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Government’s rubbish starts to fester

If you’re going to take out the political trash, make sure the garbageman is there to collect it, warns Tom Richardson.

Jan 08, 2016, updated Jan 08, 2016
The State Liberals were sticking together during the recent bushfires, but will they stand by their man now? Photo: Twitter.

The State Liberals were sticking together during the recent bushfires, but will they stand by their man now? Photo: Twitter.

Remember that kid named Corey Worthington? Sure you do.

He’s the lad who made international headlines around this time eight years ago when he threw a house party while his parents were away. Which trashed said house.

That’s it.

Kinda funny really.

But on a slow news day, the aftermath became a media invitation.

And then, on a slow news week, the kid’s unapologetic reticence (not to mention his ubiquitous yellow sunnies) became the gift that kept on giving.

By week’s end, he was famous, an unofficial icon of the slacker generation. Shops had a run on yellow sunglasses. Leila McKinnon scolded the kid on A Current Affair like an indignant parent.

And why did all this happen?

Well, largely because there was nothing much else to report on that day in early January.

Malcolm Turnbull was accused of “taking out the trash” when his Government slipped two ministerial resignations into the political ether in quick succession during that dead zone between Christmas and New Year. It was a fair assessment; the day before Jamie Briggs and Mal Brough farewelled the cabinet (prompting a few wags to speculate that the Turnbull ministry had begun resigning in alphabetical order), the Government had declared its commitment to Gonski was, well, gonski. The day after came the unsurprisingly scathing report of the Heydon Royal Commission.

The strategy was neither original nor particularly elaborate: get the bad news out the way in a flurry, then throw in something that usurps it in the news cycle.

But, as one Labor hack put it, if you’re going to take out the trash, you’d better make sure the garbageman hasn’t gone on holiday.

Otherwise it just sits there, festering on your doorstep.

Which is what’s happened with the Briggs affair, wherein the SA MP was urged to “consider his position” after a junior consular official complained about his leeringly inappropriate behaviour at a Hong Kong bar.

The notion that the resignation of a relatively junior minister might swamp the political news cycle for a fortnight evidently never crossed the minds of the Government’s (for want of a better word) strategists. Especially a relatively junior minister from a state the Government tends to consider as an awkward outpost of the federation, like a mute but nonetheless slightly annoying baby cousin (once removed) who needs to be begrudgingly accommodated at the family Christmas lunch, only to then devour the lion’s share of the pudding.

But a confluence of events has seen to it that the Briggs matter has become a sort of zeitgeist moment, the manifestation of Labor’s long-sounded lament that the Coalition frontbench has “a problem with women”.

The culture of casual sexism in Australian politics and sport has been laid bare

The silly, insensitive and ill-advised sharing of a photo of the wronged public servant and the ham-fisted and lunk-headed intervention of Briggs’s mate Peter Dutton ensured the story didn’t just keep going, but escalated into a Government-wide scandal. Symbolically, this was no longer a case of Turnbull evicting an undesirable element, but of a pervading misogyny in the Liberal right.

The subsequent furore over Chris Gayle’s unfortunate flirtation with his Network Ten interviewer Mel McLaughlin may have hogged the spotlight, but it perpetuated the theme.

This has been a week wherein the culture of casual sexism in Australian politics and sport has been laid bare. That it has not been consequently universally rejected is perhaps the worst of it.

Those who formulated what Blackadder’s Baldrick might have labelled a “cunning plan” for taking out the Government’s trash might not conceivably have predicted Dutton and Gayle.

But surely they could have foretold that a scandal involving a ministerial resignation, an unwanted flirtation and a Prime Minister happily divesting himself of a political opponent was a story with a longer shelf life than the conclusions of a royal commission whose evidence has all been heard publicly and reported for the past two years.

Instead of Briggs being trumped by Heydon, the opposite has occurred.

The idea, presumably, was that most of the national political reporters were away on leave, kicking back with canapés and Aperol Spritzes (which, if you haven’t heard, is what everyone with a Facebook account was drinking between Christmas and New Year), and the ministerial resignations would be given cursory coverage before the wounds were quickly cauterised.

But they didn’t factor in the Corey Worthington factor.

When there’s not much else going on, a ministerial resignation is manna from heaven for journos who have been twiddling their collective thumbs waiting for a story to drop.

To lose one minister in a day is a misfortune; to lose two…well, you know the drill.

And unfortunately for Briggs, he has become this silly season’s Corey Worthington.

But while his behaviour should not and has not been excused, a sense of perspective is required. He has resigned from the frontbench, losing – for now, at least – a promising and still-fledgling ministerial career. When some of his colleagues tweeted their sympathy and personal support, they were shouted down for doing so. On the facts that are publicly available, was his transgression so great that he should be completely friendless? Does it undo any acumen, any achievements and successes, in his public life?

Others in the SA Liberal Party, an organisation that has always handled political embarrassments with a minimum of fuss and chaos (cough), were quick to scout likely replacements in Briggs’ seat of Mayo. That’s despite him intimating his intention to carry on as an MP; he will say only that he stands by his public statement, which refers obtusely to “working hard in his electorate to ensure the re-election of the Government”.

This could get messy. Or messier.

But amid it all, we have heard next to nothing of Brough.

Briggs was dispatched with ruthless efficiency, whereas Brough had been shielded from his fate over several months, as his position became more and more untenable, amid contradictory statements to parliament and a police investigation into the alleged illegal copying of former Speaker Peter Slipper’s diaries in 2012.

But, much like Dyson Heydon’s commission findings, the detail of that was already well known, the coals thoroughly raked over, and Brough’s temporary banishment a virtual fait accompli.

Thus, he became a footnote, on a suddenly crowded political agenda.

Another historical recollection: shortly after Princess Diana met her grim fate in that Paris tunnel, the widely-beloved missionary Mother Teresa died in Calcutta.

As then UK tabloid editor Piers Morgan recalled in his diaries: “Normally she would get on every front page and have huge pullout tributes… but today, she was an afterthought, tucked away on page 21.”

“It will be a great Trivial Pursuit question in years to come,” he wrote. “On what page did the Mirror cover Mother Teresa’s death in 1997?”

If Jamie Briggs is this season’s Corey Worthington, Brough is akin to Mother Teresa. Except, y’know, without all the good deeds.

An afterthought.

In his carefully constructed statement, Briggs emphasised that “nothing illegal has been alleged, or did in fact occur”.

His former cabinet colleague cannot make the same claim.

And yet we dwell on Briggs, and his boorish offence.

Maybe take out the trash day wasn’t such a complete write-off after all…

Tom Richardson is a senior journalist with InDaily. His political column is published on Fridays.

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