Australian PM subject of tacky sexist menu

A high-profile Australian political candidate apologised on Wednesday for a menu at one of his fundraisers featuring a quail dish named after Prime Minister Julia Gillard which had "small breasts" and "huge thighs". Former government minister Mal Brough, now an opposition Liberal National Party candidate at national elections in September, said it was devised by a non-party member who thought it would be "humourous". Brough told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation he had not seen nor approved the menu and was "deeply apologetic". The menu for the event in March offered a dish called "Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail: Small Breasts and Huge Thighs and A Big Red Box". It emerged on Twitter a day after Gillard, whose comments on misogyny last year won her global acclaim, reignited the gender war with a speech in which she said the conservative opposition would marginalise women if they won the upcoming election. Gillard, the nation's first female leader, warned that government would be dominated by "men in blue ties" should Tony Abbott win the September 14 vote as opinion polls are predicting. "On that day, 14 September, we are going to make a big decision as a nation," she told the launch of Labor group "Women for Gillard". "It's a decision about whether, once again, we will banish women's voice from the core of our political life. "We don't want to live in an Australia where abortion again becomes the political plaything of men who think they know better," she added. The opposition has called the comments a "crude political ploy from a desperate PM leading a bitterly divided party" and demanded an apology. But opposition leader Abbott, and the Liberal National Party, condemned the menu. "I think we should all be bigger and better than that; whether it's a tacky, scatological menu out the front of a Liberal Party event, whether it's squalid jokes told at union conference dinners with ministers present," Abbott said. "Whatever it is, I think we should be better than that. I think we should be appealing to every Australian's best self as we go into this election."