PM’s on point
IT was no surprise that voters this week endorsed Malcolm Turnbull’s decision to ban ministers from having sex with their staff.
Two-thirds of Australians polled in Monday’s Newspoll agree with the new ministerial guidelines the PM unveiled last week in response to the Barnaby Joyce affair.
It’s actually the same proportion of people who think Joyce should step down as leader of the National Party, over the scandal which involves his leaving wife, Natalie, and four children, after getting his media adviser, Vikki Campion, pregnant and shifting her to another minister’s office.
What the poll figures really show is the Prime Minister is more in touch with community values than the political and media classes, whose louche attitude is “everyone does it”, amid much mirth about “bedroom police”.
But you saw Bill Shorten do a sharp U-turn Monday after he saw the Newspoll and pledge support for the ban, which he’d spent all weekend deriding.
Yes, Malcolm Turnbull did the right thing speaking up for family values and sexual propriety in the workplace. He’s not issued a decree. He’s not calling for bedroom police. He’s not created a “bonking round” for journalists. He’s not a prude or a wowser.
He’s simply responding to what his Treasurer Scott Morrison calls a “very bad political culture” that’s taken root in Canberra and which is out of step with the behaviour Australians expect from themselves and from their leaders. Not to do so would be condoning it.
As Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg put it bluntly on ABC’s Q&A this week, Turnbull expects the leadership of this country, from himself down, to reflect a standard which was not the case with Barnaby.
Joyce is the exception. Most married people in Australia treat their vows seriously and make the effort to resist the temptation of affairs. Most marriages don’t end up in divorce in Australia — in fact fewer than one third break down — and most people don’t cheat on their spouse.
Yet this good news story about the strength of the majority of Australian marriages is rarely told. In fact, it seems the chattering classes go out of their way to give the opposite impression, people like chief executive of Melbourne University Publishing Louise Adler, who appeared on Q&A alongside Frydenberg this week confidently declaring: “I think it’s over 40 per cent of marriages fail in Australia.” Just plain wrong.
If our political leaders and media continue to act as if marital fidelity and stability is an aberration then it soon will be.
We are suggestible social animals and we tend to go along with what we’re told is the prevailing social norm. And for some perverse reason the story we have told ourselves since the mid 1970s, when no-fault divorce became law, is that stable, intact, faithful marriages are a near im- possible ideal, and who cares anyway.
Well, the opposite is the case, as the rate of divorce declines — there are fewer divorces today than there were a decade ago — even as marriage has become more popular than ever.
That is good news that we should affirm, because research consistently shows that successful marriages are better for children, who gain distinct and lifelong advantages (including a higher chance of having their own successful marriages), over singleparent and blended families.
The real story is that two thirds of couples stay together until the proverbial death do us part and there are just 1.9 divorces per 1000 people in Australia, a record low, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
So bravo to the PM for drawing the line, even if he was motivated by the political necessity of distancing himself from Joyce’s mess.
And double bravo to him and wife Lucy for modelling their own successful 37 year marriage, as they did on 60 Min- utes Sunday night.
The show has been dismissed by critics as the PM “gloating”, but even his most vicious detractors must respect the Turnbulls appear to have a genuinely good marriage, and have raised competent children and grandchildren who love them. That is not something you can fake.
The good example Turnbull sets with his own marriage is something former Nationals leader and Howard government deputy prime minister, John Anderson, believes is important for strengthening social norms.
“Malcolm is very deeply committed to the institution of marriage and has set an outstanding example,” he says. “I actually think those things matter.”
“There seems to be no limit to the idea that freedom can be confused for licence in our society and, then, when it goes too far, we see the most extraordinary catchup attempts to say we’ve let too many taboos go and so it’s time to legislate.”
No one goes into a marriage thinking they are going to cheat. But temptation is ever-present, attractions strike, chemistry builds over periods working in high intensity environments. Most people try to employ strategies to resist because they value their marriages.
So good on the PM for upholding standards in government that most Australians either live by or at least aspire to.