O’Connor: Political silliness will put us all on the breadline

Our next PM could very well be decided by the price of bread with the level of triviality plaguing Australian politics, writes Mike O’Connor.

IF I’d been able to answer for Scott Morrison at last week’s National Press Club lunch I would have said “twelve dollars.”

That’s how much a loaf of bread costs at a bakery near us. Outrageous, I know, but it’s called smoked potato and belongs in the pantheon of breads and while I’m ashamed to admit we pay that much, in our defence may I say that we restrict our consumption to one loaf a week.

The PM, however, ignorant of the delights of smoked potato bread was stumped when asked by a member of the Canberra press gallery if knew how much to pay for a loaf.

Obviously, the man is unfit to hold high office and should be booted out at the upcoming federal election.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison stated last week he did not know the price of a load of bread. Picture: NCA/Gary Ramage

Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese has since been quoted as saying that he does his own shopping. Well done, that man. Straight to The Lodge with you. Bill Shorten must be thinking that if only he’d done his own shopping, how different things might have been.

Will the next prime minister of Australia be decided by the price of bread and whether he takes time off from running the country to slip down to Woolies and buy his own groceries?

Apparently, for such is the level of trivialisation that now infects politics in this country.

There was nothing new about the price-of-bread question. It was an old trick and one that harked back to 1993 when then Liberal Party Federal Opposition Leader John Hewson was unable to say whether a birthday cake would cost more or less under his proposed tax reforms. Ten days later, he lost the federal election to Paul Keating.

Hewson took it badly and has been whining and sniping away at the party that succoured him ever since, a steadily diminishing voice of bitter irrelevance echoing faintly in the ether.

Opposition leader Anthony Albanese boasted of his ability to duck down to Woolies for a shop. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Jeremy Piper

Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce didn’t encourage any serious discourse on the state of the nation’s body politic when it was revealed he had sent a text message saying the Prime Minister was a liar and a hypocrite

So here we have Barnaby, whose concept of marital fidelity has in the past been what could easily be described as flexible, accusing the Prime Minister of dishonesty and deceit. By their deeds you will know them.

The price of bread and Barnaby’s whinge set social media, already seething with the news that former NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian had allegedly described the PM as a “psycho”, into convulsions.

A “psycho” is regarded as an unstable person suffering from mental illness who is prone to violence. Did Gladys mean that the country was being run by a dangerous madman given to acts of spontaneous violence?

No reasonable person could reach that conclusion. How, I wonder, did Gladys describe Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk in her private moments when the pair clashed repeatedly mid-Covid? As a psycho? We’ll never know.

There would be those who would brand Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews as a psycho and Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan. Our very own Deputy Premier Steven Miles on a good day might also qualify.

It’s a joke, a colourful term used to describe someone who stubbornly refuses to see things your way and accommodate you but in the context of Australian contemporary politics it is seized upon as proof positive that the PM is nuts.

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce came out swinging with accusations of deceit. Picture: NCA/Gary Ramage

Not only is he nuts but he used to be in marketing so it’s ScoMo from marketing. If he’d been in accounting or the stationery department it wouldn’t be ScoMo from stationery. It’s an irrelevance but said to infer that anyone who works in marketing can’t be trusted.

It goes without saying that the ex-union officials and party hacks who populate the Opposition benches are absolute models of trust and integrity.

The PM is also a Christian. In the United States it is all but imperative for politicians to embrace a faith but in this country, it is seen as a political negative.

Albanese has been asked on ABC Radio “about the Prime Minister’s faith” and has wisely declared that “faith is a personal matter.”

That the question was asked at all says a lot about the level of debate in Australia. Are ordinary Australians, the ones who live in the real world which exists outside the political bubbles that enclose federal and state parliaments, swayed by name calling and innuendo?

We will see but the next time Albanese is in Brisbane with his recyclable shopping bag, I can tell him where to get the nation’s best smoked potato bread. That way if he gets any tricky media questions, he can answer “twelve dollars.”