Marriage! 9 out of 10 couples say: "I guess!" 4 out of 10 wedded couples say: "Probably wasn't the best idea, really. Sorry! Here have your juicer back". But still, the ol' marriage does have some sticking power, I'll give it that. And when it comes to marriage in Australia, we still seem to be harking back to an earlier age, a simpler age. An age where men were men, women were women and midgets were still considered part of the food chain.

And hasn't this election just been gangbusters for marriage? I guess that's what you have to expect when you have a woman with the temerity to be deliberately unwed jockeying for the top spot. Hell, she's in the top spot already. God knows what horrific damage the spectre of this unmarried, independently minded, career driven woman might be doing to the suggestible minds of little girls everywhere. "Quick Dierdre, Julia's about to be on the telly. Lock Lucy in the kitchen with some eggs and self-raising flour. That'll keep her busy until the unwed harridan has finished talking." Yes, thankfully for Lucy, she has parents who understand that the value of a woman can be measured in her capacity to catch and keep a husband. And after that, it's pretty much just shopping binges, daiquiris and Xanax until retirement. Or divorce.

So, let's talk about Janet Albrechtsen, arch-right columnist extraordinaire for arch-right newspaper extraordinaire The Australian. After growing up in Perth, with the sole company of The Australian for serious journalism, I had quite an amount of time to realise that Janet Albrechtsen is not a good person. Indeed, Albrechtsen is the kind of writer who makes Miranda Devine look like palatable dinner company. If Janet were a fruit, she would be asphalt. If she were a movie, she would be The Human Centipede. If she were a children's cartoon character she would be Skeletor.



While essentially just a troll for the political commentary set, Albrechtsen is nonetheless exceptionally good at needling in at the sorts of issues that just make you want to put a fist through the paper and/or screen in a vain attempt to get at her. Witness yesterday's craven and personal attack on Gillard's "free ride" in this election. Bandying about the phrase "sisterhood" as if she was addressing a women's rally in the late 60s, Albrechtsen boldly declaims that Gillard is doing so well because women are supporting her for the sole reason that she is herself a woman. Although I suspect that many women may well be supporting her because they don't want to give Tony Abbott any measure of control over their ovaries. But hey, maybe women are just blind, unthinking automatons trained to respond favourably to someone who looks like them. Maybe we made a mistake letting them vote all those years ago. Makes you think, don't it? But, to be fair, none of that is especially pernicious, just a little uninformed. But then Albrechtsen really goes to town, commencing with the line:

"The sisterhood should stop reading right about now."

Yep. Here come the hard truths, direct from the bilious maw of faux-righteousness that is Albrechtsen's word cannon (read: mouth): "Gillard admits she never wanted children or marriage. She has showcased a bare home and an empty kitchen as badges of honour and commitment to her career. She has never had to make room for the frustrating demands and magnificent responsibilities of caring for little babies, picking up sick children from school, raising teenagers. Not to mention the needs of a husband or partner." It's one of those paragraphs you read with a sense of steadily escalating horror, each sentence improving on the one before it, until that majestic climax "Not to mention the needs of a husband or partner".

Yes, the art of political commentary is alive and well in Australia.

While as far as I can tell being patently untrue - witness the article, also, funnily enough, in The Australian, containing the apparently startling revelation that Gillard's partner, Tim Mathieson, would actually live in The Lodge with her - this ongoing determination to paint Gillard as somehow comparatively unable to take charge of the country because she remains unmarried and childless is just such a goddamn needless distraction. Even worse is the suggestion that it renders her assumption of the Prime Ministership some sort of betrayal of the "sisterhood". "Yeah, have some children you silly broad, then we'll be impressed. Lucy, how's that cake going? Daddy has a mighty hunger". And this in addition to the usual wasteful fare apparaising Gillard's various sartorial choices; in the immediate aftermath of the debate, purportedly award-winning journalist Kate Legge provided us with 500 words of insight into the state of Gillard's earlobes and how it distracted from the debate itself. Oh, that was in The Australian too.

But these giddy, comically scandalised and utterly sexist broadsides simply make the media sound like a giggling five year old who has recently discovered the word "vagina". Or, as I called it for at least three years, "bagina". It's like we still can't get over the fact that women are climbing in to the upper echelons of power. But we have, strange as it may seem, given women of all stripes and lifestyles positions of authority over the past few decades and yet outright calamity has yet to befall us. Kevin Rudd's wife, Therese Rein, was richer than he was by a factor of shitloads. The currently serving Chief Justice of the Family Court has herself never had children, yet from all reports is doing a rather stellar job. The examples are, thankfully, legion.

Albrechtsen is an extreme example, but this questioning undercurrent remains across much of the media's coverage, a sort of collective raised eyebrow to continually remind us that it's kinda weird for a woman not to have kids, isn't it? What's all that about? All they have to do is say "it's a concern in the community" and suddenly they have themselves a story. A story which helps to make it a concern in the community. A media cycle which is simply proof, yet again, that women in all walks of life are still denied the very male privilege of having their public actions appraised separately from their personal lives. The "sisterhood" still has much to fight for, it seems.



Gillard is providing plenty to criticise in this campaign. I think our media would paint itself in a far more favourable light if its coverage of her campaign wasn't quite so openly parodic.