The right’s outrage over Anthony Albanese Tourettes gaffe is pathetic | Caleb Bond

We’re meant to be the ones who stand up against political correctness and the incessant policing of language, writes Caleb Bond.

Federal politics can be utterly deranged at times.

Oh, heck – can I write that anymore?

Political correctness is constantly sanitising language and designating hitherto innocuous words and phrases as offensive.

Case in point is that Wattle Range Council this week considered whether to rename Chinamans Lane (at least, in that case, sense prevailed).

And the Prime Minister discovered on Tuesday just how far this has gone when, in Question Time, he asked a fidgeting Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor whether he had Tourette’s.

The comment immediately drew laughter from both sides of the House and Anthony Albanese withdrew it almost as soon as he had said it.

I thought it had a bit more zing than when he called Peter Dutton a boofhead in 2021.

But it is 2024 so the mere mention of a neurological disorder as an insult caused outrage.

Except that, curiously, the outrage mostly came from the Coalition and others on the conservative side of politics.

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We’re meant to be the ones who stand up against political correctness and the incessant policing of language.

It shouldn’t matter whether it comes out of the mouth of your ideological friend or enemy.

You can fairly point out that many on Labor’s side would be aggrieved if a member of the Coalition said it and that the Left ought to play by the rules they set.

But the earnest outrage, as though the PM dropping a mild taunt in Question Time made him a bona fide hater of people with disabilities (you can’t say “disabled people” anymore), was pathetic.

Mr Albanese meant no harm to anyone with Tourette’s syndrome and everyone knows it.

Meanwhile, the very next day on ABC Radio National, breakfast host Patricia Karvelas issued an apology for a guest referring to European policy as “schizophrenic” – a term she then repeated.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra this week. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The ABC switchboard clearly lit up with indignant Radio National listeners.

All five of them, anyway.

We all know what was meant by schizophrenic – that certain policy was all over the place – and it was clearly no slight on people with schizophrenia but that’s the world in which we now live.

The PM’s incident reminded me of when the SA Liberals joined with the Greens to attack Peter Malinauskas for using the phrase “sloppy seconds”.

Despite my ideological inclinations being rather obvious to regular readers, I defended Mr Malinauskas for that in these pages – and, two years later, I am defending Mr Albanese for receiving the same ridiculous treatment.

Those who decry political correctness are no better than their opponents when they attack them over harmless language.

But Mr Albanese dragged himself back into the House later on Tuesday to issue a second solemn apology for his “unkind and hurtful” remark.

On the same day – the first sitting day after the first anniversary of Hamas’ October 7 terror attack in Israel, the single biggest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust – the PM failed to secure bipartisan support for a motion marking the day because he insisted on including a call for ceasefire and recognition of Palestinian deaths.

It should simply have been an acknowledgment of a terror attack, not a statement on the war it caused.

But it was the use of the word “Tourette’s” and not the blatant co-opting of a terror attack for political purposes for which the Prime Minister felt compelled to apologise on Tuesday.

What does that tell you about the state of our political discourse?