Pointless blue over a thing borrowed

I AM at a loss to understand why it is that most Australians aren't impressed by the party antics of question time. In the middle of the worst financial crisis in decades, federal parliament descended into a time-wasting debate this week about what constitutes plagiarism.

On Tuesday, Julie Bishop was caught out having lifted a couple of sentences from an article in The Wall Street Journal without attribution in a speech she delivered the day before.

It was her maiden parliamentary speech in her newly appointed role as shadow treasurer, and the indiscretion became newsworthy because she had also stumbled the day before on radio when talking about the cash rate.

Treasurer Wayne Swan found out about Bishop's indiscretion not from his own research, mind you, but as a result of his taxpayer-funded staff doing a job other than that which they are paid to do. He labelled her "the Helen Demidenko of Australian politics" (please note I used quotation marks).

I wonder if that line was his intellectual property or that of one of his staff?

Bishop isn't the first politician to plagiarise the words of others, as evidenced the following day when she exposed the man who outed her for having copied paragraphs of a speech given by Assistant Treasurer Chris Bowen.

Again, one can only assume that her staff wasted their time looking into Swan.

Bishop could hardly contain her delight as she held up the highlighted paragraphs during question time for all in the chamber to see. One-all, now let's get back to the big issues was the message; does anyone remember the financial crisis?

This article is not designed to absolve Bishop (or Swan for that matter) of their crimes. To be sure, if either had plagiarised an essay for one of my university subjects they would have failed the essay and the unit. But students reading this article need not get nervous. It is highly unlikely I would notice such infractions.

Unlike the Treasurer and Opposition treasury spokeswoman, I do not have teams of taxpayer-funded staff to trawl through past copies of speeches, essays and articles to catch out would-be offenders. If I want to catch a plagiarist, I have to do the legwork myself.

Accusations of plagiarism in politics have been around for years. The present Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Joe Biden, was caught out in 1987 during his own campaign to be president for lifting the lines of then British Labour leader Neil Kinnock. He dropped out of the race soon afterwards.

At the 2004 Australian federal election, Labor leader Mark Latham was accused of plagiarising the words of Bill Clinton. Of all things, he plagiarised Clinton's message on education, just not the central theme of good education: don't plagiarise.

But these are only the public outings of political plagiarism.

In reality the practice is far more widespread among our political elite.

Politicians who sign off on letters to constituents, issue media releases and deliver speeches and submit opinion pieces - all drafted by staff on their behalf - are plagiarists, some worse than others.

A small number of politicians, such as Tony Abbott and Craig Emerson, are well known for writing their own speeches. But most don't, choosing instead to hire underlings to do the job for them.

Then there is the literature mass-produced by party headquarters for electioneering. That material often includes pre-prepared quotes and commentaries, sent electronically to candidates.

All they then have to do is insert their name under the "on-message" words.

The professional plagiarism the main parties engage in hardly creates an atmosphere whereby politicians respect the ownership of the words they spruik.

The irony is that in the case of the recent Bishop and Swan indiscretions, the plagiarism was done by staff writing the speeches for their respective politicians. It was plagiarism on top of plagiarism.

But should we be concerned that our politicians often speak with words other than their own?

In and of itself, probably not: permission has been granted by the staff members for their intellectual property to be hijacked. And in the case of Bishop and Swan the errors were oversights rather than deliberate acts.

The examples of plagiarism say more about the time pressures our politicians are under, particularly frontbenchers. Anyone who has taken a look at a cabinet minister's diary knows what I am talking about. In an era of perpetual campaigning politicians can't do everything for themselves and those who try become micro-managers who lose sight of the bigger picture. Politicians therefore outsource many of their responsibilities.

But doing so also means that mistakes can creep in. Just ask Bishop or Swan.

Peter van Onselen is an associate professor in politics and government at Edith Cowan University.