En Passant

Domestic violence kills many more Australians than terrorism. Where, Mr Morrison and Mr Shorten, is your war on domestic violence? Click here for the link to my latest article in Independent Australia.

Miss Dhu died in police custody. The police are one of the sponsors of White Ribbon Day.     Obama’s drone program kills women. Obama says he is opposed to violence against women.   Locking up women and their children to reinforce racism in Australia and unite workers with their capitalist and austerity leaders. Turnbull […]

Here was a great opportunity to build a united mass movement against the oppression of women and indigenous Australians. Instead the focus was on getting the state to take top down action that does absolutely nothing to address domestic violence, anti-abortion bigotry, racism or women’s oppression. This is the very state which drives and reinforces that racism and oppression. There is nothing to cheer about in banning Brown and Newman.

Malcom Turnbull going around saying it is un-Australian to hit a woman won’t stop it and his comments look to me as if they are cover for not doing anything substantial to address the results that flow from a sick society where women are treated as chattels or brood mares for capital.

Combatting domestic violence at a minimum requires a challenge to the dominance of the family and ultimately its overthrow. Tony Abbott will do nothing that might undermine the ideology of the family let alone overthrow it. Nor will he address the ‘less than men’ messages about women that flow from the paramountcy of the family unit in capitalist society. Instead he has cut funding for domestic violence services.

The problem of domestic violence is systemic. It needs systemic solutions, not propaganda about the role of women in rugby league, nor stereotypes like cheer squads which reinforce the subordinate role of women in society and hence reinforce the very system which produces domestic violence.

If only the 24 women murdered by their partners or former partners in Australia so far this year had died in a plane crash we might hear about them and have some debate about how to address this systemic issue.