You may have heard the phrase, much-beloved by corporate types and politicians alike, “in the space”.
During question time this week, the Minister for Social Services, Dan Tehan, in receipt of a Dorothy Dixer from the member for Tangney, Dan Morton, lauded his colleague for having “a keen interest in the welfare space”.
If you keep an eye on reporting of the corporate world the same phrase pops up with monotonous regularity. A bloke who works in a bank is almost invariably described as having a “long history of working in the finance space”.
It’s an annoying phrase, vague and faddish, and I regret having to use it - but I fear I must because there is something deeply, deeply wrong in the Canberra space.
Come yesterday, the crazy-meter was already quivering at the red extreme after government senator Michaelia Cash’s outburst the previous day. It slipped into “dangerously unhinged” when Labor senator Kim Carr reached deep into his Godwin’s Law sack of epithets to refer to Liberal senator James Paterson as a member of the Hitler-Jugend.
The wags have nicknamed Carr “Kim il-Carr” due to his association with Labor’s Victorian left faction; perhaps that’s why he thought references to vicious totalitarian regimes was going to pass muster. He seemed genuinely surprised that his Liberal colleague would take umbrage with being likened to a member of a slavering group of brainwashed child-zealots propelled by ultra-nationalism and anti-Semitism.
Carr at first humbly offered the oblique, non-apology beloved of politicians along the lines of “If it offends you, I’ll withdraw” and finally a bit later: “I apologise for those remarks and we can move on from there.”
Unlike his near-namesake, Kim Carr has never overseen a famine caused by collectivising agricultural production while simultaneously reverting to medieval farming techniques and technology but give him time. Pyongyang wasn’t built in a day, you know.
There has been a lot of to and fro about what is euphemistically described as the outburst from Michaelia Cash on Wednesday. Yesterday, Malcolm Turnbull backed his Minister for Jobs and Innovation (a Turnbullian portfolio creation if ever there was one), seemingly content with Cash’s “unreserved withdrawal”.
Within several hours the Liberal Party had developed its default rationalisation. Michaelia Cash had been provoked. Worse, she had been bullied. Or indeed, one argument went, she hadn’t yet been bullied but she was about to be and lashed out at her tormentor, Labor senator Doug Cameron, first.
So, let’s go to the third umpire, which in this case is the Hansard. Readers can happily flip through to page 14 of the pdf and read on from there.
My take on this is that Cameron was doing a poor to middling job of forensic investigation. Put it this way, he’s no Robert Ray or John Faulkner, whose precision interrogation of ministers and bureaucrats back in the day was both brutal and impressive. But the bullying claim doesn’t stand up because a) it is a form of inquiry that necessarily involves a form of fairly rough cross-examination and b) Michaelia Cash offered the following statement during Cameron’s questioning to indicate what was going on was a bit of theatre that she quite enjoyed.
“Senator Cameron, you and I have played this game, we have danced this dance, we have done this many times before. You and I enjoy it, I think, at the end of the day, and we have a bit of a laugh once the lights go off and Hansard are no longer broadcasting. I’m delighted to do this yet again with you all day; however, if you do verbal me I will have no choice but to correct the record. You have verballed me by saying that a number of my staff left the office as a result of the incident in October. You know that’s incorrect.”
Anyway, read it for yourself and make up your own mind.
But the Michaelia Cash brain snap took a turn for the loopier when she entered her final round of Senate estimates hearings yesterday. It should be explained she chose a path where media is perhaps not allowed to film and that is why parliamentary security staff wheeled in a large whiteboard to screen her from view. Rather naughtily, Channel 9 took a snap of the minister’s phone as she was receiving texts from a staffer, plotting her escape route away from the shrieking cries of journos and the whirrs of betacams.
Those who enjoy a day at the races know that when the screens go up, generally speaking, bad things are about to happen. Not to put too fine a point on it, it is time to reach into your pocket and give the kids $10 to go and buy a couple of buckets of chips in order to avoid offering the not entirely convincing explanation that the horse being winched up on a makeshift crane is going to go and live on a farm, a beautiful farm, the very same farm that bitey dog went to, what’s-his-name, a lovely farm that is just too far away to visit.
And so it is in politics. But screens fashioned from whiteboards are simply asking for trouble, an awful combination where crap magic is paired with the summoning of the ghosts of whiteboard scandals past. In politics, nothing good has come from a whiteboard or ever will. Disgrace. Opprobrium. Malaria and bad juju. As one, the networks kicked off their political coverage with the Cash scuttle. It created an impression of a minister and, more broadly, a government hiding in the shadows.
The digital wizards at @australian have turned Michaelia Cash's new entry at https://t.co/4f8J6TsTbe into a moving 404 pic.twitter.com/TUF8829vWn
— James Jeffrey (@James_Jeffrey) March 2, 2018
Elsewhere in the big house, the member for Longman, Susan Lamb, has been yellow carded on citizenship grounds but churlishly refuses to leave the field of play. Bill Shorten had a free trip to the Great Barrier Reef courtesy of the Australian Conservation Foundation where, presumably, his contribution to conserving this national treasure amounted to him atomising coral with a thong. Malcolm Turnbull can get Foxtel Now and Netflix without the annoying buffering while you and I can’t, even if we did live in Point Piper and we don’t.
Why does any of this matter? In the long run it doesn’t, except to say that it confirms our politics is in a wretched phase of bad government and lamentable opposition. “Why don’t they get on with running the country?” is the common, understandable refrain. I would argue they don’t run the country or if they do, they are merely tinkering at the edges. Shut the whole thing down for a couple of months and the sun would continue to rise in the east, we’d trundle off to work and go about our business.
What should be of concern is that the Canberra high farce undermines the parliament’s dedicated attention-seekers. They are being callously upstaged by those we had been led to believe were the sensible ones.
Bob “The Hat” Katter can hardly get a word in. Silenced by the din around him, he runs the risk of spontaneous combustion and becoming Australian politics’ version of a Spinal Tap drummer.
Pauline Hanson continues to call for cuts to immigration but has found that space already taken. Regardless of what you think of Hanson, I think we can all agree that the prospect of relative anonymity is not going to be good for her general health.
Meanwhile the parliament’s favourite “everybody look at me” player, Derryn Hinch, is reduced to retweeting sundry topics and related trivia of mild interest at best. Starved of attention he could go into painful withdrawals, and be seen wandering through the Canberra Centre demanding passers-by say something about him while he tweets self-praise.
One of Hunter S. Thompson’s most alluring aphorisms is: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro” but in the case of the Australian political environment it doesn’t hold up because the truly weird have become the norm, pushed to the cheap seats of the crazy train while the straights in their pantsuits, comfortable shoes and expensive ties, juggle chainsaws in first class.
In this Canberra space, no one can hear anybody scream.
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