POLICY CONTENTS ideas • debate • opinion Volume 31 No. 2 • Winter 2015 SYMPOSIUM ON FEMINISM ARTICLES 3 The Corruption of Feminism 39 Free Trade & Its Exceptions When human rights stopped being about Do they apply to Australia today? freedom, so did feminism. Sinclair Davidson Janet Albrechtsen 45 How Ideas Spread 7 Global Women’s Issues One CIS report’s 20-year journey Why we still need feminism. around the globe. Andrea den Boer Wolfgang Kasper 12 New Feminism’s War on Women 49 Laudato Si’: Well Intentioned, The arguments once made by misogynists Economically Flawed are now made by feminists. Pope Francis has too negative a view Brendan O’Neill of markets, but he is no Marxist. Samuel Gregg FEATURES RESEARCH 15 Australia’s Future in the Balance 52 Charter Schools, Free Schools, Overcoming antagonism and reigniting and School Autonomy enterprise and prosperity. The prospects for innovative education Wolfgang Kasper & Paul Kelly models in Australia. 24 Magna Carta: The Rule of Law Jennifer Buckingham & Trisha Jha and Liberty The principles inherent in the document developed by incremental steps. BOOK REVIEWS James Spigelman 59 Christian Reconstruction: 32 Magna Carta: 800 Years of Law R. J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism & Liberty By Michael Joseph McVicar From Scalia to Jay-Z. Reviewed by Jeremy Shearmur The Hon. Christian Porter POLICY staff Editor-in-Chief & Publisher: Greg Lindsay Editor: Helen Andrews Assistant Editor: Karla Pincott Design & Production: Ryan Acosta Subscriptions: Kerri Evans and Alicia Kinsey Policy Magazine Ph: +61 2 9438 4377 • Fax: +61 2 9439 7310 Email: [email protected] ISSN: 1032 6634 Please address all advertising enquiries and correspondence to: The Editor Policy PO Box 92 St Leonards NSW 1590 Australia © 2015 The Centre for Independent Studies Limited Level 4, 38 Oxley Street, St Leonards, NSW ABN 15 001 495 012 Cover images: © Dekanaryas | Dreamstime.com Printed by Ligare Pty Ltd Distributed by Gordon & Gotch Australia and Gordon & Gotch New Zealand. The Editor welcomes unsolicited submissions. All full-length articles (other than reproductions) are subject to a refereeing process. Permission to reproduce articles may be given upon application to the Editor. 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If I was speaking detour away from real issues of freedom. at a conference of university students, I would ask But if feminism is not about freedom, what’s that there be no clapping, in case it triggers anxiety. the point of it? If it’s not about freedom, it’s just I would ask for ‘jazz hands.’ a lobby group for pet grievances. So what the hell happened to feminism? It’s too Today’s feminists feast at a smorgasbord of early for karaoke, but feminism should be summed whinges, whines, victimhood claims, misogyny up by Helen Reddy’s iconic song: games, gender binary discussions, Western world obsessions about pay gaps and quotas and glass I am woman, ceilings. Hear me roar… Brave riders of the feminism’s third-wave include I am strong, pop stars like Taylor Swift who recently said: ‘I didn’t I am invincible. see myself as held back until I was a woman.’ As Heather Wilheim wrote recently for The Federalist: Sadly, the lyrics of modern feminism go ‘Held back from what?’ Building a net worth of something like this: $250 million? It’s probably too much to expect celebrities to I am woman, become feminist icons. But when women like Hear me whine, Gwyneth Paltrow teach us about the wonders of I am weak, vaginal steaming, you have to ask— I am vulnerable. is that really the best they can do? What about the media—how The notion of triage—of prioritizing problems, are they doing? How long have of addressing those who most need help—has been we got? inverted by modern feminism. Let’s start with the keyboard If today’s feminists ran a hospital emergency feminists who found so much department, they would be racing to fix an otherwise healthy middle-aged woman with a common cold over a young girl facing a life-threatening injury. Don’t get me wrong. As Anne Manne wrote so Janet Albrechtsen is a columnist for The Australian. eloquently many years ago, women like me inhaled These remarks were delivered at the Big Ideas Forum the benefits of feminism as naturally as the air hosted by the CIS in Sydney, 24 August 2015. we breathe. POLICY • Vol. 31 No. 2 • Winter 2015 3 THE CORRUPTION OF FEMINISM offence with Mark Latham’s crude tweeting about had finished reading the fictional Fifty Shades a handful of women. Latham gave up his column of Grey. in the AFR last week. I’m not defending Latham. This poor commentator would probably have His gratuitous nastiness always detracts from what to take a vaginal steam bath if she listened to the can sometimes be a kernel of confronting truth. words of Esther Perel who, in a recent TED talk, But it’s uncanny how the sisterhood strikes when pointed out that ‘most of us get turned on at night it suits—for political purposes, not as a matter of by the very same things we might demonstrate principle. against during the day. The erotic mind is not very It’s apparently fine for Clementine Ford to call politically correct.’ Miranda Devine a ‘f—ing c—’ on Twitter but it’s I’ll leave that subject to Cosmo magazine—save not fine for Latham to use crude words. I say a pox to say that feminists today don’t even understand on them both. freedom in the bedroom. Some years ago, Malcolm Turnbull rang me And how are our politicians faring on the at home and asked whether I knew what Latham feminism front? ‘The horror!’ exclaimed Greens had said about me. I hadn’t caught up with the senator Larissa Waters last year. Was she responding news: Latham had called me a skanky ho in federal to Islamic State’s propaganda which says ‘It is Parliament. I didn’t know what ‘skanky ho’ meant, permissible to buy, sell, or give as a gift female so, while I was on the phone to Malcolm, I googled captives and slaves, for they are merely property the phrase. Needless to say, I was inundated with which can be disposed of’ and ‘It is permissible to more porn than is decent when you’re sitting have intercourse with the female slave who hasn’t in your study with young children running reached puberty if she is fit for intercourse’? around you.