Tony Abbott's monsters

24 September 2012

Melbourne Anglican editor Roland Ashby recently produced a collection of interviews published in the paper over 15 years. Not long after Pauline Hanson made her legendary racist maiden speech in parliament on 10 September 1996, the author Morris West complained in his interview that 'too much attention has been given to Pauline Hanson [because] the media creates its own monsters'.

The most famous monster in the history of the western imagination is the one created by Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein. When Victor realises he has made a mistake in trying to play God, he leaves his handiwork to fend for itself. Frustrated and angry at being cut loose, it wreaks havoc on everyone and everything in its path.

Since the heyday of Pauline Hanson, the media has made monsters out of many politicians. It has mercilessly caricatured them as grotesque and out of control. This may have ensured coverage of politics that is accessible to most Australians, but it has been at cost of diminishing the quality of rational political discourse in this country.

Significantly, the conservative side of politics appears to have itself adopted a variation on this practice. It has made monsters of its own MPs, in the belief that their larger than life profiles will translate into electoral success.

When appointing Nationals Senator leader Barnaby Joyce to the front bench as shadow finance minister a few years ago, Tony Abbott created the genre of the 'retail politician', in order to justify liberties such MPs would inevitably take with party policy. 'I think that Barnaby is a uniquely gifted retail politician,' he said at the time.

The retail politician is given special licence to move about the electorate to spruik party policy. As less gifted communicators, the 'wholesale' politicians will stay out of the limelight to finesse the policies their retail colleagues are busy selling. That's the theory.

True to the form of the monster, Joyce created havoc among his colleagues when he criticised the sale of Cubby Station to a Chinese-led consortium and thereby opposed the Coalition policy that supports foreign investment.

Then last week, another gifted retail politician who had been elevated to the shadow ministry, South Australian Senator Cory Bernardi, played to the nation's bigots by linking gay marriage to bestiality.

This monster had to go, in what could prove to be a sign that Abbott has learned from his mistakes. Abbott might finally have ditched his distinction between

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Tony Abbott's monsters

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