Page 4457 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 19 November 1991
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I wonder whether it is still on the Labor Party's shelves. This is one thing I would like Ms Follett to respond to: I often get invitations, and I am sure she does, which say down the bottom, "Lounge suit only". Is there a tyranny there? Is there a tyranny of fashion? Do women still have to wear a uniform? George Bernard Shaw says this:
Take for example the tyranny of fashion. The only law concerned in this is the law that we must all wear something in the presence of other people. It does not prescribe what a woman shall wear: it only says that in public she shall be a draped figure and not a nude one. But does this mean that a woman can wear what she likes. Legally she can; but socially her slavery is more complete than any sumptuary law could make it.
And so it goes on. There has been recognition of the situation of women in the literature over the centuries.
I now move to political discrimination. Of course, it is only a few years since Wilfred Burchett and Joyce - Lord Haw-Haw - were treated as treasonous people. In a recent text, Roland Perry writes this:
... both Joyce and Burchett wanted radical political changes in their respective countries. Joyce dreamt of returning to a Hitler-conquered United Kingdom, with some dictatorial role for himself. Burchett's letters and utterances suggested that he would have returned happily to an Australia convulsed by a communist revolution, and that he would have expected a role in communist government.
The writer goes on to say:
The dreams and writings of radicals could not be considered by law as treasonable, however, unless they were translated into action.
By 1972, he writes:
Yesterday's potential traitor had become tomorrow's heroic patriot.
The whole process of political change has not happened just in this Territory, and has not happened under the Labor Party. It has no mortgage on human rights reform in this country.
What are the underlying causes of discriminatory conduct? One has to examine oneself. We have to work out what motivates us. This morning I got out my fifth grade reader from the Christian Brothers, Wollongong - Mr Humphries laughs because he knows what is in it - and I looked through the contents. There is "The story of some hot water". Another one is, "What is that, mother?". Another
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