The real sexists come to the defence of the incompetent Christine Nixon

When fools attack you for what you didn’t say, you know they can’t rebut what you in fact did. Take Claire Harvey, who claims that my objection to Police Commissioner Christine Nixon’s desertion of her post during the deadly Black Saturday fires, when she first hid in her office doing paperwork, and then left for dinner after being told lives were in mortal danger, is due to her being a “girl”: Melbourne Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt saw Nixon’s strife as the police’s comeuppance for sending a girl to do a man’s job. Actually, Harvey’s piece does reveal sexism at play here. If Nixon were male, would her extraordinary failure to fulfill her statutory responsibility to lead the bushfire fight that night have been defended by Harvey, former Premier Joan Kirner, The Age or Age writers? Yes indeed, no man would have so many influential people lining up to try and make excuses for him being incapable of doing his job. No, these people would be lining up to crucify him in the court of public opinion. You can read Bolt's full post here, but get a load of this! The dinner debacle is not some aberration, not a once-in-a-lifetime blunder. It is entirely in character. Nixon was never a lead-from-the-front police chief. She is a Harvard-trained MBA chief executive who relies heavily on committees and advisers. Policy and networking are her strong points. Practical, hands-on crisis management is not. When appointed chief commissioner in 2001 after 28 years in the NSW Police Force, she had only three years’ experience as a regional commander. The government decided her management skills and outsider’s perspective outweighed her operational weaknesses. Nixon was smart enough to know her limitations and chose to delegate to those she believed could deal with specific problems. That's Sunday Age crime writer John Silvester trying to defend Nixon's dereliction of duty and incompetence by effectively saying she "never was good at policing anyway!" Then why the hell was she made chief commissioner in the first place? This is extraordinary. The Victorian Labor government must be held to account for the appointment of a person so unqualified to do one of the most important jobs in the state. But read the rest of Andrew's post - it is utterly damning.

Posted via email from Garth's posterous