CHARLES WOOLEY
By the time you read this it is effectively all over, bar the concession speech. Bill and Chloe are packing their bags and preparing to move into the Lodge.
ScoMo is already wondering if he really wants to spend the next six years or more on the thankless task of opposition leader. Jenny is hoping Scott might go back to his peaceful old advertising career, maybe picking up a contract for the beleaguered coal industry.
He could star in his own campaign. He has already worked up the lines, “This is a lump of coal. Don’t be afraid. It won’t hurt you.”
Might I add a catchy slogan here: “Coal: There’s no fuel like an old fuel”.
In the next few hours ScoMo will learn for sure whether coal is as harmful in politics as it is in the environment. Marie and Pierre Curie, the discoverers of radium, used to carry demonstration samples of the magic substance around in their pockets, with unhappy long-term health consequences.
Oppenheimer, the father of the A bomb, handed uranium samples around his postwar chemistry class at Stanford so the students could “feel how warm it is.” You might imagine the long-term effects of that. Thirty years on, a survivor of Oppy’s class once told me he thought he was the only one still alive.
I am not seeking to affect your vote, neither to alarm you about the advent of Bill, nor to encourage you to toss ScoMo onto the mullock heap of history. I’ve studied your habits. You only get round to reading me after you’ve done the really important things in life like cleaning the gutters, changing the kitty litter and voting. So I’m just chancing my hand here.
Over some 15 federal elections I got it wrong only a few times, but the clincher for me this time was running through the campaign headlines. ScoMo mentioned Labor and the Greens more than he mentions his own party. When he and Matty Cormann held press conferences together they spent more time warning of the dangers of Labor and the Greens than spruiking their own policies.
Now let me see, what were those
policies again? Oh yes I remember, Labor and the Greens.
Labor’s Neville Wran, one of the wiliest and most successful of NSW premiers, never named the Liberals. “I never mention the opposition,” he once told me. “They are beneath contempt. Why would I give them any oxygen?”
So by close of play today, 16 million voters will have selected 151 lucky candidates. They will all receive an annual salary of $207,000, generously topped up by other perks, loadings and allowances — and there’s great superannuation. Unlike your job, theirs requires no qualification, no training and no experience.
It doesn’t even impose a burden of loyalty, which is why you had to choose today between ScoMo and Bill.
There are no tests of suitability and character. No required measure of minimum intelligence, and not even a clear declaration of what they stand for — because most don’t actually know. It takes nothing more than dumb luck to get elected. In most cases you don’t even know