Albo’s T-------- blunder says more about our times than our PM

Credit: Matt Davidson

“What’s happened to our country?” rages someone, somewhere, maybe at an oak table with a nice view. “You could call a person d-m--t-d, provided they weren’t. They could take a joke.

“Now you can’t say anything. Woke fascism! The Queen’s English is now all ‘trigger words’. These f-----g dashes and quote marks, I’m sick of them! You have to speak like your maiden aunt. What, that’s sexist, ageist and virginist? Your m----- a---? Not good enough? Your ------ ----?”

Context is the last refuge of the scoundrel, as Dr Johnson didn’t say. And in Anthony Albanese’s case, the context was only a deeper bucket of sh-- that he’d stepped in on Tuesday when, as the opposition frontbench b--bled (Albanese’s word) while he was trying to explain something about taxation, he snapped: “This nonsense that they carry on with ... Have you got Tourette’s or something?”

Gotcha! Similarly, the ABC journalist Patricia Karvelas got jumped all over for using “schizophrenic”. Gotcha again! If there’s one thing the anti-woke relish, it’s when the woke slip up, given that the anti-woke think many of the woke are actually faux-woke.

Unravelling these controversies can be truly m--d b-nding, but let’s give it a try. We’ll eliminate any words that are too upsetting. P---- D----- and his treasury spokesman, whom we’ll call Andrew Peacock, were the ones who baited Albanese, the country’s chief woke officer, into his anti-woke outburst about T-------’s. But for them to chastise him would be anti-anti-woke, too close to coming full circle and sounding woke themselves. So, the L-----l Party shows that it has some use for women and deploys shadow health minister Anne Ruston to deliver the lecture: “M---ing a disability is no l----ing matter. Australians living with T-------’s deserve the PM’s r---ect, not his r---cule.”

Shadow finance minister Jane Hume said the comment revealed Albanese’s “true character”. Mandy Maysey, president of the T------- Syndrome Association of Australia, said the condition “is socially isolating, and for [the prime minister] to just flippantly use it in such an offhanded manner speaks volumes”.

So it does, but volumes of what? That he’s a man caught between worlds? Born in 1963, half-stuck in a past where medical syndromes could be an insult against people who didn’t suffer from them? Stuck between the bubble of inter-office insults and the public bubble of parliament? Or just an insensitive -------? (D--n these b----y dashes.)

Albanese apologised. The inciting taunts aren’t on the record, but his reaction is, leaving another wound on a PM under pressure. It was part morality tale, part grande bouffe. Or was it just a lapse of discipline? (You no longer hear P---- D----- uttering insults that speak volumes about his character, since he learnt a few years ago that every microphone is a hot one.)

Prime ministerial insults have always spoken volumes, about the individual and the era. In 1989, Bob Hawke was in the sh-- for calling a silly old bugger “a silly old bugger”. This was when silly old buggers were powerful influencers, and Hawke duly apologised to all elderly, silly and buggerlike Australians. He didn’t need to apologise to the individual silly old bugger, a Whyalla 74-year-old named Bob Bell, who admitted that he hadn’t been wearing his hearing aid and missed what Hawke said. Had Hawke known these facts, he’d have been not only ageist but ableist too.

Paul K------’s grand mastery of the insult is his undisputed legacy. “I want to do you slowly,” he told John Hewson, offending not even Hewson’s Liberal colleagues. When K------ called John Howard “a desiccated coconut” and a “mangy maggot”, Peter Costello “all tip and no iceberg” and the original Andrew Peacock “a painted perfumed gigolo”, there was no coconut, maggot, iceberg or gigolo lobby to take collateral offence. Sure, K------ also called opposition members s--mb-gs, g--bs, d-gs and t--ppo, unclever playground b-lly insults that got buried beneath the funny ones.

In her 1982 work, The Book of Insults Ancient & Modern: An Amiable History of Insult, Invective, Imprecation & Incivility (Literary, Political & Historical) Hurled Through The Ages & Compiled As A Public Service, American author Nancy McPhee, once she got to the end of her title, drew heavily on prolific insulters such as the Holy Bible, William Shakespeare and Noel Coward (“Never trust a man with short legs – their brains are too close to their bottoms”). Heightist and sexist, Coward’s putdown was redeemed by being funny (funnier in 1982). Shakespeare and the Bible were redeemed by their canonical status and not having to worry about all-seeing, all-remembering social media. This, even more than fast-changing ideas of humour, has assumed tyranny over the once harmless putdown.

Illustration: Simon LetchCredit:

Back when Albanese was in St Mary’s Cathedral College, his sermonisers said the definition of “integrity” was to speak and think at every minute as if G-- were watching. It was a frightening picture of G-- as a CIA agent with listening devices in every room, but also a timely education for the world Albanese would govern 40 years later, when every utterance is held in store, when today’s lame – sorry, weak – joke is tomorrow’s tripwire and the Cold War-era G-- would be replaced by the all-recording digital panopticon of the 2020s. The church didn’t expect Albanese to be perfect; it taught him to be careful.

As prime minister, he has tried to sail above culture war s--tfights, but this week, by accident (his most telling character trait?), the PM stumbled into one of our new religious schisms.

Illustration: Simon LetchCredit:

When the “progressive” trips up, their response is to apologise and improve. As Albanese’s housing minister Clare O’Neil said, “What matters is how we deal with [a mistake] afterwards, and I think it was good he didn’t pretend he hadn’t done the wrong thing.” Confess and do penance: today’s progressive resembles yesterday’s Roman Catholic.

On the other side are those who think the world should lighten up: who think everyone (except him/herself) is too thin-skinned, and who pines for a past where you didn’t have to watch your step when, for example, using incorrect personal pronouns. Today’s libertarian bears an uncanny resemblance to yesterday’s muscular Protestant.

These are the two paths, headed to opposite poles, on which we are all flying, as America has flown before us, and the further apart we fly, the faster we accelerate. Insults, and our ever-changing tolerance for them, speak volumes for the incoherence of our politics.

A footnote, a time capsule and a declaration of interest: In the early 1980s, my family were at a social event where a teenaged boy was gulping and hiccupping while trying to speak. A family member, ------, asked the boy, “Have you got a problem?” Never having encountered Tourette’s syndrome before, ------ genuinely wanted to know if the boy needed help, say a glass of water. We were mortified when we learnt the cause, and much more embarrassed than the boy himself. To make a joke behind someone’s back was common; what wasn’t was the innocence to ask if they were OK.

Maybe things haven’t changed so much.

Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.

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