Joe Hildebrand: Pollies eat junk food to make them seem normal

SOMETIMES the smaller moments of the election campaign can turn into the biggest of all - and it can all come down to one sausage.

John Brogden may be the only politician in history to have been beaten by a sausage roll.

The year was 2003 and the little-known Liberal leader was up against the eccentric Labor titan Bob Carr running for his third consecutive premiership at the NSW state election.

Carr had almost twice the approval rating of the baby-faced Brogden, who was new, naïve and unknown. And his hero was Bobby Kennedy, which placed him about two steps to the left of the Labor Right.

RELATED: INSANE RULING ON ‘INSULTING’ ISLAM

In short, the conservatives were muddy and muddled while Labor was direct and disciplined. The campaign had walkover written all over it. A long, boring walkover.

Stuck on the campaign trail and struggling for a story, a young gun reporter from The Daily Telegraph decided to spice things up.

At one of the innumerable whistlestops she invited the notoriously health-conscious Carr to partake in a sausage roll. The premier, whose diet consisted largely of eggwhite omelettes, responded in typical form.

“Sausage rolls are disgusting,” he pronounced in his superior Shakespearean cadence. “They are fat encased in fat.”

RELATED: THE INSIDE STORY OF MARK LATHAM’S TV NO-SHOW

As a result The Tele had its front page and everyone should have gone home happy but unfortunately it didn’t end there.

Sensing an opportunity for some cut-through, Brogden declared himself in favour of the humble sausage roll.

RELATED: MAN WHO CAN SAVE AUSTRALIA’S SOUL

Pretty soon he was scoffing one for the cameras but instead of looking down-to-earth he just ended up looking a bit silly.

Worse still, he gave Carr an opportunity to come over the top and declare himself for the far more popular meat pie. It was classic wedge politics — indeed at one point it looked like there might be some actual wedges involved.

RELATED: JOE HILDEBRAND: TO THE MEN IN MY LIFE

From that moment Brogden’s last remaining premiership hopes were over. As it turns out, it really is a long way to the top if you want a sausage roll.

Food in politics is a serious business. Indeed, it is probably the only profession in which sometimes the food eats you. One wrong bite and next thing you know you’ve been chewed up and spat out.

Part of this is the great egalitarian nature of Australian political life. We like to imagine that our politicians all think that they are better than us and we need to constantly reduce them to our level.

In other words, they need to eat and sh*t like the rest of us. If we’re going to be the recipients of the latter we’re going to damn well keep a close eye on the former.

RELATED: BATTLE FOR EX-PM’S SEAT TAKES DIRTY TURN

At least this way we can figure out if they really are just like us as they always claim or if they really are an alien species just as we always suspected.

Unfortunately for the politicians, the results always lean towards Option B.

The most famous act of political consumption was in fact not technically eating at all, not was it performed by someone who was technically a politician at the time. Nonetheless it was so impressive that the voting public waived both technicalities and made the man who did it Australia’s longest serving Labor prime minister.

This was of course Bob Hawke’s record-breaking effort of drinking a yard glass of beer in just 11 seconds while a student at Oxford in the 1950s. It was a feat which he himself said probably endeared him more to the Australian electorate than any of his political accomplishments.

Former Australian Prime Minister, The Hon. Bob Hawke, is adored by Australians for his ability to drink big beers quickly. Picture: Justin Lloyd

Former Prime Minister Bob Hawke skoles a beer during the 2nd day of the Sydney Test on Friday, January 5, 2018.

Yes, we concluded, he may be an alien freak. But he was our kind of alien freak.

Sadly it was all downhill from there. Paul Keating preferred cappuccinos to Carlton Draught and the electorate never really warmed to him as much as his espresso machine did.

John Howard was also very food-conscious but in his trademark steady and sensible way. The second longest-serving PM in Australian history had one very simple piece of advice for would-be leaders: Never miss a meal.

RELATED: THIS IS THE WORLD’S DUMBEST ELECTION PLAN

It might be basic but it’s also brilliant. Politicians work absurd hours in absurd places and have to do absurd things. If you forget to eat your three-square it’s very easy to get hangry, and — as Bruce Banner almost said — you don’t want to see me when I’m hangry.

Indeed, Howard’s successor might never have lost his job if he’d taken that advice — or at least been able to take it. The workaholic Kevin Rudd reportedly blew up on his prime ministerial jet when he couldn’t get a proper dinner on an evening flight back from Papua New Guinea.

Obviously every tabloid editor’s dream was the headline “STEAKS ON A PLANE” but sadly documents indicated Kevin only wanted a bit of chicken or fish.

Rudd’s rather sudden successor Julia Gillard also entered the food fray during the 2010 election campaign by eating a PM pie from a Pakenham pie maker — which is not so much a meal as a 17th century nursery rhyme. And of course this image was used in countless articles and social media posts afterwards as her eating humble pie after one transgression or another.

But no newspaper caption writer or social media scribe could have predicted that bounty that was to come when Tony Abbott decided to bite into a raw onion for reasons that can only be described as “best known to himself”.

Tony Abbott eating an onion during a visit to Charlton Farm Produce at Moriarty.

The only possible explanation I can come up with is that it’s one of those things you go through life assuming everybody does only to find out that nobody does it except you, like eating bananas upside down or masturbating with shoelaces…

Er, I’ve said too much.

Appalling stuff from opposition leader Bill Shorten. Picture: Mick Tsikas.

But none of that is as sick as Bill Shorten’s attempt to eat a sausage sandwich sideways, a move that suddenly turned Bunnings into bi-curious. Never before has a whole nation shouted “What the?!?!?!?” in such perfect unison.

Of course Shorten has had his fair share of epicurean disasters. In 2012 he had a run in with a pie shop owner who didn’t have a hot pie ready for him. When she offered to heat one up in the microwave but warned it would be “soft”, Bill’s fuse appeared to shorten. The pie shop owner claims she said she liked Julia Gillard.

Shorten said he thought he heard her say: “The pies are soft, like Julia Gillard” — a rather odd declaration for a Chinese-born Labor supporter.

At any rate, Bill felt duty bound to defend his boss’s honour, only to accidentally knife his boss instead of the pie less than 12 months later.

Still, one person who did definitely knife the pie was Malcolm Turnbull, who outraged the nation in 2018 by consuming the Aussie staple with cutlery. This, I kid you not, made international news.

Which brings us to, er, 2018 again. A year in which the new prime minister Scott Morrison made national headlines for successfully eating a pie.

Turnbull eats a pie with a knife a fork.

Yes, the story of ScoMo’s culinary adventures was reported by Australia’s number one news site — this one! — and my beloved alma mater The Daily Telegraph under the headline: “Scott Morrison tackles local pie with ease”.

And I have to declare, despite all my contractual obligations and without fear or favour to my employer, that I could not endorse it more.

Because after a decade of the cyclonic merry-go-round of prime ministerial assassinations and policy paralysis this is the best we have to hope for: A PM who can eat a pie without embarrassing the nation.

Now if only we could find the sauce.

Joe Hildebrand is the editor-at-large for news.com.au. Continue the conversation on Twitter.