What to do when Parliament's gaslights start to dim?

Insulting, or mildly endearing? It seemed politicians back then were unsure.

No Australian politician now would be fool enough to utter such sexisms. These days there are other ways to keep women in their place, to hold them to the margins.

What's needed is a lexicon on power which offers good results but leaves far less of a vapour trail - sexism with plausible deniability.

Welcome to the world of gaslighting.

There is a gripping moment in the 1944 film Gaslight when Ingrid Bergman, playing newlywed Paula, contorts with the realisation, then horror, that she may in fact be going insane. Her eyes dart and grow wild. She heaves.

As she buckles, Paula's tormenting husband, played by the dashing Charles Boyer, grows in stature: a portrait of calm control and unrivalled authority.

He has slowly strangled her sanity, convincing her to trust his judgment over hers. Those dimming gaslights around the house? They're all in her mind. Proof she has lost her grip on reality.

Paula's efforts to alert others are shut down. She is not allowed to speak. Her manipulative husband tells the outside world his wife is unwell. She is suffering emotional exhaustion, which has affected her mind, and she needs to rest.

You've heard the one about life imitating art?

Spool forward almost 75 years to a 2018 press conference held by the newly minted Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, talking about the member for Chisholm, Julia Banks.

Fed up with intimidation and bullying within the Liberal Party, Banks had just released a statement saying she would not recontest the next election.

While Morrison may have been a gaslighter from way back, it's here we first see some eerie Charles Boyer-like parallels in public.

"What is important right now is Julia's welfare," he says with furrowed brow, looking every bit the concerned gent from central casting, worried about a woman who has lost her way.

"My first concern is for her welfare and wellbeing, and she is taking the time to ensure that that is taken care of."

Clever words, thick with morse code about mental health. Like most people listening, I assumed Banks had suffered some kind of breakdown.

"So what am I doing right now? I'm supporting Julia and reaching out to Julia and giving her every comfort and support for what has been a pretty torrid ordeal for her."

The "ordeal" to which he is referring was the palace coup that ousted Malcolm Turnbull and installed Morrison, supposedly as an innocent recruit. It was more his "ordeal" than hers.

But we now know, thanks to Banks's revelations in her book Power Play, that he hounded her to stay silent while he got busy oiling the spin around her departure. Morrison is masterful at this.

For Julia Banks, at that moment, watching Morrison go on TV and publicly gaslight her flicked a switch - to anger. It was "just this whole entrenched, anti-woman culture", she says.

Ironically, Banks' rage was prescient: worse was to come. That was back in 2018, when the government's "scourge of cultural and gender bias, bullying and intimidation of women in Parliament" began attracting international headlines.

Liberal women were beginning to wail. Morrison had to shut them down. And he did.

Ingrid Bergman's panicked eyes in Gaslight were nothing compared to the look of terror on Senator Linda Reynolds' face as she tried to wind back her bullying complaints, saying it was in fact an issue for the party to deal with behind closed doors. Another senator, Lucy Gichuhi, had also promised to "name names", then suddenly went silent.

The following International Women's Day, at a Chamber of Minerals and Energy event in WA, Morrison reminded the men in the room where he stood: "We want to see women rise, but we don't want to see women rise only on the basis of others doing worse."

More morse code: I've got your back, boys.

This is where Morrison's deeply embedded sexism is way more covert and rat cunning than the sloppy sexism of former prime minister Tony Abbott.

Where Abbott really did want the women of Australia to be apron-clad and ironing-board proud, Morrison wouldn't dare mention the laundry. He's too smart. He sticks with code. Or when he feels a feminist rumble, he flicks on the gas.

Morrison's repetition of the name "Brittany", without any courtesy reference to a title (Ms Higgins, or even Miss), ensures the former government staffer remains framed as a mere girl.

Drunk and out of place. An aberration in this grown-up place of politics. So much so that he needs his wife Jen to "clarify" why he should pay her story any attention.

To suggest Morrison's handling of Brittany Higgins and the cultural grime her powerful case has exposed was simply "patronising" is seriously underplaying his talent for misogynist signalling.

In a rare lapse, Morrison dropped the ball during a later press conference when he hurled faintly veiled taunts at a journalist over harassment allegations within News Corp. He'd got it wrong, and later apologised.

But given that was just a week or so after the huge March 4 Justice rallies that blew open a minefield of anguished grievances about Australia's treatment of women, Morrison was clearly signalling that he didn't buy it. He was ready to punch back.

His refusal to address the Canberra rally, instead essentially telling Parliament that those who attended were lucky they weren't shot, wasn't just dim-witted fumbling. It was Morrison drawing a line in the sand.

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In setting up an all-women "kitchen cabinet", tasking the ladies to sort it all out, he's doing what Morrison does with sly stealth - abrogating responsibility and removing himself from any accountability. Worse, he's applying a 1950s model to a complex, whole-of-government, 21st-century problem.

Now, out of politics and with the safety of distance and reflection, Julia Banks says she has worked Scott Morrison out.

"I think he is a visceral sexist", she says.

"It's a form of workplace coercive control over women. He is a man who uses his power over a woman," she adds, acknowledging how she too fell for it.

"The gaslighting approach is part of his toolkit."

Women in the federal government exist on the margins. Not only are they a visual and vocal minority, but they carry minimal influence or clout. No Liberal woman has ever been a serious leadership contender, with the publicly popular Julie Bishop scrounging just 10 votes in the 2018 leadership contest (and only one of those from another woman - Banks).

Coming from so far behind, and accustomed to being on the outer - to being the "exception" - women fall easy prey to gaslighting.

Given that all women have internalised some level of sexism and misogyny, we tend to nurture our own powerlessness like a personal pet. When reminded of one's inferior status, by a prime minister speaking in capital letters - "Julia, I am the Prime Minister!" - is it any wonder that in a moment of siege Banks backed off - albeit for 24 hours - and gave him what he wanted?

Like Bergman's Paula in Gaslight's happy ending, Banks is now basking in her truth finally being shared, once the dimmer switch has been discovered.

The bigger task for Australian women is to find collective breath - to blow out the gas.