The breakfast club in Dutton land. Something’s shifting and it ain’t just the baked beans

“Ha ha ha, our next question is from Evan, one of the students here today,” said the wiry, moustachioed host from the lectern, a local radio star, I was told. “Evan says he wants to be a politician! Evan…” (pause) “…WHYYYYYYY?” Evan, who I’d heard earlier describing himself as a young Liberal and a stalwart of the United Nations (UN) club, looked taken aback.

As did, on the podium, 12 political candidates, the bald pate of Peter Dutton among them. 

It was 7.15 in the morning. There were about 100 of us there in the main room of the Arana Leagues Club in Brisbane’s north-west, plates loaded with soggy scrambled eggs and blood-foaming baked beans, having hauled ourselves up at some godawful hour and now fighting off a second wave of carb drowse. That we were into politics was probably a reasonable assumption.

Poor old Barry, the chamber of commerce organiser, sitting at my table, looked fit to kill. A rounded, balding man, he clenched and groaned quietly as the host — Ian Skippen, apparently something of a household name in the day — reeled off his act. “Why is a politician like a baby’s nappy? You have to change them when they get too full of… Ladies and gentlemen, our next candidate!”

Skippen — slim, neat grey hair, a smile that can sell a non-stick frypan or a CIA-backed coup — started a running schtick with Dickson Greens candidate Vinnie Batten, a former sound engineer, when the candidate’s portable microphone stopped working. “Vinnie turned the microphone off!” “You’re, uh, meant to turn it off between spe…” Vinnie started. “OK, our next speaker!” 

In the Panthers Room next door, they were setting up for the bingo, putting out little cards in front of a huge video screen that flashed numbers like an angry god. Had Skippen been booked for the other gig? No, he’s a regular at this apparently. And he did well, made the trains of thought run on time. The breakfast was a candidates’ forum for the adjoining seats of Ryan and Dickson covering this area, the latter being the seat of Dutton, under threat from Labor candidate Ali France.

They’d invited all comers, so here they all were, the competent main party players — majors, Greens, Lib-Dem, One Nation — among the obsessives, the Progressive Party, the Federalists and the truly independent, the truly lost. You don’t duck Christian candidates’ forums or chamber of commerce breakfasts. These are compulsory gigs.

And strange ones too, the breakfasts. There’s a macho cult to them, gathering to muse over complex questions of state at an hour when you can barely remember how to put your pants on. The audience is evenly divided between people who eat nothing until noon, and those who can’t resist a free buffet. By halfway through the latter are in carb comas, face sliding into a pile of congealing link sausages. Candidates can nail a six-point policy on mental health, and then forget their own name.

The turn-taking went the wrong way twice for a while before anyone noticed. The ritual has its hard-and-fast features: men with sweating foreheads and crisp, drip-dry shirts exchanging business cards; the buzzing around actual MPs; Dutton, tall and shiny, with a coterie; the school kids from the local junior UN club.

Back in the day, only the Liberals or Nationals would have been invited to a very clubby atmosphere. Now you have to invite everyone, and things remained mostly cordial. The bushy-bearded independent whose whole speech consisted of his biography and a referral to his website for more information, and the tie-dyed perennial candidate who offered to do, if elected, whatever a majority of the electorate wanted to do, and apologised for thus having nothing other than that to say. They all had their place. 

But they got little attention, and Skippen had to throw them a bone, not always making it worse. (“Any questions for Frederic? No? Sorry, Frederic. Moving on.”) Most of the rest was cordial. Too cordial, a little.

This was two days after Dutton had given his “war with China” speech for Anzac Day, spat out of that face — strange and sinister on TV, flattened out, smooth, bare and glowing, a Bond villain, an alien, a cartoon general driving us to death.

The sabre-rattling is the worst of projected politics, war preparation designed to cover the inept handling of diplomatic relations over a decade of colonialist condescension to the Pacific, and schizoid bullshit to China, yammering about the Uyghurs locked up in barbed-wire camps we sold China the iron to build. Yet of course when you’re next to the guy, as he peers into the little conveyer-belt toaster to see where his fruit loaf’s gone, it’s a different question…

So he got off lightly, did Dutts, the whole morning. I flubbed it as much as anyone. Coming up to the audience microphone, I couldn’t pull a China question of sufficient cogency together in time, and was worried I would just splutter and rave, “But you just… you warmongering fucker… just a cynical, um… My Lai… bastard… and that is my question, sir”, and so I gave a dixer to the Lib-Dem (“One trillion in debt, two hundred billion in pork. Can we say this is a pro-business government?” “Why no…,” he swept in).

The focus wasn’t really local, a couple of mandatory wetlands matters aside, no questions about the crossing at Mooroopna Street and when we were going to get a bike rack at the comfort station, but it was almost wholly national and domestic, concerns with cost of living, housing etc, and climate change and environmental degradation, and it was there that both Libs — Dutts, and Ryan MP Julian Simmonds — despite their superior political skills, were under pressure throughout.

Question after question came on net zero, housing affordability, cost of living. Both Libs looked a little taken aback. This was the chamber of commerce after all, but the damn questions kept coming on why my grandchildren will never be able to afford a house, why the sunniest country in the world was subsidising coal plants, why wages were going backward so relentlessly. Why were we making it more difficult to buy electric vehicles when everyone else is making it easier?

“Well, uh, look,” said Dutton, clearly flustered, “if we all converted to electric vehicles straightaway the electricity grid couldn’t bear it…” This is the if-we-all-got-a-Tesla-for-Christmas scenario, rather than a steady scaling up.

Ali France went to get in a zinger on that, but the microphone was off. “Oh Vinnie turned the mike off again,” Skippen cackled. “It’s meant to be turned off…,” Vinnie sighed. Though she put up an all-right sort of response to Dutton (compared with a much-stronger response from Ryan Labor candidate Peter Cossar), it has to be noted that she forgot to turn the mike back on seven times.

Even Evan’s question was greenish, though I completely forget what it was, and I suspect he will not go into politics but end up running a bar in the Western Sahara, after a failed tilt at musical theatre.

Perhaps the most telling moment was towards the end of the morning (ugh), when Simmonds, a bit battered by questions, was attacked from the right by the Lib-Dems on debt and on the Coalition’s corporate donors. “But let me put a question to you, Elizabeth [Watson-Brown, Greens candidate]. You are running a publicity campaign well into the six figures. Who are your big donors? You can’t tell me,” he said with that university debating society chortle, “these are all small donors.” 

Watson-Brown leaned into the microphone smoothly (it was on) and said: “They’re all small donors. The reason you can’t believe it, Julian, is because you have no idea of the level of anger and dissatisfaction out there,” which brought the house down.

Simmonds’ face — half-shocked, half-acknowledging the gotcha — looked like Wile E Coyote from Looney Tunes, suddenly plummeting after the realisation that he was treading on air. There was a mass release of energy, all those carbs and carbon dioxide. Only Barry was in agony — “This wasn’t supposed to happen; they’re not meant to ask each other questions.” “Barry, it’s great,” I said, putting a bracing hand on his shoulder. “People are loving it.” He winced afresh: “It’s just too… political.”

How strange, and revealing. Barry’s agony was real. He truly sought the sort of uncontested discussion of sensible solutions that would once have been the leitmotif of such events. And for the most part it had been this morning, a drive towards rationality and a finding of consensus.

But the setting of sensibility was now so far to the left that Dutton and Simmonds had to essentially concede a statist green conception of politics. It was the clearest sign to me, to date, that some sort of shift was under way. Vox pops confirmed this; the Greens were the winners of the morning. 

“We heard you don’t drink wine, Ian, so we bought you this single malt, in thanks for this morning,” Barry said, winding it up, as people began to drift off. “Thanks,” said Ian, taking the silvered box, his smile unchanged. “Actually I love red wine!”

Barry winced again, and I felt suddenly moved by how much he really cared about this, how embarrassed he was by its occasional shambolic moment. But it was the fact that it worked, with the shambolic moments, that made it so valuable. They’d invited every whacker on the two ballots, given them equal time, and somehow it had all worked. This, well, this is what democracy, such as we have, is all about.

Out in the first floor foyer, the first phalanx of bingo-istas were arriving, older ladies, perms bobbing, handbags looped around their forearms, making their way up the stairs. “Ooof, come on, luv,” said one, pulling herself up by the handrail, about three steps from the top, gesturing to me. “Help me up the mountain.”