Australians living in the United States are accustomed to their American friends passing along “news” from back home about dingoes and crocodiles. Australia’s a long way away, after all. But this morning, something weirdly substantial made the rounds: a fifteen-minute clip of Australian parliamentary proceedings in which Australia’s first woman Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, calls the leader of the opposition, Tony Abbott, a misogynist, and does so with genuine anger. “I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man,” Gillard said in her opening. “If he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn’t need a motion in the House of Representatives, he needs a mirror.”

The occasion of Gillard’s speech, and of Abbott’s motion, was a gem of the gaffe-driven news cycle that American and Australian politics share: the Speaker of the House, a man by the Dickensian name of Slipper, sent texts to a staffer in which he compared female genitalia to a particular kind of shellfish and described a party colleague, seemingly with auto-correct turned on, as an “ignorant botch.” He’s been sued for sexual harassment.

Slipper had formerly been of Abbott’s party, but had left in the wake of an earlier scandal, in effect joining Gillard’s razor-thin majority coalition. Abbott’s motion demanded that Slipper be fired “immediately”—not parliamentary procedure—because the texts were “vile” and “derogatory.” They are, but it doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch to say that Abbott was more concerned with getting rid of a man whom he had once described as a personal friend and who had become an embarrassment, as well as with chipping away at Gillard’s majority. And Abbott’s past statements on women in public office left him wide open to the charge of opportunism.

Gillard cited a few examples in her speech, such as the time, in 1998, when Abbott answered a magazine’s question about the lack of women in parliament with a question of his own: “What if men are by physiology or temperament more adapted to exercise authority or to issue command?” Or when he suggested in parliament that Gillard should “make an honest woman of herself.” (That Gillard is unmarried and does not have children has long been a source of outrage for her opponents, one of whom described her as “barren.”) It’s not just Gillard who has faced Abbott’s demanding standards: in 2004 he described abortion as “the easy way out,” and as Australia debated the introduction of a carbon tax, Abbott directed his appeal against the proposal to “the housewives of Australia, as they do the ironing.” Abbott has not denounced others who have called Gillard “a man’s bitch” and a “witch”—in fact, he’s been photographed standing next to them, outside of Parliament House in Canberra. Gillard, of course, has her own strategic interests here as well—to keep Slipper on her party’s side—but in the process she got everyone talking about something much more important.

“I was very personally offended by those comments,” said Gillard in parliament on Monday, and her voice cracked a little. Abbott’s agitation against mollusc-related sexism came a week after reports of a preposterously offensive remark against Gillard’s father was made at a fund-raiser for Abbott’s party. Australia’s version of Rush Limbaugh, Alan Jones, said that Gillard’s father, who had died a week before, must have “died of shame” at his daughter’s policies. The remark didn’t even make the papers until a couple of days later; there had been no apparent outrage from anyone who attended the event. Abbott, who wasn’t present, did eventually say that Jones was “out of line.” (We haven’t heard such a blistering condemnation since Mitt Romney conceded after Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a “slut” that it was “not the language I would have used.”) Abbott then proceeded to use the same language when calling for Gillard to fire Slipper, describing it as “another day of shame for a government that has already died of shame.”

Abbott’s wife, Margie, gave a speech this past weekend that was seen widely as damage control for the Jones debacle. She said that she was not political, “but just don’t ever try and tell me that my husband of twenty-four years and father of three daughters is on some anti-woman crusade. It’s simply not true.” (In an interview published on the same day, she added that he even loves “Downton Abbey.”) But the fact is that Abbott speaks for a relentless gang of Australians who seem very angry at Gillard, in a bizarrely disproportionate and unpleasant way that suggests the real problem might simply be that she is running the country. Their hatred—comprehensively documented by the Australian writer Anne Summers in a speech given at the University of Newcastle in August—seemed to reach fever pitch around her introduction of the carbon tax this year. Yes, Gillard had introduced the carbon tax despite a promise she made in an election campaign, but—as Summers demonstrates through an ascending series of uglier YouTube clips and protest signs, many featuring explicit pornographic images and the popular nickname “Ju-liar” (first coined by Alan Jones)—what started as a legitimate political disagreement has become deeply personal in nature.

So why is this among the most-shared videos by my American friends today? Purely as political theatre, it’s great fun. Americans used to flipping past the droning on in empty chambers that passes for legislative debate in this country are always taken in by the rowdiness of parliamentary skirmish. It could also be that the political dynamic depicted in the clip parallels the situation in the States: a chief executive who is a “first” took power after a long period of control from the right of center, and whose signature policy achievements have at times been overshadowed by personal vitriol. Or perhaps it’s that we are right now in one of the rare periods every four years where the American political process provides actual face-to-face debate between the leaders of the two parties. After his performance last week, supporters of President Obama, watching Gillard cut through the disingenuousness and feigned moral outrage of her opponent to call him out for his own personal prejudice, hypocrisy, and aversion to facts, might be wishing their man would take a lesson from Australia.

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