The speakers' lists at Reclaim the Night rallies across Australia were littered with election candidates from all political parties — in Adelaide it was Democrats Senator Natasha Stott Despoja and the Coalition's Trish Draper; in Sydney it was Kerry Nettle, lead Senate candidate for the Greens in NSW, and Labor member for Sydney Tanya Plibersek.
Reclaim the Night appears to have come at a good time for politicians and electoral hopefuls to get their faces in the cameras and in front of the crowds as an opponent of violence against women and as feminists.
In a press release issued before the Sydney event, Plibersek says: "I attend Reclaim the Night every year". But neither she nor any of these women politicians play any role in organising and building feminist protests and events.
Sydney's rally had a peace theme, yet organisers saw no contradiction when they invited a parliamentarian of a pro-war party to speak. Plibersek's party supports the Australian government's backing of the "war on terrorism". Surely war is the most grotesque example of violence against women.
Similarly, Adelaide's rally included a member of the Coalition government which has thrown its weight behind the war — Trish Draper.
In the past few weeks we've witnessed some of the most horrifying examples of violence against women. Hundreds of Afghan women were killed in bombing raids by US warplanes in villages far from Taliban forces. Several hundred mainly Iraqi women were drowned when their boat capsized in seas near Indonesia.
If these politicians had a genuine concern for violence against women, they would have opposed Bush's war on Afghanistan, a war which has already killed hundreds of civilians, many of them women, and is stopping aid from reaching millions who face imminent starvation.
If Draper and Plibersek had a genuine concern for violence against women, they would have opposed their parties' stance against refugees fleeing terror and persecution, trying to find safety in Australia. Instead, they supported every piece of draconian legislation which passed through parliament in September, making Australian refugee law the most punitive and deadly in the world, and in so doing, contributed to the deaths of over 350 people, the bulk of them women and children.
Labor and the Coalition are complicit in those deaths because they have closed off all other avenues for coming to Australia legally, leaving desperate families with no choice but to risk their lives on the high seas.
In an October 25 media release issued by the Sydney Reclaim the Night collective, Plibersek said she is proud to be marching on October 26.
"We use this night to commemorate victims of violence and to demand an end to violence. There has been a lot of talk about terrorism in the last few weeks. There is terrorism in Australia. What else should we call it when a minority of violent men change the behaviour of a majority of women, making them frightened to go out after dark on their own."
Violence against women goes beyond the still-widespread experience of rape, assault and domestic violence. It includes war and state-inflicted violence. To appear at Reclaim the Night as a parliamentarian for a pro-war party and claim to be opposed to violence against women is breathtaking hypocrisy.
For organisers to have invited pro-war election candidates to speak on the platform of an anti-violence event is very disappointing because it falsely says that, as feminists, there are some examples of violence we condemn and some we just turn a blind eye to.
Tanya Plibersek and Trish Draper should stand condemned by feminists for their support for war.
BY SARAH STEPHEN