If you need a reminder of why Prime Minister Tony Abbott needed to go.
Here are just some of them:
1. He appointed himself Minister for Women, but didn’t really get us.
The man once said this: “I think it would be folly to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation in a large number of areas simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons.”
Related: Two years in, let’s celebrate all that Tony Abbott has achieved as Minister for Women.
Granted, he said it during his university days in the 70s (let’s hope he was extremely intoxicated), but can a man who once believed that women were simply inferior because of their biology ever change his spots?
Based on this comment in 2010, those stereotypical gender roles seem to be fairly ingrained: “What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing is that if they get it done commercially it’s going to go up in price and their own power bills when they switch the iron on are going to go up.”
When asked what his greatest achievement as Minister for Women was, he famously responded that it was repealing the carbon tax. Go figure.
2. His backwards attitude to marriage equality.
Abbott refused to allow his Coalition colleagues a free vote on the issue of same-sex marriage, ensuring Australia remains far behind the eight ball and continue to deny gay people equal rights – despite the majority of Australians supporting marriage equality.
3. He completed screwed us with the Paid Parental Leave scheme.
He told us his signature Paid Parental Leave scheme would see families paid the full wage of a working parent for six months up to a cap of $75,000. He stole the female vote.
Then he dumped the package, leaving working mothers who meet the means test with the same, old, meagre scheme of 18 weeks’ pay at minimum wage.