One of the terrific luxuries of life in the democratic west is that we are free to write and say pretty much anything we like about our elected representatives.
In the space of one day this week, we saw a powerful demonstration of how blasé and indulgent some of us can be in exercising that freedom.
In Egypt, thousands of people have taken to the streets to demand the removal of a politician who for 18 years has resisted any shift towards democracy, and is still refusing to stand aside.
In Australia, where we have the power to re-elect or reject our federal politicians every three years, there is a tendency on the part of some to carry on as if we’re under the yoke of a dictatorship, and to suggest the basest of motives on our national leaders.
The quality of our politicians is a common gripe in Australia. After the treatment which both Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard received this week, you would have to wonder why any sane person would choose to go into politics at all.
This week we saw the alternative prime minister fitted up over an absurd and unsustainable allegation that he’d blithely dismissed the death of one of our soldiers by saying “shit happens”.
The comment, made to an equally plain-talking group of military commanders, was a broader reflection on the fact that whatever is done to protect the troops in the field, things will still go terribly wrong, as they did with the death of Corporal MacKinney. It was a fair term to use, especially in the context of a military culture which has given the language terms such as SNAFU, an acronym meaning “Situation Normal, All F***ed Up”. But the new squeamishness prevailed and Tony Abbott found himself on the end of sustained tut-tutting.
Upon being presented with the incendiary suggestion that he’d laughed off the death of a digger, attention then turned to the fact that Tony Abbott was so offended and angered by the slur that he stood there looking daggers at the reporter. This was deemed by some to be “the story.” It’s only a story if you believe – wrongly – that being rude to journalists is a hanging offence and that we hold such a special and warm place in the nation’s heart that Tony Abbott may never recover from looking like he wanted to deck one of us.
On the same day, Julia Gillard was steeling herself to address the nation’s Parliament on the floods and cyclone which ravaged Queensland in the first month of this year. The Prime Minister has been accused of sounding insincere and put-on in her management of the crisis.
It’s a valid line of inquiry; she invited much of the debate with her real Julia/fake Julia distinction during the election campaign. It’s been amplified by the widely-lauded performance of Queensland Premier Anna Bligh.
But what we saw from the PM on Tuesday was nothing other than barely restrained human emotion, at having the horrible job of recording the magnitude of the devastation our nation has just endured, and the legacy of those who died, those who endangered their lives saving others.
Gillard’s speech was magnificent and her broken delivery made it all the more emotional. But immediately after she had sat down, a crazily large number of people on talkback, on twitter and in sections of the media were lining up to say that the whole thing was a sham, that her tears were manufactured, that she’d put the whole thing on (and possibly been rehearsing) to kill once and for all the perception that she was flint-hearted or cold or insincere.
If this was a put-on the woman deserves an Oscar. It struck me as nothing more than a valiant attempt to maintain composure in discussing such awfulness.
If Gillard’s speech was magnificent, Abbott could not have been more decent in his very generous assessment that she had shown such a good heart in its delivery.
There are plenty of people who will passionately dispute this about Gillard. There are plenty of people who hate Abbott so much that they desperately want the shit happens story to be true.
If these people are right, then Australian has got an alternative prime minister – whose own government enthusiastically signed us up for the war in Afghanistan - who doesn’t much care that an Australian soldier has died in that conflict.
And we’ve got a prime minister who will try to get herself out of a scrape in the polls and rebuild her image by using the death of a couple of dozen people in a massive flood to turn on the tears.
Neither Tony Abbott nor Julia Gillard deserve that level of ridicule. It suggests that they are pretty much morally bankrupt. Shit does indeed happen, and there was plenty of it around this week.
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