Adam Bandt shows silence is golden ... unless it’s Green
THE federal election being upon us, it is time for those of who live in the electorate of Melbourne to hear from Adam Bandt, writes James Campbell.
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THE federal election being upon us, it is time for those of who live in the electorate of Melbourne to hear from Adam Bandt.
In the first two years I lived here I never heard a thing from him, which suited me fine. Then last June, six months after Dan binned the thing — voila! — a leaflet arrived from the Greens MP saying: “It’s official. We stopped the East West toll road!”
Wow, I thought, that’s pretty lazy. Since then I’ve become a Bandt spotter — keeping an eye out for his appearances in the electorate. Perhaps I’m not looking hard enough but it strikes me he keeps the lowest profile of any MP I’ve ever had. Compared with the other MPs I’ve lived under — Bill Shorten in Maribyrnong, Kelvin Thomson in Wills and Peter Costello in Higgins — Bandt is positively invisible. The only place I seem to see him is staring down from his office wall in Brunswick St.
With its glasses and inane grin, Bandt’s favourite publicity shot makes him look a bit like a young version of Colonel Sanders. It popped through the letterbox this week on a glossy brochure listing things the Greens are against — Australia’s policies towards refugees, coal mining — and a lot of things Labor has done that they would like to be given credit for.
The people featured in the brochure are the types you would expect: a bearded youth, a retired sociology lecturer from La Trobe, one ethnic person, and a woman with her child. It was the last image that interested me.
Was this a subliminal reminder that the Greens are the party for people who need au pairs? Ever since the news broke that Bandt’s leader Dr Richard Di Natale used to employ au pairs at the very reasonable rate of $187 a week, I have been green with envy, as I suspect has every inner-city type with small children.
True, like most around here I don’t have a spare bedroom in which to park the au pair, as the wealthy Di Natale does, but why couldn’t they sleep on a floor mat as servants in Ireland used to do?
The rules around the employment of these helpful youths seem admirably lax but even so, I suspect a bedroom is a minimum requirement in 2016 even for the Irish. Still, if Di Natale and Bandt keep holding out a future for Australia that includes servants, I might think about voting for them.
James Campbell is a Sunday Herald Sun columnist
Originally published as Adam Bandt shows silence is golden ... unless it’s Green
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