Politicians behaving badly
Many thanks for all your lively comments on the future of the British monarchy. Consider the Republican debate well and truly accelerated. One point which emerged very strongly was that Queen Elizabeth has survived for so long as Australia's head of state because of the absence of decent home-grown alternatives.
Before you hit the send button, I don't buy that argument for even a fleeting moment. But it does raise an intriguing and legitimate question about the quality of political leadership, and the calibre of ministers, MPs and state leaders.
Certainly it has not been a good few months for the nation's politicians - they've rivalled even the stars of rugby league and Aussie Rules in the sordid and salacious story stakes.
Some of the weirdest headlines came from Western Australia, where the state Liberal leader, Troy Buswell, which had recently been vacated by a female colleague. Buswell has taken larrikin irreverence to new heights - or, more accurately, new depths? Before he became leader, he had already confessed to snapping the bra strap of a Labor staffer - bipartisanship at its most boorish.
Suffice to say this chair-sniffing, bra-snapping "pol" recently survived a leadership challenge and even received a standing ovation from party members the weekend before that vote - which seemed a somewhat risky gesture given the number of chairs temporarily left empty.
All this week New South Wales has seen blanket coverage of yet another political scandal. This one involves the state health minister, John Della Bosca, and his tempestuous wife, the Labor MP Belinda Neal. Ms Neal at the staff of a restaurant/night club called Iguanas.
According to their signed accounts, the local MP swore at them, said she would take away the club's licence and threatened to send the police to close it down. Her dinner friends have added their signatures to statements denying she used such threatening language - a difference in statutory declarations which is now under police investigation.
Soon it was open season on Ms Neal. A young mum came forward to claim that Neal had booted her on the ground during a female football match. The MP was, indeed, red-carded and banned for two games, but her coach disputes her opponent's account of the incident.
Then came news from Canberra that she had told a rival Liberal MP who was 36 weeks pregnant that "evil thoughts will turn your child into a demon".
Malcolm Farr of the Daily Telegraph, one of Canberra's finest and funniest political reporters, recounted an ALP conference in 2002.
"A TV cameraman moved around the inside of the horseshoe arrangement of delegates and stopped in front of Belinda Neal, who was filing her nails. She looked up, scowled, and extended a recently-manicured middle finger to the cameraman, and later to several thousand viewers."
There was even a Nixonian flourish: the revelation that she reportedly keeps the names of her political enemies in the freezer.
Ms Neal has now been ordered to take "anger management" classes by the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd - who interrupted his already busy trip to Japan to deliver a 20-minute carpeting.
Scandals hit politicians the world over - and if there is a paucity of political talent then it is by no means limited to Australia. Another global phenomenon appears to be that people, especially the online literate young, are finding other outlets to express themselves politically.
the Australian community-based activist group, now boasts 280,000 members, more than all the political parties combined and regularly comes up with innovative and policy-changing campaigns.
The magazine, The Monthly, recently asked whether Australia was one man away from becoming a one-party state: the implication being that only Malcolm Turnbull offered the Liberal Party much hope for the future.
So is Australia currently experiencing a democratic deficit - a shortage of really talented politicians? If so, why? And if the country does ever decide to choose its own head of state, should it look beyond the realm of politics?
UPDATE, 10:00AM, 17 June 2008: To those of you who have said that I've only cited the bad behaviour of two politicians, I promise you there are many more where they came from. Here's a , which, again, is far from definitive.
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