Today our politicians and media are hullabalooing about Liberal Senator George Brandis allegedly calling Prime Minister John Howard a ‘lying rodent’.
Brandis denies he uttered these words. The whistleblower of the moment, former senior Queensland Liberal Party official Russell Galt, maintains he did. Expect more he said/she said, tit-for-tat(tling) and media scrum on this one.
How can two little words be such a big deal? After all, if Brandis did speak as alleged, wasn’t he just expressing what many Australians have thought for some time? Including very many schooled in what used to be the much broader church of the Liberal Party. I was in a taxi with one of them recently when Howard came on the radio. My fellow traveller’s verbal reaction made ‘lying rodent’ sound like a compliment.
They’re a big deal because Brandis chooses to work within the political system that is the Liberal Party under Howard’s leadership. Anyone who makes that choice knows they have to toe the line or they won’t get ahead – as Dawn Service explained in last week’s issue.
Today, that means more than shelving your personal views on the Iraq war, on imprisoning refugees and their children in the desert, or on Guantanamo Bay. That’s bad enough. Now it means saying black is white and lies are truths and two plus two equals five. And not just saying it, also being seen to Love Big Brother.
In that – yes, Orwellian – world, two little words turn into silver bullets. The tone of delivery and the context become irrelevant. Humour, passion, nuance, ambiguity, imagination and humanity are ironed flat.
As I suggested last week, Howard is not the Great Satan. Nor is he Stalin or Hitler. But as a politician, he is a top-down, authoritarian control freak who is profoundly threatened by difference. He will strategically kneecap dissenters to retain power. As Australians, we need to think about whether that’s the kind of man we want to choose again as national leader. We must also ask who is really prepared to do things differently.
Some time ago I met an Israeli who has one of the most challenging jobs in the world. She teaches Jewish and Palestinian children to live together without hatred and violence. Her method is based on interviews with Righteous Gentiles, people who risked their own lives in World War II to save Jews. These people shared a number of characteristics. Not what you might expect: not religiosity, not political affiliation, not formal education, not income or professional status. Apart from optimism – a belief that one day things would change for the better – they were all critical thinkers. Put simply, they were prepared to question, when claims paraded as truths just didn’t add up. They didn’t take important things on trust.
Hey George, and John – two plus two still equals four.