The sooks of parliament revive an old playground sneer

Is there a more satisfying sneer to toss at an opponent – and a more humiliating disparagement draped upon one’s shoulders – than the word “sook”?

It comes loaded with memories of torment from the skinned-knee schoolyards of the 1950s.

Used at the right moment and delivered with a curl of the lip, it is a word cruel enough to excite a chant among gangs of toadies wishing to win the approval of the chief harasser.

“Sook, sook, sook.”

It belittles the sniveller and mocks the whinger with terrifying accuracy.

Yet this short, wonderfully descriptive word has fallen scandalously out of favour in recent years, as if, somehow, it lacks sophistication or the practised cruelty of Paul Keating’s inventive invective. Could anything compete with the scorn Keating aimed at John Hewson: “a shiver looking for a spine to run up”.

Sticks and stones … Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen, James Brickwood

Happily, we can report that sook has been revived in no less august surrounds than the House of Representatives.

Why, the word was batted back and forth by the alleged bruisers of federal politics only this week.

It began, unsurprisingly, when the knock-about (and much knocked about) Nationals twice-was-leader Barnaby Joyce called Prime Minister Anthony Albanese a sook last week.

This came within the apparently bottomless depths of the so-called debate over whether those fleeing the hellhole of Gaza were being subjected to appropriate security screening before being granted visas to Australia.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has taken the matter to near-Trumpian depths by declaring no one from Gaza should be allowed into Australia “at the moment”.

When Albanese was asked by Dutton’s excitable lieutenant Sussan Ley whether any agency had “expressed any concern about any individual who has arrived from the Gaza war zone since October and whether any such individual had had their visa cancelled”, the PM had not got out a word before he was engulfed in jeers from the Coalition.

Albanese quipped a bit lamely that Dutton shouldn’t get up early because it made him “grumpier than normal”.

Credit: Matt Golding

Joyce couldn’t restrain himself.

“Sook,” he cried.

Albanese, unwisely, asked the Speaker to demand that Joyce withdraw.

There’s nothing sookier, every schoolkid knows, than a victim complaining of being called a sook.

“I withdraw,” said Joyce, his voice conveying as much sarcasm as he thought the Speaker might tolerate.

The Sook Games were on.

On Tuesday, Immigration Minister Tony Burke accused Dutton of being “irresponsible and a sook” when the opposition leader became extra voluble after failing in an attempt to force Albanese to make a personal explanation to parliament.

Amid the resulting hubbub, Labor backbencher Graham Perrett yelled at Barnaby Joyce: “Sook!”

Theatrically, Joyce rose to his feet.

“Someone over there said the word, ‘sook’, and they must withdraw it,” he simpered to the Speaker, Milton Dick.

Perrett withdrew his remark.

And so the marvellous term “sook”, said by some etymologists to have its roots in the Old English sūcan (“to suck”) in the 14th century, enters the realms of words deemed unparliamentary in the 21st century.

Sooks.

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