POLITICS... with Mungo MacCallum
It’s a truly terrible realisation, but the person most like Peter Slipper in the current Australian parliament is none other than Tony Abbott. You don’t, or at least don't want to, believe this? Then, as Gough Whitlam might say, compare and contrast.
Both are vigorous men in their fifties, highly ambitious and committed politicians. Both went to exclusive schools and on to university to study law. Both are now conservative Christians and militant monarchists with a zeal for their causes which occasionally upsets their more cautious colleagues. Both are married with children.
But it goes further, becomes more personal. Both are immensely proud of their bodies, which they show off on every occasion. Slipper, we are told, showers with the door open. Abbott now appears in Speedos and, I am told, once shared a house with convent educated girls where he paraded around naked until asked to leave.
Slipper has been accused of sexual harassment; Abbott was described by his student contemporaries as a thug and a bully who used sexist and racist tactics to cower his opponents. And there are stories of his behaviour in those days which make the current allegations about Slipper seem like the merest peccadillos in comparison.
For a time at least their shared positions and interests apparently drew them together: Abbott was a welcome guest at Slipper’s wedding and as recently as 2010 spoke glowingly as the man was endorsed for the ninth time by the coalition to represent them in the federal parliament; indeed, they even voted for him as their sole nominee for the high office of Deputy Speaker. It was Slipper who cast the final vote to enable Abbott to knock off Malcolm Turnbull in 2009; if he had been able to repeat the act to make Abbott Prime Minister a year later his grateful leader would have happily kissed him on both cheeks, or probably all four.
But how it has all changed. We are now assured that Abbott knew Slipper was pretty suss all along and that the party was planning to deny him preselection next time around.
Well, true; but this was only because a heavier candidate, the former Howard minister Mal Brough, wanted his seat. It had very little to do with the many allegations of rorting and misconduct which Abbott and his colleagues had known about, and studiously ignored, for at least six years.
Now suddenly they have become hanging offences. As a boxer, Abbott was forced to abide by Queensberry rules but he has abandoned them in his single-minded desire to Sink the Slipper. No, not quite single minded: he would also like to stomp Craig Thomson, a comparative stranger but another who is standing in the way of Abbott’s overweening ambition.
And his relentless pursuit of both is at least starting to pay off: the media have responded to Abbott’s campaign to such an extent that Julia Gillard has been forced to abandon her commitment to the presumption of innocence and sideline them both.
Slipper will not return to the chair until all is resolved – which will take months; and Thomson has been suspended from the Labor caucus for a similarly indefinite period.
Abbott says this does not count because Thomson still intends to vote with the government and Gillard intends to accept his vote; but once again Abbott is exhibiting a selective memory, not to mention weaselling hypocrisy. He was a member of John Howard’s government in 1996, when the prime minister lured Labor’s Mal Colston to rat in the senate with the offer of the Deputy President’s job. Colston accepted, but was forced to stand down from the chair when his former party brought allegations of rorting his travel allowances against him. Sound familiar?
But unlike Slipper in the House of Representatives, Colston still had a deliberative vote in the senate. For a while Howard virtuously rejected it, but then found he needed it and grabbed it – at a time when Colston, unlike Slipper or Thomson, had actually been charged with defrauding the government and was awaiting trial. Howard’s excuse? Well, the man was entitled to the presumption of innocence, wasn’t he?
It has all been very unedifying and Gillard is right to say that it is bringing the parliament into disrepute at a time when that august institution needs all the help it can get. But just who is responsible for dragging the place down?
Sure, the buck starts with Slipper and Thomson, who are obviously seriously unlovable individuals. But if they are actually guilty of anything more than that, it is up to the law to deal with them. Neither can be forced to leave parliament except through death, resignation or conviction on a serious criminal charge.
And the accusations against them, which in both cases seem to have been activated initially by personal malice rather that a commitment to the public interest, are certainly serious, but they hardly amount to crimes against humanity. Slipper did not organise the Sandakan death march and Thomson was not in charge of the My Lai massacre.
And yet the parliament, and even more culpably the so-called quality press, have been utterly obsessed with the affair for what seems like forever. In one breath the editorials lament the lack of genuine policy debate in Australia; in the next they salivate over whatever new suggestion of low grade sleaze the muck rakers can conjure up.
We deserve better. There are real problem, and uncertainties facing the country, and in this wider context the goings on of Slipper and Thomson – unless and until they actually bring down the government – don’t matter a rat’s arse. And I know, I’ve spent the last thousand words joining in the wallowing – but only to point out how silly it all is. I won’t do it again. Trust me, I’m a journalist.
