Annabel Crabb December 7, 2014
"Gone off his tits": Treasurer Joe Hockey. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
A funny thing happens when governments start to panic.
All of a sudden, the language becomes clearer.
Has any government press release, any speech, any happy ministerial aphorism ever carried, for instance, the same urgent fluency as was exhibited last week in the disclosure that Treasurer Joe Hockey had "gone off his tits" about his colleagues' extravagant mangling of the GP co-payment debate?
It's a crude expression, of course. On just about every level (semiotic, rhetorical, anatomical) it's just wrong, wrong, wrong.
And yet, there was a pungency to the line (delivered by a nameless Coalition squealer) that was something of a relief, particularly when juxtaposed against the Prime Minister's cheery assertion, before a room of his stricken colleagues, that "this has been a year rich in performance".
In a world of pointless euphemism, sometimes it's actually better when someone just goes off their tits.
On Thursday, it was reported that Foreign Minister Julie Bishop had "gone bananas" at Mr Abbott. Here again, it's richly demonstrated that the real communications talent in the Coalition does not repose among the ministers who every day rise to explain to us why "no cuts to the ABC" is actually weirdly similar to "large cuts to the ABC", if you really think about it, and so on.
The real communications talent is with the "senior Government sources".
"You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose," said Mario Cuomo, and that's pretty much true, although there are many variations; Tony Abbott, for instance, who is easily the best writer to inhabit the prime ministerial suite since Keating, nevertheless somehow managed to campaign in haiku, and govern in IKEA manual. (It should work. I can see how it could work. So why do I have an ominous handful of leftover screws, and a table with one leg pointing the wrong way?)
But the prose of a happy government is invariably a forgettable affair.
It's not until the wheels start to fall off that people actually start making sense.
Think of the Rudd government. Those early months of romping popularity. That great torrent of meaningless language, diverted into gurgling little tributaries of nonsense; COAG communiqués, sundry essays, speeches to the Brookings Institute. Listening to Kevin Rudd in his happy phase was like reading aloud the session titles from a change management conference. It wasn't till the "ratf----er" phase that things started getting interesting.
It takes circumstances of genuine crisis to flush the Gothic poets out of the political woodwork.
"It's useless," I remember one Labor wordsmith grumping to me of his party's leadership a few years back (this was in the dying days of the Gillard government). "It's too late. They're in the Fuhrerbunker now, with the Alsatians. There's no talking to them." Now there's an image you wouldn't forget in a hurry.
It's like art, I guess. No-one's ever any good at it when they're happy.
Do you remember any good Leonard Cohen songs from the days where he bounced out of bed, went for a run and had a lovely day working in the garden? Exactly.
Even Paul Keating – the undefeated champion of the political bon mot – did his best work when miserable. "Beautiful set of numbers" is the closest he got to a rhetorical smile, but it was the bad times that really got him going.
And John Howard, probably the most consistently unquotable prime minister since the invention of the stylus, crafted his solitary career zinger ("Lazarus with a triple bypass") just hours after getting whacked by his colleagues back in 1989.
(With characteristic thrift, he later retooled it into a book title.)
Who's the happiest bloke in Canberra right now? Bill Shorten, who spends his days enjoying exactly what Tony Abbott enjoyed while in Opposition – the guilty thrill of unearned political advantage, as fluky as a fifty on the footpath.
And this is the fellow who on Tuesday gave us: "Once upon a time, I thought denial was a river in Egypt. It's actually the attitude of the Abbott government."
Now, is it a coincidence that Mr Shorten's celestial good fortune should come at the exact same time that his oratory soars to such memorable, operatic heights of awfulness?
No, of course – not a coincidence at all.
Because it's when things get bad that politicians get pithy. Look at Clive Palmer. Back when his PUPs were on the leash, every press conference was alive with catchpenny Cliveisms, and the pilfered profundities of dead American presidents.
But on Thursday, it was a newer, grimmer Clive who faced journalists for a few minutes before tersely inviting them to "Stick it" and storming off.
Political death – like the normal kind of death – invites plain speaking, the closer it looms. I have seen the future, and it contains more tits.
