Published The Advocate, March 18, 2006


IN POLITICS you can be better than your opponent and still be thrown out simply because people are sick of you or your party. In the Tasmanian state election many candidates will be defeated at the hands of a fickle, unkind electorate. Almost certainly, some sitting members will be beaten too. They’re not supposed to take it personally. But they do. It’s hard to keep a stiff upper lip when your bottom lip is trembling and tears are welling in your eyes. Nothing personal? Yeah right. Like having a stake driven through your heart. For some in politics, the pain of defeat is so shattering, they suffer mental breakdowns. I have a fairly high regard for myself but even so I would never go into politics. I already have enough aggravation, thanks. To enter politics you need a strong stomach and a thick hide. Voters are not interested in what’s inside you but in what they can get out of you. And trying to keep your footing on the treacherous political slopes can be as difficult as a one-armed man climbing a rope. I have known some really decent people who went into politics. Some of them have remained friends even after they became captives of their party factions. But there are too many lawyers in Australian parliaments for my liking. It is in the nature of the legal profession to spend most of your time in the company of criminals and then to go into parliament. I have also known many mediocre people to be elected to Parliament. Don’t knock it. They provide a necessary voice for lots of other mediocre people. The question to be resolved at the polls next Saturday is whether Paul Lennon has done enough to get his government unelected. Unelected, because oppositions rarely win elections, governments lose them. It was the former Federal Opposition Leader Billy Snedden who said something like "we didn’t lose, we just didn’t win" after being defeated in a poll. He was correct in the sense that oppositions have nothing to lose. Election outcomes are all or nothing; you win or lose – unless Tasmania’s unusual electoral system pops up a minority government this time. Do Rene Hidding or Peg Putt look likely to form an alternative government? Not together, they don’t, although local politics can produce strange bedfellows. Politics seems much more important in Hobart than it does on the Coast. Hobart is like Canberra. Everyone there seems to be obsessed by politics. Spend too much time there and you begin to think it really is important. But hop in the car and drive back to North-West Tasmania, and the further you are from Hobart, the less important politics seems. The air is cleaner here, too. Anyway, look, I’m not having a crack at politicians. No cheap shots. No finger-pointing. Truth is, none of the candidates has the qualifications for wielding power over the rest of us but that’s what makes democracy such a winner: By the People; For the People.

Published The Advocate March 11, 2006


I HAVE a mate Bill, who is 79, and he has a mate Harry, who is 80. Bill is an author and Harry is an ex-teacher. I know Bill personally and have a sense of Harry through Bill’s anecdotes about him. Boyhood friends, Bill migrated to Australia 38 years ago – he describes himself now as a 'Possie' (Pom-Aussie) – while Harry remained in England. Though apart for all those years, Bill says their lives have run in parallel. In countless coincidences, starting with their mothers sharing the same birth date, the same kinds of events and mishaps have occurred to them through the years. I will not bother listing all the overlaps but the parallels include the deaths of their wives in the same year and developing similar health ailments. Both have failing eyesight, for example. In other respects they have their differences. Bill is an old socialist and Harry is a Liberal Democrat. Bill talks at 1000km/minute in a language that is long-winded and old-fashioned. When his eyes went on him and he lost his driver’s licence, Bill spoke of 'adopting a bicycle as my primary means of locomotion'. His everyday language is peppered with such roundabouts. Harry deliberately mispronounces certain words. For ‘schedule’ he says ‘schoodle’, so Bill tells me. Harry apparently uses so many of these invented words that he speaks in an idiosyncratic language of his own. Together the old pals recently spent a month walking through France and Italy, following in the steps of Hilaire Belloc, as you do when you are elderly and have poor eyesight. Belloc walked the route in the 1890s musing on the meaning of life and produced a book of the trip; and Bill wanted to do the same. Bill being Bill, before they left, 'every possibility had to be taken into proper account to guard against untoward eventualities,' including the possibility that he and Harry might not get on after spending so long apart. They reached a pact: Should one do or say anything that irritated the other, rather than leave it to fester and spoil the trip, he should make the complaint known. This possibly is also the secret of a long marriage. Or not. After a couple of days on the road, Bill noticed Harry was unusually quiet and he asked if anything was wrong. Harry said he was offended by Bill’s casual use of the F-word. Bill, a former merchant navy seaman and journo, agreed not to utter the effing word for the rest of the trip. At the end of a hot and tiring day, they were struggling to reach an Italian village atop a steep cliff. Exhausted and exasperated at not finding their hotel around each new corner and the one after that – in the fading light with not a good eye between them – they began to worry if they were in the wrong village. Onwards and upwards they struggled and after climbing 452 steps – yes, Bill counted them – Harry turned to him. 'Bill.' 'Harry?' 'Permission granted.'