Welcome to big school A huge influx of new MPs and their staff are in Canberra going through a kind of “Parliament school” to prepare them for the challenges of the next three years. Based on our views of the behaviour in Parliament, here are a few suggestions for what they might get through after they told everyone where the toilets are and which food to avoid at the canteen:
- Dress standards: the House of Representative Practice tells us that acceptable standards of dress in the chamber are ultimately up to the discretion of the speaker. In 2005 speaker David Hawker argued it was not “in keeping with the dignity of the house for members to arrive in casual or sports wear” — but Tony Abbott and Penny Wong have both got away with arriving in the chamber in gym gear. Senator Ian Macdonald was ruled “disorderly” for his immortal decision to wear a hi-vis “Australians for Coal” shirt in 2014. However, new MPs should note that they can wear a tailored safari suit without a tie — a loophole frequently enjoyed by noted enthusiast Philip Ruddock. Wearing another culture’s religious attire to for an extremely grubby stunt? Apparently basically fine
- Props: in 1980, the chair ruled that the display of a handwritten sign containing an “unparliamentary word” was out of order — tragically, what that word was has been lost to history. Hansard does not record what that language was. Macdonald wasn’t the only one hit with a a “disorderly” ruling the day he wore hi-vis: Greens senator Scott Ludlam was also reprimanded for holding up a piece of paper with “SRSLY” written on it. Your can’t bring in real weapons, but Liberal senator Bill Heffernan got away with brandishing a fake pipe bomb in Senate estimates to protest against recent changes to security. The other lesson is: even if you get away with it, a prop choice can haunt you for the rest of your career. Just ask the outgoing PM
- Language: what can be said in Parliament is a tricky one for newbies. Calling an MP a “liar” is considered unparliamentary, but in 2014, Christopher Pyne appeared to call manager of opposition business Tony Burke a “cunt”. The offending word might have been, in fact, “grub”. Along similar lines, in 1965 external affairs minister Paul Hasluck called then-deputy opposition leader Gough Whitlam “one of the filthiest objects ever to come into this chamber”; in response he got a glass of water emptied into his face and was called a “truculent runt”. Whitlam later conceded that might have been a transcription error.
Compare the pair Climate activists Blockade Australia shut down parts of Sydney’s CBD this week, blocking the harbour tunnel and other city streets. Members have been arrested and face $22,000 fines or up to two years in prison.
On Monday a 31-year-old man from Bondi drove into protesters.
He was fined for negligent driving and got a $469 fine and three demerit points.
Qantas While Crikey‘s pages have recently featured a loathing for the national carrier intense and powerful enough to fuel the first leg of an around-the-world flight, there’s been one area in which it has been guaranteed pretty favourable coverage: the inaugural direct flight from Perth to Rome. Particularly glowing is the Traveller: “No wonder Perth-London has been such a success — there are so many positives to this new route it will be hard to understand why passengers would opt for any other.” Within a few lines we get an important postscript: “The writer travelled as a guest of Qantas.”
Indeed there was an entire coterie of media on the plane — along with Western Australia’s Premier Mark McGowan, Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce, and Perth lord mayor Basil Zempilas.
The West Australian and The Australian Financial Review both play it cooler, but are uniformly positive. It raises questions about the value to the average person of a review written by a journalist being put in business class and having their flight paid for by the people being reviewed. That said … I’m not saying our coverage of Qantas would shift completely if it sent me to Rome. I’m just saying it shouldn’t rule it out as a possibility.
Presumably there were a bunch of people in cattle class on the Qantas flight Perth-Rome. Shouldn’t somebody ask for their review? I’ve done long haul both at the pointy end and down the back and the benefits of business class for long haul flights are substantial.
” it will be hard to understand why passengers would opt for any other.”
Let me see, why would I opt for any other option but business class from Perth to London?
Just a little thing called money!
I think Gough called Garfield Barwick (not Paul Hasluck) the truculent runt. I appreciate that Charlie cites an SMH article, but a Google search has all other versions of the story identifying Barwick as the recipient, and that is the understandings of old political tragics like me.
I think that Gough used a Latin insult meaning the same word for Paul Hasluck.
I do remember this.
Senator BUSHBY: Bruce Goodluck was, of course, the infamous chicken suit incident. Upon a dare from a Labor colleague, Bruce turned up to federal parliament in 1985 wearing a full chicken suit. The Deputy Speaker of the time yelled out, ‘Remove that thing from the House!’ and, with his feathers thoroughly ruffled, Bruce flew out of the chamber and managed to elude capture.
Extraordinarily, despite everyone being well aware that Bruce was the culprit no-one ever came forward to dob him in, showing that everyone must have enjoyed the antic more than they could let on at the time. It was only years later, shortly after his retirement, that Bruce confessed to the misdeed. While not keen for the antics to become his legacy, he acknowledged that the escapade worked to his advantage when he returned to politics in 1996 after three years of retirement from federal parliament. This time he stood successfully as an Independent member for the Tasmanian House of Assembly in 1996 and held the seat until the 1998 election.
Senator FAULKNER (Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) On the death of Bill Wentworth MP. Once in 1963 when Bill Wentworth railed against communist forces in the House of Representatives, Les Haylen, Clyde Cameron and Eddie Ward determined to exploit his agitation on the topic. While other Labor speakers drew attention to Wentworth’s increasing excitement, Les Haylen slipped quietly out of the House, borrowed a long white coat from one of the waiters in the parliamentary bar and, wearing the coat and equipped with a stethoscope borrowed from a Labor senator who was also a medical doctor, he entered the House on the government side and stood quietly beside Wentworth. As Wentworth rose to the peroration of his long tirade against Labor and Labor’s association with communists, Haylen murmured softly to him that the green cart was waiting outside to take him away for a nice quiet rest. Alan Reid reported that even Wentworth laughed at the joke but Les Haylen himself was in no doubt that the most appreciative member of the audience was Wentworth’s old foe, Menzies.
Another nail in the climate coffin. Thanks. A. Bunch.
The recent McGowan-Joyce love-in was nauseating, even more so if they both then flew to Rome together, and with no regard for all the pollution that created
In all fairness I don’t think McGowan and Joyce added much air pollution by being on that flight. The plane, a 787-9, has a take off weight of nearly 250,000. Now if the combined weight of both men was 200 kg the extra pollution created would be infinitesimal. Having said that if Clive and Gina were both on that flight who knows?
I think the media coverage has been nauseating, how newsworthy, is it? An aeroplane takes off from Perth and lands in Rome, 5 days later we are still reporting it. I don’t think if the pane had crashed we would not have had more coverage.