LEONARD COLQUHOUN
Comment 30, perhaps the problem with the Braddon voters not having “elected representatives with better standards” is with the choice they were offered. Perhaps the problem is that the candidates on offer as our reps are now quite UNrepresentative of us. Let’s run through what seems to have become the typical starting line-up …
~ ALP: definitely no engine drivers à la Ben Chifley, nor ex-policemen à la Bill Hayden. No, the pre-MP CV goes more like this:
University degree, but not in any really ‘hard’ subjects such foreign languages and the physical sciences, more likely filled up with those XYZ Studies types of units which are barely-disguised propaganda for some or other vague, cosy and comfortable Leftward ideology where people are not individuals but cogs in some or other collective. Could be harmless, or even, at a stretch, useful, if balanced and tempered by a stretch of real life.
But, no: it’s on to a Party job – up from office dogsbody and gopher to branch organiser, factional warlord, or a political career job as an adviser, researcher, media manager, you know the type. Or a union job, using important positions in the union hierarchy – and the trust which union members placed in them – as rungs on the upward climb to pre-selection. Judge the factional weather finely, and it’s pre-selection, election and, hey presto: an MP. Job done.
~ Coalition: partly as above, mutatis mutandis. But employer organisations, while superficially parallel to workplace organisation, don’t act so easily as rungs to political ascent.
The real problem with potential Coalition MPs seems to be that the majority of coalition voters don’t operate in the public-funded world: their offspring go to private schools (esp. at secondary level), their sick and injured are tended in private hospitals paid for by private health insurance, they don’t ride trains, trams or buses, and don’t live in public housing. While they live and operate in a world outside politics in ways that their ALP equivalents do not, a life lived among the A and B quintiles doesn’t help them to appreciate how the other 60% live leading to (the perception of) a Let-them-eat-cake^ dismissal of the struggles of the C, D and E quintiles.
~ Greens: perhaps they fall into two main categories, very generally speaking.
(All of the above, it needs to be stressed forcefully, is “very generally speaking”: readers and posters will most likely think of many exceptions.)
For Green aspirants, the initial career post-school career path is probably similar to those of ALP candidates; after that, there is the dedicated, committed idealist who either invites suspicion by what seems to be monomania, or who sullies his or her commitment by acting on the awful realisation, that in the world as it is here and now, that Big Bad C-word is essential.
Or else they turn out to be no more than the early 21st century version of your standard single-issue fanatic, with that same totalitarian, autocratic, wowserish, Dear-Leader-knows-best, attitude than cannot abide ordinary blokes and sheilahs, who “waste” their lives on football, bling, fast cars, faddish clothing, big-screen TVs, etc., et-bloody-cetera. Fanatics who can’t see the Colleens and Colins for the Collective.
If there’s one thing which gets right up their noses, it’s the 495,000 drongos who don’t read TT.
Devil of a choice, ain’t it.
^ Wikipedia has an interesting discussion of this alleged and/or attributed Marie Antoinette dictum, showing that, unlike that other woman’s 1963 statement about “Well, he would, wouldn’t he”, its provenance is very dodgy.
But it still sounds good.
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