Day 7- Community Claptrap

Leadership is tricky, isn’t it? You want to seem like you’re in control without being too controlling. You want to inspire, but the act of doing so can seem a bit pushy. Tough balance. And election campaigns are about offending the people you can afford to offend.

Maybe we get it wrong when we assume that leaders of political parties are there to lead. Maybe the term is wrong. Let’s replace 'Party Leader’ with 'Chairperson-in-Chief'. Someone who might helm a citizens assembly, say.

This idea, the one that will drive climate change policy (and here I was thinking that the Rudd Government actually had a mandate post 2007 to get it done, but clearly I’m foolin’) is one I can’t pin down on these light emitting pages. Perhaps because it’s just too silly. Sillier than a monkey thirsty for its wee. Sillier than the opposition leader (sorry-how about 'chief nutbag of the other lot')plucking a duck. There will be better writers doing hatchet jobs right now on blogs and in papers, and they are right to do so. The citizens assembly is called the Parliament. Hurry the fuck up and sort something out.

Nothing, however, is quite as silly as a student politician. Maybe there’s money in writing a student politician handbook in the post tweet age, maybe subtitled 'How not to be so hilariously lame as to bring support to whatever you’re opposing, whatever you’re not’.

Maybe this chap here, PhD Candidate Brad Smith, who launched a flailing, pathetic attack on the PM in Brisbane this morning, was acting    out of pure frustration, a bodily articulation of disappointment and anger. Or maybe, moments before he lurched beyond the barricades, he was imaging his visage on a billion t shirts, the Che of the Sunshine State.

Either way, he’s a joke now, a momentary meme that does nothing for the wider cause. A note to student politicians- even if I agree with you, chances are that I hate you. And I’m not alone- not even close. Because intelligent discussion comes after quiet contemplation and wide reading. It’s tough to get ahead as a student poli if you’re quietly thinking, assessing the whole picture. It’s ambition really, innit? Goes some way to explaining the quality of sitting members we get. Maybe a randomly selected posse of 150 citizens will be a better way to get good policy after all.

Rudd offers a statement early afternoon, stating that he takes security real serious like, and that he’d only send an underling if he was physically unable to attend himself. Fair enough, right? Sometimes I’m too drunk or depressed or attached to a mountain stage of Le Tour to get out of my chair- if something needs doing, I just yell out for someone else to do it. Here’s how I reckon it went.



Office lackey: Prime Minister, you’re due at the security briefing


Kev: (Long groan). Must I?


Office lackey: ummmm… am I allowed to answer honestly without either being yelled at or met by the long passive aggressive silence David Marr is planning to write about in the Quarterly Essay that will speed up your eventual demise?


Kev: (long passive aggressive silence)…. Alistair!


(Alistair bounds in, all young and youthful like)


Alistair: Yes Prime Minster?


Kevin: No punning


Alistair: My apologies Prime Minister


Kevin: wǒzuìyù mián


Alistair: Sir?


Kevin: That’s mandarin for I’m drunk and don’t want to go


Alistair: would you like me to go in your place?


Kevin: (has fallen asleep).


Alistair: Ok.

Rudd, just before the security briefing. Via News Ltd.