I can’t tell you with any certainty when Australian politics became purely an ego sport, when it became untethered from shame, or modesty, or dignity, or proportion, and just fell face-first into its own soap opera, lapsing into a daily practice of coughing up fur balls – but we are here now and, at times, it is sickening.
On Wednesday we were treated to the spectacle of two Riverview old boys – a former prime minister, Tony Abbott, who keeps doggedly prosecuting a battle he has already lost, flogging incendiary populist claptrap as a manifestation of his thwarted greatness – and a deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, who seemingly cannot shut his mouth to save himself.
Abbott railed querulously against Scott Morrison, and experts, particularly Treasury shiny bums, and non-integrating migrants in the hope that his former chief of staff, or someone else on the Sky News night shift or 2GB, those being the focus groups of choice, might present him to the world as he sees himself – as a misunderstood political genius, cruelly cut down by lesser mortals.
In Armidale Joyce summoned Fairfax for a one-on-one exclusive to project himself on to the redemption trail, perhaps piloting a new reality TV franchise – Misunderstood Public Figures of New England.
Flanked by his new partner, who didn’t want to be photographed but offered her pay slips for public inspection, Joyce felt himself a victim of “malice”.
He wasn’t after sympathy (which rather begged the question why the small media entourage was camped in the deputy prime minister’s borrowed lounge room in Armidale when he was supposed to be on personal leave in his hair shirt, as per Malcolm Turnbull’s unequivocal, head prefect’s edict).
Barnaby, the antithesis of an ascetic, proceeded with nursing the flame of his impulses. He just wanted to be understood, and for the media to stop asking questions, because, seriously guys, enough was enough. This is the new absurdist art form in professional politics: gathering the media to let it be known you don’t intend to subject yourself to any meaningful scrutiny.
This could have been funny, it could have had a laugh track, like some grim sitcom churned out by gag writers in a sweatshop – except real people were involved, are still involved, so it wasn’t.
It was just indulgent, an indulgence squaring up against Turnbull’s indulgence the week before in publicly excoriating Joyce and inviting a character debate in Australian politics – entirely zero-sum, and like so much of what now passes for political discussion, disconcertingly unmoored from reality.
Watching Abbott punching away at the air, and Joyce talking and talking, and feeling all the feelings, predominantly the feelings of how he had been wronged, and maligned and misunderstood – I was taken back to a memorial service I attended last Friday for one of the greatest political journalists this country has produced, Michael Gordon, who left us in typically modest fashion, quietly, a couple of weeks ago, without saying goodbye.
At Mick’s service, Paul Keating had paid tribute to him as a participant in the best sense of that word.
Keating as prime minister had articulated some ambitions for the country, what a modern, vibrant contemporary Australia might look like, and how it could make peace with its history.
Like it, love it, loathe it – there was a program. And Mick had risen to the occasion of explaining and interrogating the program, believing that to be an essential part of the journalistic compact of serving the public interest and trying to make the country a better place.
Listening to Keating’s farewell for Mick I was struck by how that basic civic function: politics engaged in policy debates, and the battle of ideas, and the journalistic function of prosecuting and interrogating the big ideas, is fast becoming a museum piece in contemporary Australia.
As I sat and mourned my friend and mentor, I also mourned the passing of the era in which his craft had prospered – when political conversation was about something more than serving the immediate interests of the political class. When it was about something more profound than some generously remunerated and superannuated politicians’ sense of personal grievance.
For almost a decade we’ve had revenge tragedy and palace intrigues as the grand narrative of Australian public life. We’ve had a succession of political leaders who have had ample opportunity and blown it, trailed by an unhinged media chorus only too happy to provide minute-by-minute coverage of the spectacle.
At some point we have to be self-aware enough to know that it diminishes all of us – this circus, this ceaseless clamour and chatter.
The public watch on agog at the toxic maelstrom we all inhabit, wondering when someone might do them the courtesy of regaining consciousness, and looking outside, and grappling with what a contemporary program for government might look like.
Every time politics tries to press reset on the core function, to actually start talking about the issues people really care about, the protagonists seem to lack the collective attention span to carry it through, and we lapse back into sideshow alley, because dysfunction has become so familiar, so ingrained, so expected, that media operations can actually build business models around it.
Politics is presenting to the Australian public as little more than institutionalised self-absorption at taxpayer expense.
It is obscene, it is exhausting and it is mostly pointless.
The Jesuits that educated Abbott and Joyce like to talk about “men for others” – a Catholic concept of serving a cause larger than yourself.
Right now, we seem about as far away from that calling as it is possible to be.
