A country-show controversy involving a noxious weed, news from the ABC Advisory Panel, the long-term financial risk of stepping out of the workforce to raise kids, and a considered look at the current debate over legal definitions of sex.
#77 | Show Judging Drama, ABC Advisory News, Stay-at-Home Mum Economics & the Women's Rights Debate – Agsolutely Fabulous
When a noxious weed wins the native flora photography section
A recent country show photography competition, category: Australian native flora, awarded first and second place to a bird of paradise (not native) and a prickly pear (an actual declared noxious weed). It’s a small, genuinely funny mishap, but it lands on a real question worth asking of any competition: whose job is it to catch that, the steward accepting entries, or the judge assessing them? Country shows are one of the better remaining opportunities to bridge the city-country information gap, and when a noxious weed gets celebrated as a lovely native plant, that’s a missed opportunity to educate rather than just a scoring error.
Joining the ABC Advisory Panel
A new appointment to the ABC’s Advisory Panel, not the board, no direct say over programming budgets, but a genuine channel for rural and regional audience feedback to reach the national broadcaster on programming decisions and how people actually access ABC content. iView alone carries more than 9,000 hours of programming, live news for households without functioning free-to-air reception, and a strong slate of children’s educational programming that’s proven genuinely useful for supplementing distance education and homeschooling. The panel itself was, by all accounts, refreshingly free of ego: a diverse group united by wanting the ABC to work better, not by individual agendas.
The real cost of being a stay-at-home parent
Stepping back from paid work to raise children carries a long tail of financial risk that rarely gets acknowledged until it’s too late to fix: no superannuation accumulating, a growing employment gap that’s genuinely penalised on return to a male-dominated workforce, and a total dependence on a partner’s income for everything from clothing to healthcare. Divorce rates climbing among people in their late 40s, 50s and 60s are, in part, the endpoint of exactly this: years of unpaid contribution with nothing built up individually to fall back on.
One structural fix worth genuine consideration: redirecting the childcare subsidy, currently paid directly to childcare centres, to families instead, to use as they see fit, a centre, a relative, or as household income while one parent stays home. And a house rule worth adopting broadly: whoever isn’t earning an income while raising children should never have to ask permission to buy new clothes or see a doctor. Various back-of-envelope calculations of the market value of full-time unpaid domestic and childcare labour land somewhere in the vicinity of a quarter of a million dollars a year once every task, cooking, cleaning, bookkeeping, logistics, animal care on a farm, is properly costed out. That’s not a number to feel guilty about. It’s a number that should change how the work is valued and protected.
The debate over legal definitions of “woman”
This one’s genuinely contested territory, and it was discussed on the podcast following renewed debate sparked by the Giggle vs Tickle case and commentary from Pauline Hanson about legal definitions of sex. The view expressed on the show: biological women deserve women-only spaces, and a woman objecting to sharing that space shouldn’t be overridden to accommodate someone else, while also holding that transgender people deserve dignity, safety, and community spaces of their own free from bigotry. The two positions were treated as not always identical rather than interchangeable, a distinction that gets lost in a lot of the online shouting on this topic.
It’s a debate where reasonable people land in genuinely different places, and where the loudest voices on either extreme rarely represent the majority who just want workable, respectful solutions. The hosts were explicit on one point regardless of where listeners sit: no hate, on any side of this discussion, will be tolerated in the show’s community.
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