Let’s get this out of the way first. The one-minute video of Australia’s new Ambassador for Gender Equality, Stephanie Copus Campbell, should never have been posted on social media. Or anywhere for that matter.

Viewed more than 6 million times, it has provoked some of Twitter’s most savage trolls and nasty misogynists, including Donald Trump Jr and Fox News. Vile responses to her introductory video attacked the way Copus Campbell looked: “a woman possessed by a demon. Creepy as hell” … “nothing but evil in those eyes” … “Meth-head” … Beyond the personal, these mostly unprintable posts scream hatred for supposedly “woke feminism”. There was a warning to Aussie blokes that they’re “about to be thrown in the gulags for being a man”… “what a crock of shit” … “why an ambassador for gender equality?” … “does the new Aust Ambassador want women to have penises?”

You get the drift?

Posted by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the video has attracted more public attention than all the words uttered by the previous five gender ambassadors over the past 12 years. Yes, Copus Campbell is the sixth ambassador in this role. Who knew? She is only the second to dare use “gender equality” in the title. Earlier, it was the less contentious “Ambassador for Women and Girls”.

I am not suggesting for a moment that Copus Campbell shouldn’t say what she is saying about gender equity and her ambitions in this role to the press the United Nations’ Women, Peace and Security agenda on behalf of Australia. She is eminently qualified to be Australia’s lead advocate for gender equality. Given its depressingly parlous state here and in our region, we need her voice now more than ever.

Just not like this. Not staring down the barrel of a camera, after some media nob told her not to blink. And not with such an ill-produced string of sentences that buried the valid message even before the tsunami of misogynistic interpretation and anti-feminist backlash.

By her own admission, Copus Campbell had turned up like the proverbial lamb to the slaughter. Clearly a trooper, she told the ABC’s Patricia Karvelas on Wednesday that the video recording “was one of the first experiences I’ve had in the studio”.

It’s a simple, albeit harsh media reality: play to your strengths. Video presentation is not one of Copus Campbell’s. Not yet. The grown-ups in the room should have said so. But so belted around the ears by years of government bullying, it seems public service minions caught up in the Canberra bubble still can’t shed their fear of giving frank advice. When some aspiring mandarin comes up with a foolish idea, or bad execution of a good idea, they need to be told. Bluntly.

Who can forget the insanely stupid Milkshake metaphor used in a bizarre video to teach teens about sexual consent? Or the phallic logo that then prime minister Scott Morrison’s department came up with in early 2022 for the “Women’s Network”. What is wrong with these public service media marketeers and communications lackeys?

Whimpering advice aside, there is a much bigger problem here. One of DFAT’s own making. For the past decade, Australia’s National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security, effectively the gender ambassador’s job plan, has stayed mostly hidden from view. Back in 2019, when News Corp took a few swipes, suggesting the government’s “politically correct agenda” and “feminist theory” was turning the “brave men” of Australia’s defence forces into “social justice warriors”, the government ducked for cover. Rather than explain why women must be part of the peace and security process, the then foreign affairs minister, Marise Payne, stayed typically silent.

Gender diversity and the inherent value of equity and inclusion are hard for some people to understand. Or trust. What they don’t get makes them fret. Much of the backlash against women around the globe is driven by paranoid patriarchy and a collapse in masculine identity. Where confusion reigns, fearmongering misogynists prosper.

Copus Campbell is dead right when she says gender equality is “central to Australia’s diplomatic … and regional security”. As pointed out by leading gender expert Louise Allen, ample research has “provided evidence that gender equality and the status of women are together the most reliable indicator of conflict prevention”.

Ripe opportunities to educate media and prime the public to be “gender literate” have been missed. Women’s anger, the March4Justice and the national reckoning of 2021 called on government to step up. It didn’t. Not then. But now?

The appointment of Stephanie Copus Campbell sends a strong signal that the current government is steadfast about shifting the dial. She is tough. And resolute.

I suspect, as soon as she gets the screech of social media out of her ears, she will turbo-charge the gender equity conversations we have to have. One thing’s for sure. She’s an ace at staring down a challenge.

Virginia Haussegger is a Canberra journalist and gender equity advocate.

This Opinion Editorial was first published in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age 2023, 16 Feb (online) 17 Feb (print