Opinion
Have you noticed when men call on women to make more babies, they gird themselves with male myths?
Women who’ve lived in that highly masculinised, mythologised “past” that younger men want to “bring back” would laugh in their face, given half a chance. And if there is one thing anti-abortion, pro-breeders hate more than childless women, it’s women who laugh at them.
When new National’s leader Matt Canavan spruiked his vision to “manifest a hyper Australia” this week, insisting “we need to make Australia the country it was in the past”, the forefathers over his shoulder were all smiles. Canavan’s chosen backdrop was a photo gallery of National Party grandees. All 15 of them: white, male and neatly pressed in suit and tie. Each captured in an olde-worlde hue, because although Australia got colour TV in 1975, the Nats prefer black and white.
For those afraid of the future, binaries are comforting. Canavan called on women to effectively get on their backs – “we need more Australian babies” – code for not immigrant babies, but Aussie ones. This is not about the past. Or truth. This is about Canavan’s far-right version of the past. A place designed and led by men.
It’s about patriarchy. And power. Who has it, who keeps it and whose place in the world is being reassigned. Which right now is women: the would-be, should-be breeders. The gender currently letting the country down, as our fertility rate drops to a record low of 1.42 children per woman.
It’s hard to know exactly which generation of the past Canavan is referring to. Is it his past? Unlikely, as he was a kid in the 1980s when young women like me became the biggest cohort to get university degrees, outpacing our male peers. (We were the first post second-wave feminism data point to prove men had a problem: women were outsmarting them.)
Is it John Howard’s past? Everyone was supposed to be relaxed and comfortable back then. But we know they weren’t. Is it his mum’s past? Also unlikely, as she longed to connect to her Italian parents’ European past, as we learnt when her well-intended efforts embroiled her son in a parliamentary dual citizenship fiasco in 2017.
Perhaps the glorious age Canavan hankers for is that postwar period when Australia’s fertility rate soared, peaking in 1961 at 3.5 babies per woman. Birthing well above replacement level of 2.1 babies, the ’50s and early ’60s were a golden time for men handing out cigars as women pushed out babies.
There were no anguished discussions about childcare, or paid paternity leave, as neither were needed. Thanks to the “marriage bar”, working women were sacked when married and sent home to play wife. It was a time when the law insisted men were paid more than women, who were banned from most of the interesting work anyway. A time when women couldn’t get a bank loan, much less buy a house.
It was a time when Catholics like the Canavans practised the Billings method of “natural” contraception and bred like rabbits. It was a time when a family friend, a mother of nine, sought advice from her parish priest about how to stop falling pregnant, only to be scolded and told she must not “deny her husband”.
It was a time when “real” men earned the family income, and “proper” women cooked, cleaned, and cared for everyone, while morphing into domestic doormats for men to walk over.
Horrified by today’s increasingly muscular gender backlash, Elizabeth Reid remembers Australia in the 1950s and ’60s as a dreadfully demeaning time, when women were forced to “shrink”. Appointed women’s adviser to prime minister Gough Whitlam in 1973, Reid fixated on helping women liberate themselves not only from domestic slavery and drudgery, but from the shackles of sexism and female oppression.
“We women were invisible except as sex objects and homemakers,” she says.
So, is this the golden past Canavan is calling Australia to return to? Is he echoing the state-sponsored, out-loud-and-proud misogyny of Trump’s America? Stopping short of calling for Australia to be “great again”, he certainly appears to be parroting the US Project 2025 playbook. Gleefully following its song sheet about “restoring the traditional family” as “the centrepiece of American life”.
But Canavan understands the power of localism. He has his own spin on the MAGA noise. He wants to Australianise it with Aussie jokes and barbecues. Oi, oi, oi!
Is it any wonder young Australian women aren’t having babies? For many, finding a man unsullied by the manosphere’s misogynistic ideology is hard enough. Then there’s the existential crisis at their door.
It might take eternal optimism to bring a child into a world spinning on the whim of narcissistic authoritarians who preach joy in violence and war. Where a child’s safety is impossible to guarantee. A world that is badly overheating, burning, flooding and erupting; where a few tech-bro megalomaniacs, with eye-watering wealth, control much of the information you see and read.
A world in which you can’t ever imagine owning a home. A world in which the cost of petrol, bread and milk is about to spin out of control.
The past is an easy country to promise when the truth is heavily redacted. And babies are born wearing cashmere booties.
Virginia Haussegger is a freelance journalist and adjunct professor at the University of Canberra. Her new book is Unfinished Revolution: The Feminist Fightback.
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