Tony Abbott's superpower? Feeling no shame

This forensically appropriate insight has come to me as in recent days the 10th anniversary of Julia Gillard's justly-famous "misogyny" speech has all thinking Australians discussing that famous harangue.

On to my Supervillainy theme in just a moment.

First though to my feeling (reinforced this week by the homework of watching the harangue again and again on YouTube) that even though the speech is now characterised as a goosebump-raising storm of righteous feminist fury, in fact Gillard's words and delivery are relatively, disappointingly civil.

Yes, there is some bracing contempt and loathing manifested in her performance and in the words volleyed across the table of the House of Reps at Tony Abbott. When she accuses him of "repulsive double standards" it's clear that it's Abbott himself that she, understandably, finds repulsive.

And yet there is not nearly as much contempt and loathing as the contemptible and loathsome target of her diluted fury surely deserved.

His sexist-misogynist sins against her, revisited a great deal in recent days, were considerable. For example, he had aligned himself, rubbing shoulders with them on parliament's lawns, with sub-human creature-demonstrators calling her a "witch" and "Bob Brown's bitch", crimes Gillard deplored in her speech.

I attended one of those rallies, horrified by its angry zombies, marvelling at how Abbott seemed in his element among them.

And so in the misogyny speech, Abbott richly deserved from Gillard (to borrow the useful Beaufort Scale of wind strengths) a Force 10 (Beaufort calls it "a full Storm, capable of uprooting small trees"). Instead Gillard's speech is only a Force 6 (for Beaufort "a Strong Breeze capable of creating an audible whistling in telegraph wires").

And in any case Gillard surely knew that a storm of shame was of no avail against a villain with the superpower of shamelessness. Watching the occasion, you can see her speech's shamestones ricocheting harmlessly off him, like small hailstones ricocheting off a concrete public lavatory block.

Journalists reported, as cliche-prone journalists do, that Gillard's speech delivered a "blistering attack" against Abbott but you can see Abbott isn't being the slightest bit blistered and withered by it all. He should be. But he isn't.

Carried-away admirers of Gillard and of her speech imagine the speech was delivered by her in a spontaneous gale of incandescent rage, the gods (all of them on her side) granting her a supernatural eloquence.

But it wasn't like that.

Instead the whole wonderful haranque shows some considerable elements of preparation. There is a careful cataloguing of vile Abbott quotes and Abbott deeds so as to successfully show him to be an irredeemable male sexist pig and hypocrite.

And in the harangue's delivery there are even hints of conscious theatricality. It is a performance, but only in the admirable sense that Laurence Olivier's 'Saint Crispin's Day' speech from Shakespeare's Henry V ("We few. We happy few. We band of brothers!") is a performance.

In the very week in which the "misogyny" speech's big anniversary was on all supple minds there came the exciting news that the Canberra Theatre Centre and the Sydney Theatre Company will stage a new play about Gillard's "untold story" and of course featuring the "misogyny" imbroglio. Joanna Murray-Smith's imaginatively titled play, Julia, will open on March 18 next year.

I am a consultant to the production and am urging Joanna to put aside dull reality and historical truth (who needs them?) and, as Shakespeare so often does with his plays, to use lashings of magic.

In particular I am urging that we use CGI special effects that create the exciting visual illusion that as in the parliament Julia rages at Abbott about his sexism and misogyny, her withering words really do literally (and quite rightly) gradually wither him until all that is left of him is a small pile of desiccated, misogynist sawdust.

Rapture!

An ending like that would make the play's Gillard seem a superheroine Wonderwoman in these times when we all need more Wonder in our lives.

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