David Penberthy: Mediocre candidates have sucked the life from major parties

Be it Pauline Hanson and her NRA-loving, strip club-frequenting candidate, or Clive Palmer and his extravagant ads at the expense of his staff, I struggle to recall a sillier or more amateurish political contest, writes David Penberthy.

Here are some weird philosophical questions that arise from this underwhelming election campaign.

Which of these two scenarios is morally worse — being such a tight-arse that you refuse to pay outstanding entitlements to your workers, or endangering the lives of children by campaigning against the scientific wisdom in support of vaccinations?

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In order, which of the following people are the least pleasant — the inner-city Labor groover who makes rape jokes and paedophile gags, the Tasmanian Liberal lady whose Facebook site said Muslim women should be sold as slaves, the One Nation guy who thinks the Jews are descended from lizards, or the Greens candidate who describes his indigenous opponent as a “coconut” for being brown on the outside but holding views in support of the white status quo?

Is it worse to solicit millions of dollars from a nefarious offshore political organisation to dismantle the Port Arthur gun laws, or to sneak off while full of ink to a Washington strip joint and stuff dollar bills in an exotic dancer’s undies?

United Australia Party leader Clive Palmer has had to deal with controversial candidates. Picture: Rebecca Le May/AAP

Election campaigns are meant to be a national discussion about the future of the country. The art of politics, we are told, has never been more sophisticated, with the use of technology giving the parties the richest possible detail about the aspirations and anxieties of the electorate.

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If both of these things are true, the 2019 campaign must be an outlier, as I struggle to recall a sillier or more amateurish political contest in almost 30 years covering politics.

Australia has witnessed a near-orgy of hypocrisy over the allocation of preferences to the minor parties and the question marks over the integrity of scores of candidates.

In relation to the United Australia Party, Labor only came out waxing indignant about Scott Morrison’s alleged shamelessness in accepting Palmer preferences after the Labor Party itself had exhausted every option in attracting Clive’s preferences.

Since then, Palmer has been portrayed by the ALP as a villain — which in the context of his Townsville workforce, he most certainly is, happier spending more than $31 million on advertising to buy his way into power than to pay out the outstanding $7 million he owes these working-class families.

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Yet in trying to win the moral high ground, there have been instances where the ALP has done deals with fringe candidates who are significantly more offensive or dangerous than Clive. The best example is in the NSW seat of Richmond, home to the greenie capital of Byron Bay, where an anti-vaxxer candidate is running in an area where immunisation rates are already dangerously low.

On the other side of the divide, the Liberals have knowingly cuddled up to people whose policies would destroy livelihoods in their own home states.

The best example of this is in my home state of South Australia, where the Libs are referencing Palmer candidates ahead of Labor and the Greens, even though he would wreck the River Murray for those of us downstream by shredding the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. The feeblest argument of all has been preferred in defence of this deal, that it is the least bad of a series of unpalatable options. It might be an honest answer, but it is one that unwittingly concedes that on the question of preferences, no one has the moral upper hand.

It is the area of dodgy and dunderheaded candidates where almost every single party has had a personal worst.

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Humans have always had a capacity for stupidity. You can trace it back to the very first caveman who thought it would be a funny idea to draw a donger on his cave wall. The digital age means that everyone now has a footprint of every stupid thing they have ever done or said.

Labor candidate Luke Creasey quit after making offensive ‘jokes’. Picture: Supplied

One Nation’s Steve Dickson resigned after video emerged of him visiting a strip club. Picture: Dave Hunt/AAP

You would think that in this age of apparent political professionalism, this would make it much easier for the parties to weed out the weirdos in advance.

Instead, there appears to have been no vetting or little vetting at all, or certainly nothing so onerous as a simple Google search that would have revealed in advance, say, that the guy who wanted to run for the Libs in inner-Melbourne was on the record as saying he wanted to stop gay and godless “termites” from infiltrating the Liberal Party.

The volume of these cases during the 2019 campaign has been unprecedented, and will certainly change the way the parties conduct themselves in future.

There has been embarrassing sloppiness all around. Its impact on polling day will be interesting.

We live in an age where people are less rusted on than they have ever been in a political sense. The primary vote for the major parties totalled 95 per cent a few decades ago and is now struggling to stay above 75 per cent.

The latest Newspoll has Labor on 36 and the Coalition on 38. The really interesting thing about this campaign is that both Labor and the Coalition, in their desire to destroy each other, have inadvertently pushed voters in the direction of registering a protest vote against the major parties by looking elsewhere.

But when you look elsewhere, be it Pauline Hanson and her NRA-loving, strip club-frequenting candidate in Queensland, or big Clive and his extravagant ads at the expense of his staff, the minor parties have taken a hit, too.

To that end, the biggest winner from all this mediocrity on election night might be the informal vote, fuelled by those of us who feel like grabbing a sausage and drawing a smiley face on our ballots, so uninspired are we by what’s on offer.

@penbo