Here in the provinces, the sidelining of the talented and in-form South Australian batsman was immediately hailed and condemned as the moronic work of people who think Australia starts in the Shire, heads north past Bondi towards that pointy bit at Palm Beach, and makes its way west towards Penrith before culminating at Panthers Stadium.
With trademark swagger, Paul Keating declared if you’re not living in Sydney “you’re camping out”. To borrow a line from Jaws, we’re going to need a bigger tent, as there’s 20 million of us who either don’t live in Sydney or did so for long enough to leave, knowing life is more civilised and affordable elsewhere.
Yet the prime ministership of this country has in the past 10 years become a rotating role shared between Sydney men whose frame of reference and policy instincts are inordinately influenced by their home town. To the rest of us, these people often seem spectacularly unrelatable.
This decade of Sydney rule started with a northern beaches action figure who when not running the country could be found parading along The Corso wearing what looked like a pair of red jocks. He was followed by an eastern suburbs dandy whose idea of taking the pulse of the people was to spend Saturday afternoon kayaking on Rose Bay. Next up, a goofy guy from Cronulla, a suburb whose defining cultural moment came in 2005 when the local lads woke up one Sunday, downed a carton of Tooheys, wrote the 2230 postcode on their chests and spent the day chanting “Aussie Aussie Aussie” at anyone vaguely brown caught driving a Subaru WRX.
Now we have the King of King St, Anthony Albanese, the living embodiment of inner west Gen X culture whose ideal night involves a few schooners of Reschs at The Erko and catching the Scientists gig at the Enmore before heading to Kirribilli to see who’s programming Rage, and whether they’re doing as good a job as he did.
These four locales – the northern beaches, the eastern suburbs, the Shire and the inner west – may as well be foreign countries to the rest of Australia. They serve as cloistered protectorates within Sydney, too, given the refusal of everyone to stray from their spot.
Tony Abbott’s home turf is so self-contained it’s known locally as “The Insular Peninsula”. A friend of mine who lives in Mona Vale once told me an elderly neighbour said he couldn’t remember the last time he had been over the Bridge. “The Harbour Bridge?” my mate asked. “No, Narrabeen Bridge.”
A story like that is redolent with meaning in Sydney and would elicit a laugh from our past four PMs, but leave the other 20 million of us completely confused.
Our most recent PMs have at times been defined by Sydney to their political detriment. I have no doubt one of the key reasons small-l Liberal Australia is now coloured teal is because Scott Morrison often sounded like an extra from The Adventures of Barry McKenzie. With Australia on the cusp of a Covid lockdown, the then PM tried to lighten the mood by saying he wanted to sneak in one last look at his beloved Sharkies, addressing a nation where most citizens don’t know the difference between league and union, or if the Sharkies are a footy team or a band.
In his matey moments with knockabout Sydney media types such as Ben Fordham and Karl Stefanovic, Morrison would often yuck it up in the local patois. He would use terms such as “gibberer” (fool), “turn it up” (come off it), “pull-through” (dressing down), “blow up deluxe” (become angry) – specific Sydney words and phrases which require a translator in Adelaide, Perth and Hobart.
And while Keating defined himself as a bit of a toff with his passion for Mahler, we learnt a bit about the cut of Scomo’s cultural jib with his ukulele rendition of Dragon’s April Sun in Cuba.
Hapless also was Malcolm Turnbull, principally around the issue of Aussie rules, where he was desperately ill-equipped to engage but tried valiantly to do so anyway. I had a front row seat for the tragic events of September 2017 when the unfancied Richmond Tigers defeated the Adelaide Crows in the AFL grand final. AFL is the most unifying of the four football codes, the only one which transcends class, ethnicity and gender, with Turnbull’s claim to understand it making him seem even more remote and aloof.
Turnbull was at the MCG that day when he had this to say about our national code: “It is the leaping, jumping, flying game, where the big men fly, as they say, and where possession is everything”.
Righty-oh.
Turnbull made an excruciating appearance on our Adelaide radio show the day before that grand final, where we had done the road trip to Melbourne and were broadcasting back to SA on behalf of our Crows-mad listeners. With Turnbull and his media advisors made aware our program that morning was a three-hour block of unashamed boosterism for the Adelaide Football Club, the PM arrived for the interview wearing a Richmond scarf, saying: “I know you boys love your footy so I’ve come dressed accordingly!”. It was the equivalent of arriving at the local synagogue wearing a red and white PLO bandana, and for the next hour we fielded calls and text messages from our 100,000-odd listeners telling us what an oddball the Prime Minister was.
These observations go to superficialities, albeit ones which influence our views on whether our leaders really get us or not. It is in the policy sense where the nation’s Sydney bias becomes real, as so much political effort is devoted to duchessing voters in the dozen-odd Sydney swing seats which make and break governments.
As an Adelaide guy, I am inured to the fact my home is derided as a mendicant state. Yet I reflect on my 10 years at Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, where the moment any election was called we would knock up a front page with a photo of a few nuggety-looking voters from Emu Plains and a headline screaming “WHAT’S IN IT FOR PENRITH?”. Penrith being a suburb that has its own massive hospital, eight-lane super highway, sprawling shopping mall, excellent sporting facilities and even a vast arts space, the Joan Sutherland Centre, despite the fact if you asked any Penrith resident when they last saw the opera, they’d say, “You mean Boom Crash?”.
The only thing Penrith doesn’t have is a mosque, even though Jackie Kelly’s husband insisted Labor wanted to build one there after the 2007 election.
If you gave a safe southern Adelaide seat such as Kingston a 20-year head start, it would still attract less federal attention than seats such as Lindsay, Parramatta, Banks, Hughes, Greenway, Wentworth and Warringah do in the course of any given election campaign. Indeed at last year’s federal election, the campaign had been going for a full two weeks before the Liberals even announced their Kingston candidate. Public money spent in western Sydney is regarded as the valid dispersement of cash to help people dealing with the cost of living and urban sprawl. In the rest of the country, it’s a handout for bludgers.
Julia Gillard’s national outlook was broader than her successors, informed by an Adelaide childhood, a work life in Melbourne, and frequent and extended stays in Sydney. But our last truly federalist PM was John Howard, who demonstrated that being from Sydney need not translate into a Sydney-centric view. Howard had two qualities which made him a true national leader. The first was his passion for Australian history. The second was that, despite his affability as a man, he was in a party-political sense a bare-knuckle brawler who played a key role in every internal battle the Liberals had for more than three decades. As such, he amassed forensic knowledge of every composite part that made his party tick. From a standing start, Howard could give an hour-long dissertation about the origins and nature of South Australian liberalism, from the generations-long conflicts between the Chapmans and the Evanses, the impact of Steele Hall’s dismantling of the Playford gerrymander, the role of pastoralist Renfrey Curgenven De Garis in turning the state’s South-East into the conservative enclave it remains today.
Howard had a fondness for arcane provincial stories which meant little to the rest of Australia.
When I started as The Advertiser’s Canberra correspondent in the year he was first elected, I quickly realised he was keen to engage on local stories which national leaders would usually ignore. When that year’s Adelaide Festival poster featured an icon of the Virgin Mary mocked up playing a piano accordion, the PM gave me some lines saying he understood the distress of SA’s orthodox churches, noting that Christianity seemed to be the only religion which artists were determined to deride. When Cricket Australia scrapped the Adelaide Oval Australia Day Test, he publicly lamented its passing, saying the Oval was a special place and the match a sacred fixture. These stories went off in Adelaide and were unnoticed elsewhere.
In a more fundamental policy sense, Howard at times defied his own ideological allies and instincts by adopting positions which jarred with pure free-market thought. The biggest of these was on the car industry, where he overruled Peter Costello to reject the Productivity Commission’s recommendation of the immediate abolition of tariffs. Howard figured Australia need not rush off a cliff when other competitor nations were sticking to their protectionist guns; more importantly, he believed that whatever role union largesse was playing in the car industry’s demise, its working men and women needed a breather to adjust to its inevitable collapse. Which is exactly what happened a few years later when Tony Abbott and his mate from Hunters Hill, Joe Hockey, gleefully euthanised the industry overnight.
Australia is a great country. Our prime ministers should really see more of it. For now, those of us camping out in the provinces will raise a glass of Penfolds to 10 years of being led by men who couldn’t tell Salisbury from St Peters and Moonta from Marion.
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