Informit article: Julian Assange and the Femocracy

On 25 November 2018 former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard appeared on the BBC global news channel’s 100 Women series. On the show’s website, Gillard was described as having ‘used her experience to help advance women and girls around the world through the promotion of education and leadership’. Obviously the women she’d ‘helped’ didn’t include the refugees she attempted to dump on Malaysia, or those refugee women and children imprisoned in the internment camps Gillard had reopened on Manus Island and Nauru. In a similar vein, John Pilger notes ‘the views…gathered from remark – able, despairing, eloquent Indigenous women of Gillard and her “feminism” are mostly unknown or ignored or dismissed in this country’, reflecting the fact that under Gillard’s regime, Indigenous youth incarceration occurred ‘at five times the rate of black South Africans during the apartheid era’. And this is only part of the picture. Gillard’s government also cut benefits to single parents, predominantly hurting working-class single mothers. In this respect Gillard’s rise to PM had as much positive impact on women’s struc tural margin alisation as Barack Obama’s ‘Oh dear me’ per for mative hand wringing in relation to America’s ‘Black Lives Matter’ human rights crisis had on racism.