Please excuse me drooling but it’s been a long time. The pubs have been shut since I can’t remember when, but they are due to reopen soon in the blessed state of New South Wales.
When that glorious day arrives, I will be first in line banging at the entrance should the clock pass eleven with no sign of the publican dropping the bolts from the front door.
As that first glass is raised, I believe it is also time to run a rusty knife through what politicians and many journalists refer to as ‘the pub test’.
Opposition leader, Anthony Albanese was the last to use the dismal trope in criticism of Christian Porter as Porter then remained on the front bench after having declared a blind trust had paid for his legal expenses in his defamation action against the ABC.
“I know pubs are closed at the moment,’ Albanese opined. “But this does not pass the pub test. Christian Porter has declared an unknown donor helped pay his legal fees through a blind trust. Unbelievable and absurd.”
It was a reach for the most dreadfully tired of all claims, made worse by the fact that the pubs were indeed shut, leaving any hope of determining the accuracy of the results even deeper in the unknown with the added cruelty that it was also the driest of dry arguments.
A week earlier, Labor’s Kristina Keneally did the same, criticising the Prime Minister’s decision to travel to his home in Sydney for Father’s Day and sought a special health exemption from the ACT government in order to return to Canberra. Yes, you guessed it. Keneally surmised that the trip and/or the exemption “failed the pub test.”
The PM has form, too, after last year claiming former Australia Post CEO, Christine Holgate’s decision to present gifts of expensive watches to her executives “failed the pub test.”
Journalists, too, routinely summon the mythical survey of imbibers in public houses as proof that a political leader hasn’t done anything wrong at least in terms of black letter law but has breached some unwritten rule in terms of personal or ethical conduct.
The dreary cliché invokes the notion that pubs are hotbeds of political argument where drinkers sit around with furrowed brows in fervent discussion on superannuation policy. I’ve spent half a lifetime in pubs and I’m here to say it doesn’t happen.
There is a long and unhappy history to the pub test. It is an entirely Australian fixation. A mere mention of the pub test in the US or the UK will draw blank faces if not unrestrained mockery. In these parts of the world, the UK in particular, drinking is a serious business and should never be maligned by political frippery.
They believe (and so should we) that the pub test is not an ethical everyman test of political conduct. If it is to exist at all it should be confined to two simple actions:
If you enter a pub and order a schooner of something called Scruttocks’ Old Dirigible – Now with coconut oil, replete with sticks and leaves floating on top that costs $14, you’ve failed the pub test.
Don’t get me started on the surfeit of boutique brewers’ wares that have infested the fonts and beer taps in our pubs with the ale war crimes of breakfast cereals, chilli, coffee and in one egregious example, sticky date pudding to beer as ingredients. To The Hague with them, and no correspondence will be entered into.
And if you come back from the bar laden with schooners of frosty, delicious beer only to fall off your stool, you’ve also failed the pub test.
Sitting down sounds easy but trust me, it gets more difficult the longer you’re there.
We should never say never, I suppose because politicians love clichés. They believe clichés are linguistic cheat codes with the power to infect the deep subconscious of the electorate. Clichés are based on repetition and repetition is meat and drink to politicians.
Pardon my French, but a cliché is in fact a cliché. As old as the hills or as old as Methusaleh. Take your pick. The word comes from a printing process where a metal printing plate known as a stereotype would make a clicking sound when entered into a mould known as a flong. Thus, in colloquial French, a stereotype became known by its onomatopoeic ‘click’ sound or cliché in French. The rest, if you’ll pardon the cliché, is history.
If something is worth saying, politicians believe it’s worth saying over and over again. That’s the trickery of political communications. Politicians are walking bumper stickers. Or clumsy, badly made robots seemingly confounded by the complexities of the English language.
It’s not as if politicians speak in clichés because they are as dumb as a sack of hammers (cliché alert). They do it because they think that we are.
And that’s why we need to get rid of the pub test, if not politicians. As a drab, meaningless cliché, the pub test has run its race, bitten the dust, kicked the bucket, is as dead as a doornail. It has been there, done that, run out of puff and/or steam. It has ceased to be. Expired and gone to meet its maker. Bereft of life, kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil. Run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible.
More Coverage
RBA may force Chalmers into a Hobson’s choice
Will Labor bet its strategy on a pre-election rate cut with little on offer to voters, or give up on mortgage relief in favour of buying itself seats?
Why the investment market has finally turned on Cbus
Industry fund Cbus and its chair, ALP national president Wayne Swan, can no longer duck from criticism as a key investment report points to internal problems.