Death becomes our politicians. Some candidates appeal more dead than alive

The fact brothel owner Dennis Hof was dead didn’t stop people voting for him. Maybe the problem with many politicians is they’re breathing.

The late — and politically popular — Dennis Hof with two of his staff. Picture: Supplied

COMMENT

A big shout out to Dennis Hof who overcame the severe handicap of being dead to win election in District 36 of the Nevada State Assembly.

District 36 sits inside Nye County, Nevada. The county’s principal city, Pahrump, is a solid hour’s drive east to Las Vegas. It is home to 36,000 Nevadans, wedged on the Nevada-California border and ominously and perhaps auspiciously, Death Valley lies nearby. Pahrump became noteworthy (at least to me) as a part-setting and general den of inequity for the television drama, Get Shorty.

Hof enjoyed his 72nd birthday celebrations three weeks ago in Pahrump in the company of porn star Ron Jeremy, and recently pardoned former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and died the following day.

Death became Dead Dennis. He not only won but won in a landslide. The obvious conclusion is the Democrat candidate, Lesia Romanov, may not have been entirely compelling. But here’s the rub — Hof, in a state of the deepest repose, was seen as a better candidate dead than alive.

The denizens of District 36 were not altogether comfortable casting a vote for a man who owned seven legal brothels.

But dead he was just fine, and the punters came out and voted for him in droves. Dead Dennis received 68 per cent of the vote. Had Still Vaguely in the Vertical Dennis run, it may have gone down to the wire.

What’s next? A dead Abe Lincoln to emerge from his tomb in Springfield Illinois? Dead Thomas Jefferson and dead George Washington to battle it out in Virginia’s sixth district for another shot at the title?

Worse things could happen.

When we ask what is wrong with politics today, the neatest, correct answer is politicians, the overwhelming majority of whom are respiring.

Dead men can’t sue

Members of the NSW Labor Party have woken today to the news that their former leader, Luke Foley remains stoically zoetic. Some, no doubt, might wish otherwise. Dead men, after all, cannot sue.

There have been serious allegations made against Foley by ABC journalist, Ashleigh Raper. Foley has indicated they are not just false but defamatory and has called in the lawyers. Who he might sue is not immediately clear.

The allegations contained in a letter from Ms Raper were published widely across the state and country.

Ms Raper’s allegations indicate a serious indictable offence may have occurred and Mr Foley’s staff and colleagues, as well as members of the Berejiklian government, would do well to remember the failure to report it may also constitute a criminal offence.

I was present at the NSW parliament on the night in question. I only learned this when I reviewed my diary yesterday. I have very little to report. I was a guest in the President’s private dining room. I did emerge briefly for a cigarette which, in possible breach of NSW laws, can be smoked on a balcony adjoining the main parliamentary dining room.

I noticed only that the throng was making merry.

I had a brief chat with a few journalists and said g’day to then premier Mike Baird. I left the building and went home, declining to hit the bar in Martin Place where the alleged incident occurred.

Luke Foley resigns after being accused of sexual harassment, and threatens to sue. Picture: Darren Leigh Roberts

Sir Henry’s secret door

The NSW Parliament is a weird place. The ghosts of the dead, some feted, most not, appear all over its walls and in busts along the corridors.

Sir Henry Parkes had a secret door installed in to the Premier’s office. The story goes Parkes was something of a pants’ man and would use the clandestine exit when angry, cuckolded men would bang on the door demanding frontier justice.

In that very same office almost a century later, Premier Robin Askin used to count the bribes that arrived promptly every week like clockwork and in the traditional form of the brown paper bag from the then king of illegal gambling in NSW, Perce Galea. Ten grand. Cash on the knocker.

In 1899, the heavily refreshed member for Northumberland, John Norton, was caught urinating in the chamber of the Legislative Assembly.

Castigated by the parliament and sent packing, he ran as a candidate in the seat of Sydney-Fitzroy at the next election and won handsomely.

Norton famously lays a strong claim to inventing the term ‘wowser’ for the abstemious, when he referred to a Sydney councillor in the deeply alliterative as “the white, woolly, weary, watery, word-wasting wowser from Waverley.”

Norton was fired as editor of the scandal rag, The Sydney Truth for drunkenness. That he was too much of a drunk even to be a journalist is no mean feat, I’m sure you’ll agree.

He was horsewhipped in Pitt Street by a political opponent in 1898 in front of hundreds of shocked Sydneysiders otherwise going peacefully about their business. Norton responded by drawing a revolver and firing three shots at his assailant but unsurprisingly missed his target. He was later charged and fined five pounds.

On another occasion Norton was arrested in his home at Watson’s Bay. Returning to find his dinner not prepared, he became enraged and assaulted his wife with a fish.

The ugliness has moved from the bizarre, the eccentric, the dodgy and the distinctly shady to the downright appalling in recent times. It reached its nadir when Labor Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Milton Orkopoulos was plying kids with heroin and raping them in his ministerial office. He was convicted of multiple offences in 2008 and sentenced to a minimum of nine years in prison.

Last I heard Orkopoulos was alive and still in jail. Having declined to undertake a sex offender’s program, he was denied parole last year.

There followed a series of rolling disgraces, ICAC hearings, sackings for deplorable conduct, and finally criminal charges and imprisonment. There are so many members of the NSW Labor right faction in the clink (Orkopoulos was a lefty, in case you’re wondering), it’s a wonder there’s a not a prison wing named after it.

Overall, it is easy to conclude dead Nevadan pimp, Dennis Hof, would have made a better fist of things.