Our house is just a little depressed today after last night’s Australian election not-so-much-outcome. But we’ll always have the crazy drinking straw glasses, which never go out of style! And the red lemonade in the drinking straw glasses will probably never entirely come out either. Everything consumed last night in our house was enhanced with a little red food colouring in honour of The First Female Prime Minister (that briefly was) and her red locks.
As I have noted previously, there was a lot of very shallow self-interest expressed by voters during this election campaign, so here is a bit of my own. Lauca was really very inspired by having a female Prime Minister; she even composed a victory song for Julia Gillard, it even rhymed (no small thing when you are only five years old). The saddest thing about last night’s result for me is thinking about how Lauca had said “wake me up if she wins” when we took her to bed. Disillusioned though I was with much of the Labor Party’s campaign, I really would have loved to wake her at midnight to tell her that a woman had won and to hear her sing us the victory song.
Oh that is so sad!
I’ve been thinking about the blog post that I wrote, and in fact that whole Down Under Carnival full of largely celebratory writing, about having a female PM. Talk about mood swing. I was also disappointed with Gillard’s campaign but I wanted to see her win, and well.
I was in bed Saturday night, having gone to bed in disgust, shaking with anger, crying and trying to tell my husband that now I had to tell our daughter that no, actually, she couldn’t be Prime Minister because by the time they got around to having another one she would probably be 60 (she’s 4 1/2 now). Have calmed down a little since then.
I love the red glasses straw – so cool. We just spent the night watching the red vote tally and eating lots of sugar. My daughter too was distraught at the thought of Tony instead of Julia. It’s difficult to explain to a 7 year old what a hung parliment means.
I must have some of those glasses in our house, very cool.
Yeah, talk about a let down: the campaign, the outcome. Our daughter, who is also five, was begging to stay up and see Julia Gillard win. Then disappointed about the let down the following morning. She was genuinely worried that Tony Abbott might win. She kept bringing up during the day that she had a bad feeling Tony Abbott would win. So we had to reassure her that everything would be alright for us either way, but that we’d prefer he didn’t win, in order to help put it all in perspective for her.
I am so relieved to hear that I wasn’t the only one worrying about how my kid was going to take the news.
My mother’s partner, who was also disappointed in the result was trying to say something nice about how even if the Coalition gets in it won’t be long before Labor comes back again and I said “but you don’t understand, it won’t be a woman this time, it might not ever again be one during my lifetime”. That sucks.
When Hillary Clinton lost in the primaries, Eve was devastated. I don’t think I fully understood the power of role modeling on that level until I looked at her face the morning that news was on the front page of the paper.
It really did amaze me – I mean, Eve was 8 the year of that campaign, and the race had essentially been going on for two years, so for the entire duration of her awareness of politics there was a woman who was a serious candidate. I expected that she would miss the significance and take it as normal, that I would be far more distressed – but in fact the reverse was true and it hit her much harder than it hit me. Some of that was undoubtedly due to my cynicism and her nascent enthusiasm for democracy, but not all of it.
I watched her distress and I realized that at 8, despite the changes since I was a kid, Eve already knew that women occupied a marginal position in public life. That was the hardest part of the whole election season for me, and it still makes my heart hurt.
I should mention also that my seven year old son was keen for Julia to win (in his heart of hearts he wants Kevin back bless him) and was quite worried about Tony. For purely practical reasons, he doesn’t want his internet to slow down (we explained this to him). But completely off his own bat he watched a TA commercial and turned around and said “I don’t like him Mum, he’s lying.” So we’ve done something right.
My eight year old daughter, in her heart of hearts also misses Kevin. I suppose she’s been following his career for a large part of her life. She loved the apology and what he had to say when Jessica Watson sailed home. I told her we need Julia to win ’cause it might be 60 years before a woman gets another go. I explained the party system not the presidential style thing. My 17 year old daughter – I think she walked taller when Julia got in and she organised me to sit with her and watch Julia’s first live speech as PM. She wished she was just that bit older to vote. To her, Abbott is just plain embarrassing. She also said all her friends voting for the first time planned to vote for the Greens.
3 year old Scarlett also woke the next morning asking ‘did Julia win?’ It is so disappointing four our daughters isn’t it?