with the accused men vehemently denying all allegations).

This seems to capture the general progressive feeling of the time, as well as the lack of interest in Miller’s involvement in the robodebt horror as a staffer in Tudge’s office.

It seems the identification flowed to Miller — steered there, in part, by Four Corners and others — and the victims of the politics she participated in were forgotten.

You ready for the hard stuff? The same is true of Brittany Higgins. Higgins, like anyone of whatever politics, has a full and absolute right to every resource of the law and social support that go to people who claim to be a victim of a crime. But why on earth did she become a culture hero for progressives, standing there alongside Grace Tame, when she enthusiastically joined the Morrison government and clearly had no qualms about its actions? 

How did that simply get negated? How far would that misplaced solidarity extend? To One Nation? Morrison’s government did a lot of stuff worse than anything One Nation has thought up, yet if Pauline Hanson appeared at the head of one of those rallies, the support and solidarity of progressives would be withdrawn. The Liberal Party and One Nation have different policies, but the government both Miller and Higgins were so desperate to be a part of is notable for eliding that difference in practice.

Why does this matter, beyond these two cases? Because it’s going to keep happening. There are going to be a lot more young right-wing women, precisely because professional-class women can no longer be put in that “oppressed” class anymore.

There’s going to be a power imbalance if progressives keep signing them up to the worthy victims’ roster, because, look, there’s no other way to say this: right-wing women of this type will run rings around teary-eyed progressives because they don’t share the progressive idea of a universalist ethic. They’re Liberals. They believe in individualism, the virtue of selfishness, and they don’t have much time for structural notions of oppression (unless it’s quotas for winnable seats, at which point Liberal women start sounding like the Rosa Luxemburg Cuban Women’s Fighting Brigade). 

Let’s make it really direct. Many right-wing women don’t have the same hallowedness for the “believe women” mantra about sexual violence and harassment as progressives do, so many of them simply do not have the same internal brake on strategic action in this regard. 

So it’s time for progressives, and for the material left especially, to take a tougher stand on this emerging contradiction, and not hide behind vague statements about standing with all oppressed peoples, etc. Some tough choices have to be made, and some ambit claims by professional-class women interrogated.  

This has real life-and-death consequences beyond robodebt. The draconian Victorian bail remand system that led to the death of a First Nations woman has been attributed to the crimes by the Bourke St car killer, who was out on bail. That’s only half the story. They originated from Dan Andrews’ now largely abandoned (because it was ineffective) vast, narcissistic crusade on violence against women, which drew in the fact that Jill Meagher was murdered by a man out on bail. 

People, mainly non-white people, are dying and rotting away in bail remand to give a privileged group the illusion of greater safety. Time to stand with the truly oppressed — the victims of corporate and state machines — and recognise that the great social unity movement is over. 

Parliament’s adoption of workplace safety standards for the actual building, on its first day of sitting, may be a good move, but it’s yet another indication of where the priorities lie. Single mothers, and many others, are still running out of money a week before their next payment, on a rate the Labor government promised to raise when it was in opposition. 

In all of this, one must apply a degree of scepticism to those seeking redress in a red dress at the Monsters’ Ball.