Western Australian Liberal Senator Ben Small is Crikey‘s Clown of the Week, winning by a nose after a spirited last-minute dash for the finish line by New South Wales Police commissioner Mick Fuller.
Fuller’s “consent app” idea, which simultaneously managed to be back of the envelope and front page of The Daily Telegraph — a thought bubble so elephantine that everything he’s said since groans under its weight — was filleted like a fish in our pages yesterday.
So Small takes the title partly because we don’t want his conversation (if you can call it that) with Labor’s Kate Thwaites after Monday’s March4Justice to be drowned out by the noise elsewhere. After all, in addition to the rally and Fuller’s nonsense, this week featured a government staffer being sacked for allegedly calling a female MP a “meth-head cunt”, as well the ongoing Brittany Higgins saga and the (vociferously denied) allegations against Attorney-General Christian Porter.
The whole interaction, quieter but no less dismissive and in some ways no less illustrative than those episodes, is worth consuming:
Kate Thwaites: The power, the anger, the feeling that people’s voices are not being heard. That’s what the prime minister is not acknowledging, and I entirely …
Ben Small: The same prime minister that opened his door and invited …
Thwaites: Are you going to talk over me on this? Are you really going to talk over me on this issue?
Small: … The same prime minister that invited those representatives into his office. The highest office …
Thwaites: Ben, we’re talking about respect for women in this workplace. Are you going to talk over me?
Small: …The highest office in the land …
Thwaites: I’ll let you keep going then.
Small: I think we can have a respectful conversation.
Note the number of chances he has to stop, how many ropes he is thrown which he chooses to fashion into a noose rather than haul himself out of the hole he’s dug.
Without doubting Thwaites’ sincerity, she must have been mentally drafting that tweet before Small had got to the second use of the phrase “the highest office in the land”.
Small’s performance — whether you find it genuinely offensive or just bafflingly poorly judged — is the kind Clown of the Week was created to capture.
An Oscar winning display of paternalistic, patronising behavior, so often heard from those who mistakenly believe they are societies true elites.
A well earned award!
I thought that the highest office in the land was that of Governor-General. But, more seriously, I am an old bastard and could be guilty of wishful thinking about the glorious past, but I just cannot remember that there were politicians this stupid forty or fifty years ago.
But, if ideological fervour and the (well-hidden) virtues of callow youth trump some level of intelligence in pre-selection criteria, we can expect more of this, not less.
I would argue that the trend towards younger and younger senators has not been a plus. The place has gone from being (in part) a rest home for old party hacks to a kindergarten for young party hacks.
Maybe we need to put conditions on becoming a Senator (or indeeed, MHRs) that you cannot stand for election unless you have worked in a real job away from politics for at least 5 years…
And have at least an IQ above 10
He’s the Liberal Accidental Senator from central casting. A boorish, mysogynistic, second class intellect poured into a the frame of a party hack that until this event only his own family had ever heard of.
I did enjoy Wong’s demolition of Small’s Senate attempts to justify clauses in the IR Bill that his own colleague, Cash, had removed in what is referred to elsewhere on Crikey today as a fit of pique.
If only the LNP had one competent performer ….
But they do. His name is Black Jack McEwen, oh wait he is Country Party and also dead. But still a better performer than this allegedly living crop of non country men.
Agreed, he had a tough early life and was the local MP in the area I grew up in. I may not follow his political path but he and his first wife (Dame Anne) made a real contribution to the local industries and aviation (especially in the WW2 years). Great pity that current pollies cannot understand that attitude.
The Senator is the kind of people that the WA Liberal party has been endorsing! See WA election result!!
At least the WA electorate has had the sense to make their feelings clearly shown to the Liberals. If only the general voting population could show the same resolve and good sense federally. It wouldn’t take too many seats to change the picture.