Porn stars, chorus girls and rockers add colour to the race for parliament
ELECTIONS are open to a wide range of parties and candidates but some arrive with strange backgrounds and policies
Today in History
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FREE and open elections are the basis of democracy, as is the right for people of all political persuasions to contest them. But sometimes the political landscape throws up some strange parties and even stranger candidates.
THE PLAYBOY PLAYMATE SET TO GLAM UP THE LAND TAX DEBATE
The coming state election will see the No Land Tax party, with a platform for abolishing taxes that it believes are punishing to landlords which is not too radical. Not as radical as the Victorian Single Tax League of the 1890s who campaigned to abolish all taxes but land tax. They were often seen as almost religious devotees of the founding father economist Henry George, their ideas unfairly dismissed as simplistic and literally single-minded, as if a single tax would cure all social ills.
At least both the No Land Tax team and the Single Taxers had policies, unlike a raft of parties that sprang up in Canberra during the first election for self-government in the ACT in 1989. Among them were the policy devoid Party! Party! Party! Party, the Surprise Party and the Sun-ripened Warm Tomato Party, the last supposedly formed to ban gas-ripened tomatoes but, like the others, really just a dig at the whole election. In fact at that election four of the 17 seats were won by parties formed in opposition to self-government.
Australia’s Deadly Serious Party, formed in 1980, was anything but. They wanted to train killer penguins to protect our coastline. Membership dropped below the required 500 members and they were deregistered in 1988.
What is actually more odd about the No Land Tax team is their candidates are drawn from less-than-traditional backgrounds for effective politicians, including topless models and a salsa dancer.
There have been innumerable politicians from more conventional entertainment backgrounds, like Australian rockers Gary “Angry” Anderson, who stood unsuccessfully for the National Party in 2011, and Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett, who became a Labor federal minister.
In the US, Ronald Reagan, an actor from the 1930s to the ’60s, was elected president in 1980. Actor Clint Eastwood and singer Sonny Bono were both mayors of US towns. Bodybuilder-turned-actor Arnold Schwarzenegger served two terms as California’s governor.
In the US, politics is sometimes more show than substance, even back in the 19th century. Before his entertainment career kicked off Phineas T. Barnum dabbled in politics in the 1830s by lobbying against anti-gambling laws. He made his name as a showman promoting acts like ageing slave Joice Heth (allegedly George Washington’s nanny) and Swedish singer Jenny Lind.
He owned a museum of oddities that included a mermaid mummy and eventually ran a circus known as the Greatest Show On Earth. But he also served in the Connecticut House of Representatives from 1865-69 and mayor of Bridgeport from 1875-76. He fought against slavery and racism and was in favour of wider suffrage but also helped pass a bill in 1879 banning contraception. The bill was only overturned in the 1960s.
In 1992 much was made of the fact Betty Boothroyd, the woman appointed British Speaker of the House, had been a chorus girl in the Tiller Girls dance troupe. She danced for a brief period in the 1940s, but became a secretary to a Labour MP, starting off a long political education before she finally entered parliament in 1973. She was Speaker for eight years.
Her pre-political life was not as strange as that of Illona Staller, better known as Cicciolina. Born in Hungary in 1951, she was a singer and radio star in the 70s and in 1978 became the first woman to show her breast on Italian TV, securing her a career in porn films. In 1979 she made an unsuccessful run for Italian parliament with the Greens but had more success in 1987 with the Radical Party, campaigning for human rights, integration with Europe and against nuclear power. In parliament she made outlandish statements, like offering to have sex with Saddam Hussein to secure peace before the 1991 Gulf War.
In 1991 she formed the Party of Love with fellow porn star Moana Pozzi. Its policy was more to parody traditional parties than to put forward any real political plan. Staller left parliament in 1992 and later unsuccessfully tried to enter Hungarian politics.
Parodying political parties was the sole reason for the existence of the Monster Raving Loony Party, founded by rock singer David Edward Sutch, who had legally changed his name to Screaming Lord Sutch. Sutch had lost elections since the ’60s, representing the National Teenage Party, but founded his own Monster Raving Loony party in 1983 and continued to campaign ... unsuccessfully.
The 1991 Polish elections saw the emergence of the Beer Lovers Party. Founded by satirist Janusz Rewinski it had a slightly serious policy, to encourage social beer drinking in pubs and discouraging lonely home consumption of vodka, thereby fighting alcoholism. It won 16 seats but soon dissolved.
HISTORY ON THIS DAY
978: England’s 15-year-old Saxon king Saint Edward the Martyr is assassinated at Corfe, Dorset, in what was probably a conspiracy engineered by his stepmother, who wanted her son Ethelred crowned.
1766: Britain’s King George II assents to parliamentary repeal of the 1765 Stamp Act after violent protests by American colonists.
1857: The government proclaims the formation of Parramatta Park, handing 200 acres from the Governor’s Domain over to public use.
1871: The Commune of Paris, an insurrection against the French government begins, lasting until May 28. It is triggered when the National Assembly sends cavalry to disarm the National Guard in Paris. The Guard repulses the attack and seizes the town hall.
1910: US magician Harry Houdini completes three flights in a biplane at Diggers
Rest, Victoria.
1913: Greek King George I is assassinated in Salonika by anarchist Alexandros Schinas.
1914: Eight women are fined seven shillings in Perth for wearing unsheathed hatpins, which they were said to have used as weapons, according to one report in the next day’s Western Australian, although up to 14 suffragettes were originally arrested.
1922: Mahatma Gandhi, leading a peaceful Indian campaign against British rule, is sentenced to six years in jail after pleading guilty to three charges of sedition.
1940: Adolf Hitler meets Benito Mussolini at the Brenner Pass in the Italian-Austrian Alps to argue that Italy should join the war against Britain and France.
1965: Soviet cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov becomes the first person to leave an orbiting spacecraft and float in space.
1985: The first episode of Seven Network soap opera Neighbours goes to air.
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