Like a clean set of bed sheets, Australia’s Labor pollies have opted to freshen up the cabinet and air out the House of Reps, voting to pull Kevin Rudd from PM and replace him with Julia Gillard early yesterday morning in a midnight coup. The first question one or two enlightened Yanks have asked me today is “Does this happen very often in Australia?” Bear in mind that by the time a president is elected in the U.S., so much effort has gone into creating t-shirts, buttons, posters, bumper stickers, lawn signs, slogans and marzipan cookies that tossing the boss seems a waste of marketing materials. They’d far rather follow a wayward leader down a rabbit hole “regulated militia”-style than have to go out and buy some white spirits to get the McCain/Palin 2008 bumper sticker off their car. Here in America, ideology is frequently followed off a cliff in the name of the constitution, or into an Applebees armed with a semi-automatic weapon and questionable interpretations of the forefathers’ text, practicality be damned. In contrast, "yes!" Australian leaders are ousted relatively frequently by ambitious underlings. Call it tall poppy syndrome; we are inherently suspicious of anyone with a better job than ourselves, and constantly murmuring under our breath, "Wanker. If I had his job ..."I will vouch that Australian politics come off as somewhat rowdy, particularly as they are only reported on abroad in the case of racist outbursts, human rights violations, trips to strip clubs, bad jokes by a politician in speech, or the national leader being turfed. Anyone who has ever caught some of “Question Time” knows that politics down under operate as transparently as a fish-slapping dance. Politicians joust, tickle, rib, prank and cajole one another on the floor of the House of Representatives and Senate, all in the name of democracy and lawmaking. Rhetoric is dutch ovened in a thick doona of colloquialism so as to tone down the toffishness of running a country – and therein lies the difference between politics in the U.S. and in Australia.
Where the good citizens (patriots!) of the United States wish to have a leader that will move them, who will issue starchy commencement addresses, and ideally come up with something truly memorable they can one day etch into a Washington D.C. monument in Doric fashion, Australians wish to elect someone who can cut his opponents down either through superior performance in yard-glass drinking, or through a really good insult. “Gong him Red!” We wish to be taken seriously, but also wish not to have anyone too nerdy, tanti-prone or reserved in top office; read: no one too English. Australian politics, gently partisan as they are, allow voters to both hate the PM, but at the same time applaud his sense of humor. To jest, here is an excerpt from Question Time on June 1, where now-PM Julia Gillard invokes the opposition leader’s (Tony Abbott) support of the Work Choices initiative:
“The Leader of the Opposition would get up in the morning, make a cup of coffee, walk over to the fridge to get the milk out and there would be a Work Choices fridge magnet. He would get himself ready for work, he would get into the office and the first thing he would do when he was in the office was pick up his Work Choices pen. And then when he was starting to work on “Battlelines,” having his first preliminary thoughts, they were not very big thoughts so he could have got out his Work Choices pad and written them down. And then, as he was more ready to bring out “Battlelines,” he would have been working away on the computer looking at his mouse pad every day—24/7 indoctrination has obviously got to the Leader of the Opposition. Fortunately, my department apparently rejected his request for Work Choices budgie-smugglers because the thought was too hideous to contemplate. But I have a standing offer to the Leader of the Opposition and I am waiting for his response. I still have five pallets of Work Choices propaganda. I have done my best. They have gone to Ethiopia. They have gone to East Timor. They have gone around the world. I have done my best to get rid of them, but I have five pallets of Work Choices propaganda. I have 34,000 individual items— Work Choices pens, mousepads and all the rest of it— ready to go. I am asking the Leader of the Opposition, so I do not have to table 34,000 items at some point, whether he can take these items off my hands. They will be very good for his next campaign, because we know that his slogan is going to be ‘Work Choices— good for workers’. Tony, you will really need these on the campaign trail.” (emphasis added)
[Parliamentary justice, as portrayed on The Simpsons]Periodic rum rebellions also do serve to freshen the halls of parliament, and keep us from diving off too high a platform, lest our soft bellies slap the hard meniscus of a still swimming pool of voter resentment. To wit, the furore around General McChrystal’s comments to Rolling Stone inspired a real dilemma: he had bad-mouthed his superior (a real military no-no), but to fire him would certainly upset diplomacy in Afghanistan, right? Rather, in treating our politicians as ultimately expendable, the court of public opinion can swish against the cliffs of Greater Judgement and, through attrition, a better compromise can be reached. Lost a member of parliament? We've got 225 more. I wonder then, what such a triumphant ousting means for Obama, whose political trajectory has mirrored that of Rudd. Public sentiment for the post-Howard/Bush administrations has indeed sailed.
So! A new day, a new leader – a ginger leader in fact, which should speak volumes about her ability to fight back verbally; we carrots grow a thick skin while we are young. Will Gillard out-perform her predecessor? It doesn’t matter too much, just as long as we keep up the Aussie crawl. Goodbye Kevin 07. Gotta zip!
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