Dirty tricks on Animal Farm
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday October 13, 2012
Section: Opinion

I am seriously considering becoming a donkey voter at the next Federal election. Really. The political animal in me is so disenchanted by the reprehensible goings-on in Canberra the past week (actually, make that the past two years) I am prepared to be a voter’s ass. Because I can’t trust any of them anymore and they clearly don’t care about me. Me: taxpayer, woman, wife, mother, daughter – someone who is fervently patriotic but can no longer abide this sordid sty we called Australian politics.

Fancy giving a disreputable candidate the one job that requires unimpeachable integrity? As Speaker, he was required to uphold the standards of Parliament and yet plied his staffer with his catalogue of filthy text messages, denigrating everything from his Liberal colleagues to the particulars of the female anatomy.

What I saw this week, while trying to keep tabs on the news over the racket of children on school holidays, was a female Prime Minister and her male opponent trying to pulverize each other on the unwinnable issue of gender politics. It didn’t make either of them more likeable, and it didn’t make their lust for power any less transparent. Frankly, a plague on both their houses.

Politicians might love hurling tit-for-tat verbal grenades, but I think they’ve failed to notice that I, for one, might like them a whole lot more if they stuck to governing. I’d like more policy debate and less hateful personal abuse. I have enough chaos at home, thank you, without seeing my Parliament descend into farce and hypocrisy for an entire week.

Scandals blacken everyone who participates in them. On the vexacious subject of misogyny, politicians should be more careful about who throws the first stone. As I see it, neither the Prime Minister nor the Opposition Leader is in any position to claim the moral high ground:  Julia Gillard can’t, because she let the blatantly chauvinist Speaker slip through the noose while trying to send Tony Abbott to the gallows for the same crime. The Opposition leader can’t claim any moral plaudits either, because his history of gender-charged political jibes shows questionable judgment at best.

While I don’t like my politicians hypocritical or bloodthirsty, I do like them quick witted and penetrating: I think of Paul Keating’s put-downs with shameful delight. He of the sharp suit, the sharp one-liner, sharp-eared, sharp-eyed and sharp-fanged. The one time Prime Minister who called Andrew Peacock a ‘painted, perfumed gigolo’, who declared Peter Costello was ‘all tip and no iceberg’ and who considered going head to head with John Hewson was ‘like being flogged with a warm lettuce.’

Yes, I know he descended into caustic abuse too, but corrosive as he was, love him or detest him, he was entertaining to watch. I don’t get quite the same pleasure from today’s crop of politicians trying to claw each other loose from the greasy pole of power. In fact, the older I get, the less pleasure I get from politics full stop. The unrelenting hatreds, the back-stabbing, the wolfish cunning, the dishonesty, lies and manipulations. And all designed to win us over.

In my student days, I thought of politics as an honorable profession, the kind of career that must only attract those with the fire in their belly for progress and change, and a sensitive moral antenna for social and economic injustice. I used to wander past the podiums on the lawns at University (usually on the way to the tavern) and admire the speakers for their guts and gumption.

Now, from an age of (supposed) maturity all I see is my parliamentary representatives’ obsession with each other, not the business of government. And here I am at home with the telly on, and every news story from the national capital is brimming with foul language and vituperation. I have made a point of trying to teach my boys not to use language as a weapon, and to respect beliefs different to their own. Yet I am cooking dinner with the air turning blue from the 6 o’clock news. I also don’t want my daughter to grow up thinking she’s got a get-out-of-jail-free card just because she’s female. I turn the telly off to protect my childrens’ ears (and my idealism.)

Meanwhile, lurking backstage around the Parliamentary theatre, the desperate puppet-masters are thinking of new ways to butter us up for an election: Julia Gillard, in a recent interview, saying of her partner Tim Mathieson: ‘Tim is often the only bloke [among the spouses at events]. Fortunately, after a lifetime in hairdressing, he’s used to hanging around with a lot of women. He can dispense hairdressing advice at the same time.’ Then Margaret Abbott getting up on the podium herself to defend her husband, while the spin doctors pace the floor back in the office, hoping she lays it on so thick Tony Abbott will look like the icing on the conservative cake: ‘Just don’t ever try and tell me that my husband of twenty-four years and father of three daughters is on some anti-woman crusade. It’s simply not true.” (In an interview published on the same day, she added that he even loves Downton Abbey.)

Both Margaret Abbott and Julia Gillard can colour-in the perfect post card of domestic equality and spousal harmony. That’s called standing by your man. Fair enough. But it’s also a pitch for the female vote from both sides – for women who would still like a reason to embrace their first female Prime Minister, and for those who need reassurance of Abbott’s soft spot for Margaret and his daughters and women in general. All I see is a cynical ploy to play the gender card. Am I too jaded?

For my mother, in her 70’s and very observant of the political landscape, it’s been the worst show the democratic process has to offer. ‘Appalling behaviour’ she texted me, ‘the standard of politics is degrading our country.’ From my 50-something bachelor neighbour:  They’re all a bunch of idiots, and we yet we still have to find one to vote for.’ And from a girlfriend who has worked on the sidelines of politics: ‘The person I feel most sorry for is Mrs Slipper. And his children.’

But Australian politics have always been laced with a dollop of poison. The conniving leadership battles between Rudd and Gillard, Keating’s insidious campaign to unseat Bob Hawke, Robert Menzies referring in diaries to Liberal Prime Minister Billy McMahon as ‘a contemptible little squirt’ – the language may be less offensive, but the venom is the same.

What’s new then about this week’s political rivalry? Plenty. Because this is the week I lost faith in my Parliament. And I suspect we’ll all be at the polls before we know it, having to decide the winners from the losers, painfully aware that our preference is no guarantee of good government. Perhaps I’ll be cheeky and stand in the ballot box with my blunt pencil and stab a few professional politicians. Maybe it will give them the jab they need to rediscover their dignity.