The context of the conversation was this: on the ABC’s Q&A panel were three members of parliament, including Australia’s attorney general, George Brandis. A young man in the audience revealed that his sister had been murdered by her male parter in the most gruesome way.

He said:

Sam Newman has courted controversy yet again for defending Eddie Maguire for making a joke about drowning Caroline Wilson. I work as an ambassador for Our Watch, White Ribbon, and the Safe Steps family violence response centre. My sister Nikita was stabbed to death by her partner in January last year, with a meat cleaver. She was 23. Male violence is a leading cause of death and disability of women under 45 in Australia. How will politicians and the media play a better role in bringing about long-overdue cultural shifts, so tragedies like what happened to my family are not normalised?

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In Australia, where a woman is murdered by her intimate partner every week, it’s a question that speaks to a crisis that has taken too long to arrive into the national consciousness. For the young man, Tarang Chawla, who since his sister’s brutal death has become a survivor advocate, it’s a devastating reality.

But for Steve Price, a 2GB broadcaster who gets regular gigs on Channel 10’s The Project, and who had first crack at the answer, it was an opportunity to ignore the reality of that young man, his murdered sister, and the undeniable culture of misogyny that normalises mistreatment of women.

With no acknowledgement of the horrific crime of which he’d just been made aware, he instead launched into excuses for his friends, disgraced sports entertainers Eddie Maguire and Sam Newman.

The need for a cultural shift in gendered attitudes has been spoken of very loudly since Maguire’s joke on radio that female sports commentator Caroline Wilson should be drowned. Maguire took his time to apologise and was defended by Newman, who on television declared Wilson “an embarrassment” and those who stood up for her as “cowardly excrement”. For Price on Q&A, the kind of hateful behaviour to a female colleague that has directly resulted in Newman losing $2m of Nissan sponsorship from The Footy Show was just “a bunch of blokes laughing about something they shouldn’t have laughed about” and “far too much was then made of it”.

Readers, forgive my lack of eloquence today, but I heard Chawla’s story, was sat next to Steve Price on that Q&A panel and was the next to speak. And struggling to comprehend how any human being could hear a man speak of his sister’s death and launch into a defence of Eddie freakin’ Maguire, I tried to both show due respect to Chawla as well as make the point that politicians and the media have to make structural changes to address that women are mistreated.

I hope I was able to do the first. Steve Price certainly prevented me from doing the second, and I am still reeling from it. The attorney general, George Brandis, was on the panel and I wanted to challenge his government’s destructive and disastrous $34m cut to the funding of community legal centres – a front line for women fleeing violent situations. Instead, Steve Price interrupted with, “Just because you’re a woman doesn’t mean you’re the only person who can get upset about this.”

I wanted to explain how women fleeing violence with their children need up to seven court orders to establish their legal protections, and how the funding shortfall of legal centres that amounts to $100m over four years abandons those women when they need legal help the most. I wanted to communicate that the imprimatur of government and proper resourcing agencies that protect women is a powerful message to the culture in itself.

But Price would not let me speak. “Men can be just as upset about these things,” he interrupted again.

So there we were on Q&A with an all-too-rare opportunity to challenge a powerful politician on a policy with dire real-world implications for women trying to flee violence and Steve Price was making the discussion all about himself, his feelings, his concern that just because he was making excuses for Newman and Maguire, he might be “tarred with the same brush”.

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“You’re proving my point,” I said.

And then he called me “hysterical”.

I had a comeback (“it’s probably my ovaries making me do it, Steve”), but that’s far from the point. The context of the conversation was the young man, his murdered sister, and a culture that needs to shift its attitudes on gender – because real-world violence against women by men is rendered unexceptional and unimportant when the subject is considered so trivial it can be joked about in banter on a sports show, and then excused in commentary around it.

This is what Chawla means by “normalisation”.

If structures of power and influence like the media convey that it’s OK to speak over women and interrupt them, to hold them responsible for your own feelings, to pay no heed to the reality and consequences of female suffering and write off a woman’s contribution to debate – not with engagement of content but a single reductive gendered insult – then the old culture of woman hating is going nowhere.

