When acting opposition leader Chris Bowen quipped this week that there were now more women in Afghanistan's cabinet than Australia's, he must have known the line would stick. In fact, it seems to have inspired an entire genre of commentary. Witness Steph Harmon's viral post on Junkee listing "Things That Have More Women In Them Than Tony Abbott's Cabinet": Zoo Weekly's staff meeting; the Saudi Arabia Olympics Team; the Iranian cabinet; Tony Abbott's immediate family. And on it goes. One bright spark on Twitter pointed out that Julia Gillard's first cabinet had more prime ministers than Abbott's has women.

It's funny. It's sharp. It's a point amusingly and efficiently made. That is until you stop and think about it. Beyond the clear rhetorical effect, what actually is the point? That this cabinet is embarrassingly male? Sure. But then what? What precise conclusion about this is being urged upon us?

Illustration: Andrew Dyson.

I suspect the conclusion is all about Tony Abbott. This, you sense, is the anti-Abbott sector's smoking gun, the evidence that proves his sexism once and for all. "He simply cannot accept women as equals and can only relate to them … as wives, mothers and daughters," declares Tim Dunlop in The Drum, neatly capturing this approach. I very much doubt Bowen is suggesting women's interests are less represented in Australia than in Afghanistan. But I have little doubt he's prodding us to wonder whether Abbott would change that if he had his way. The point is to present Abbott as the ultimate regressive: the misogynist homophobe from yesteryear trying desperately to drag us back to some darker age. That's why Labor is so keen to point out that Abbott's is the first cabinet without a dedicated science minister since 1931.

This brand of argument is pointless for at least two reasons. First, it has been thoroughly agitated by Abbott's foes for years now. A couple of weeks ago the nation either rejected it as untrue or deemed it an irrelevance. That Abbott has kept his male-dominated shadow cabinet largely in place - pretty much as he said he would - is unlikely to cause Australians to revise their judgment wildly.