Destroy The Joint

[3] On August 31, 2012 Alan Jones stated, "She [the Prime Minister] said that we know societies only reach their full potential if women are politically participating.

This was not the first time that the broadcaster had used inflammatory language when discussing Julia Gillard on his radio show; in 2011 Jones stated that the then Prime Minister "should be thrown in the sea in a chaff bag", for which he was referred to the industry watchdog.

[6] Eventually the press began to report on Gillard's appearance and criticised her for taste in clothes, haircut, weight, figure and her status as an unmarried and childless woman.

[8] After seeing the comments made by Jones on 31 August 2012, Jane Caro tweeted "Got time on my hands tonight so thought I'd come up with new ways to destroy the joint" in response.

[9] In doing so, she sparked the hashtag #DestroyTheJoint, first created by Jill Tomlinson as a satirical response to Jones' and Barnaby Joyce's comments on women in politics.

[9] Destroy The Joint is said to have revitalised feminism in a new medium which is interactive and gives a platform for women to engage in activism in a creative way, which is broad yet unifying.

[9] Destroy The Joint was initially a response to the criticism that Julia Gillard received but then grew to be a collective which focused on contemporary feminist issues in Australia.

[1] After the "died of shame" controversy in 2012, Destroy The Joint contributed over 110,000 signatures to an online petition[9] and embarked on a letter writing campaign in order to push businesses to pull their advertisements from Alan Jones' radio time slot,[12] which ended up costing 2GB $80,000 per day.

Destroy the Joint began pushing for a change to the Telecommunications Act 1997 so that those fleeing domestic violence situations can have a silent phone number at no additional cost.

This set a precedent for all survivors of domestic violence suffering financial hardship to have the silent number fee waived on a case-by-case basis.

[15] The same weekend Destroy The Joint had asked for responses to the hashtag #beingawoman; however, when they received responses from disability activists sharing their experiences of being disabled women, they deleted them, stating that the comments were “repetitive, circular and off topic”, and eventually banned these women from the Facebook page, stating that they were "spamming this post and page with a large number of obvious half truths and distortions".

Following several comments by members of the group and disability activists, Destroy The Joint issued an apology stating that they would unban the women they had banned, review their processes and look to being more inclusive in their activism and that they were committed to "honor victims of gendered violence".