This was published 6 months ago
Opinion
Why our response to Joyce having one for the road is mid-strength
Sean Kelly
ColumnistAlcohol is a force in our national politics.
Sometimes this is pleasant, comical. “I think quite a few bottles of wine were consumed by the three of us,” said Tony Abbott once, recalling drinking with colleagues. “Peter [Costello] was close to leaving at that stage, and I think all of us were in a mellow and reflective mood, so the reflections went on for longer, and later, than they should have.” Abbott fell asleep on his office couch and missed the vote on Kevin Rudd’s stimulus bill.
Parliament House has a long and storied drinking culture.Credit: Jim Pavlidis
That force can also be malicious. In 2021, Senator Sam McMahon lost her preselection race just days after suggestions she had been drunk in the parliament – which she denied, saying she had hypertension, which her opponents had exploited.
It can wreck lives: the role it has played in the culture at Parliament House, including allegations of both sexual harassment and assault. Often it is merely melancholy. Last year, Senator Lidia Thorpe painted a picture of existential desperation when she questioned the mental health of female senators “staggering around drunk by themselves” at night.
In Barnaby Joyce’s autobiography, he writes of drinking heavily while deputy prime minister. This was, at least in part, a response to what seems to have been quite a serious depression.
It is harder to weaponise accusations of drinking against people who are open about it, which may explain some of what felt to me like a collective shrug at Joyce’s latest quasi-scandal. Last week, a video appeared in the Daily Mail of Joyce swearing into his phone while lying on his back on a Canberra footpath. There are reports he had attended two functions at Parliament House that night, and Joyce told several colleagues he was feeling the effects of mixing alcohol with medication when he fell off a plant box and swore about it.
People seem a little interested in this, enough to mention it; but hardly outraged, perhaps mildly amused. I’m the same; I neither mind nor care. But our level of interest is itself revealing, for the two contrasts to which it points.
The first is historical. Not long ago drunk politicians were heroes. Bob Hawke’s larrikin reputation was built to a fair extent on his drinking feats before he was prime minister. In 2007, when Kevin Rudd’s trip to a New York strip club became news, some in Labor braced for impact, but voters seemed to love it.
Since Hawke was PM, perhaps even since Rudd, something has shifted. In 2015 Abbott publicly skolled a beer. In a piece discussing what felt odd about this, journalist Judith Ireland wrote, “perhaps it is that it was an unmistakably and assertively macho act – amid a chanting group of hyped-up dudes. And that it came from a Prime Minister who has been trying for the last 18 months to convince us that he is also the Minister for Women.”
The way we read the act depends both on the times and the person, and the ways they are entangled. Hawke’s drinking was taken as a sign of who he was, which made sense in the context of the time he led the country. By the time Abbott led, masculinity and its place in the nation had shifted; the way Abbott personified a certain version of masculinity had become troubling.
An image from video footage of Barnaby Joyce on the footpath in Braddon, Canberra on Wednesday.Credit: Nine
We have changed the way we interpret drinking, but there is something that hasn’t changed, too. In 2018, Jacqueline Maley wrote in this masthead that a woman would not be allowed the “level of personal complexity” that Joyce was. When a woman transgresses, it is used to point back to her as a cartoonish type of some sort. Men’s failings are used as pointers to their depth. What is common to the cases of Hawke, Rudd, Abbott and Joyce – despite the changing interpretations of drinking – is that each time that interpretation was used as an aid to better understanding them as people, a new and useful clue to their character.
There is a more sinister comparison, though it depends on the same mechanics. In a piece about Indigenous deaths in police custody, Amy McQuire writes of Rebecca Maher, a 36-year-old mother, detained for being drunk, who hours later was dead; and of Kwementyaye Briscoe, 28, arrested for being drunk in public, who was dying while the officer on duty listened to his iPod.
Following the footpath video, some asked the questions: what if Joyce had been arrested last week? What if he had died in a cell? These ideas seem absurd, in part because it should be absurd that anyone dies in such conditions. But if the comparison itself seems absurd – unsurprising that Indigenous people die this way, inconceivable that Joyce might – it can only be because we accept the different ways that drunkenness is read, and the different consequences that result.
Too many of us – certainly too many of our police – see the drunkenness of an Indigenous person not as a clue to their individuality, as a door that might be pushed upon to see where it might take us, but as a blocked passage, a place to stop. Our racist incuriosity (or contempt, or hatred) leaves us satisfied with just two facts: they are drunk, and they are Indigenous. That, it often seems, is enough to justify their death.
I hope there is a bright side to our reactions to Joyce: that our indifference to the video comes from a tiredness with expending our outrage on trivial things. And perhaps, too, it comes from a tiredness with attempting to interpret the personalities of our politicians. I wonder if Scott Morrison showed us the limits of that approach, leading us to conclude, on some level, that what matters about a politician is what they do with their power.
But it is also possible that it comes from a despairing sense that our politicians no longer sit above us; that we do not look to them as people we might admire; which also means they can’t disappoint.
Or perhaps there is nothing broader to say, and it is merely a simple story about Joyce alone: once we found him interesting, now we don’t.
Sean Kelly is author of The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison, a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.