Fred the election sausage dog has no need to bone up on his political correctness. He’s clearly already a vote weiner. Photo: Australian Electoral Commission.
With so many politicians about, anyone would think there’s going to be an election in the ACT in, um, 19 days.
They’re at your door, on posters outside your house, at openings of envelopes. They are our new best friends, until you tell them not to bother because you’re voting for someone else. But it’s best not to do that, because then they’ll want to tell you why you shouldn’t.
You have to wonder why they want to get into politics in the first place? The sycophants that stick like Araldite? The fact they have to come out of hiding every couple of years to speak to the people they represent. The offer of chicken or fish around dinner time? Endless opportunities to be photographed with cute puppies, ugly babies, large, oddly-shaped vegetables (for those in the rural areas). Even more sycophants? There can never be enough.
Depending on the level of their political correctness, they’ll have people to answer their phones for them, fob off pesky voters who have the nerve to ask for something to be done or just avoid your 73 calls/emails in the first place.
Have you ever tried to get one of them on the phone? You know speak to them, like, for real? First there’s the person who really deserves the big bucks, the one who actually answers the phone. The first opportunity an unhappy voter has to yell at someone, anyone for allowing those boat people in/out of the country.
I’m old enough to remember that, when you got in a huff – for younger readers it’s not a good place to find yourself in – you used these things called pen and paper and wrote a letter to your local politician, demanding to know why he or she stopped people who had nowhere else to go to from coming here. They were usually doctors or scientists or plumbers – people this country needed urgently – and were prepared to do any job if they could come here, a safe place.
You’d yell at the poor soul who answered the phone, then at the person they flicked you off to, who could only say the words, “Hold the line please” and then, after about a fortnight, put you through to the assistant of the assistant to the acting assistant, who’d tell you your “call is very important to us” and hang up.
What you need, dear reader, is a little down-home gumption. No, not the stuff that cleans those hard-to-clean-places, but real gumption.
Like the young actor who was asked in a TV interview how she got away with booking tables at Hollywood’s best restaurants under the name George Clooney. It just about always worked, she told the interviewer, getting in with her table of friends, eating the best food and with the restaurant often refusing to let her pay the bill. If they were rude enough to ask where Mr Clooney was, she’d say he got called away but she’d tell him what a great meal they had. And it worked.
Even when she ran into Mr Clooney on a plane … when he said he’d heard they’d been seen (not) eating out together, she wasn’t fazed. Turns out it was a teenage Dakota Johnson.
If you haven’t got her sort of chutzpah, the politician will likely forget your name almost immediately after being told it, so will call you “maaaaaaate” for the duration.
For the journalists who have been chasing them since after the last election for answers to questions like “is it true the nuclear test facility will be built in NIMBY Land”, you might even get an answer come election time – not the answer to your question of course, but the answer their media adviser told them to give to whatever question they were asked, about anything.
Now if one of these pollies could promise to (always) find the remote, I’d vote for that.
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