Abbott in a pickle over being a dill
September 15, 2012
Tony Wright
National affairs editor of The Age
HERE'S a confession. I have never, to my recollection, deliberately punched a wall. At the age of 20, if sufficiently fired up, I was usually aiming for someone's chin. And if I punched a wall, it was because I missed. At the age of 20, I was regularly too pie-eyed to see straight, and once chundered on a policeman's large boots.
Young blokes are idiots. Their brains are yet to get wired straight and they are often so charged with testosterone that they make donkeys of themselves. Well some are. Mostly footy players from what I've seen.
Show me a late-middle-aged man who doesn't have a story or two of squirm-inducing misbehaviour in his youth and I'll show you a terminal dork who probably wore his underpants too tight. Hey, they were never too tight.
Not many of us, of course, were hoping to become prime minister one day. Not an ambition I've ever held.
But the young Paul Keating was. More than 40 years ago he reportedly escaped into the night mounted on the back of a motorcycle ridden by his equally ambitious little mate, Laurie Brereton, a stuffed pre-selection ballot box balanced between them. It followed one of the regular chair-throwing dust-ups that passed for ALP branch meetings in Sydney when youthful warriors of the Right battled to dislodge the Left.
Bob Hawke, too, hankered for the prime ministership when he was a young fellow getting pissed, abusing anyone who didn't immediately understand his greatness, bedding women by the gross and generally behaving like a lair. He and Hazel in their youth got thrown out of their accommodation at the Australian National University for rowdy behaviour.
Peter Costello always wanted to be prime minister. As a university student, he got involved in such a furious exchange of ideas that he got thumped. Opinions were divided about what was worse - the punch or the fact that he blabbed about it to a reporter while recovering in bed.
Today's students, required to pay for their education and bent on getting a career, could hardly be expected to understand how rough, ready and frequently absurd were student politics in the 1970s. Melees, the tossing of abuse both physically, verbally and in print, the occasional siege of a vice-chancellor's office and skulduggery of all sorts were the daily fare of half-brained young men and quite a lot of young women shot to the eyeballs with ill-formed ideological lightning and substances both legal and illegal. The 1970s were another country.
Which, of course, brings us to Tony Abbott.
Currently under scrutiny for his attitude to women because, 35 years ago, he is said to have punched a wall either side of the head of a woman who had beaten him in a student election (and who he then enraged by calling her the ''chair-thing'' when she wanted to be known as the chairperson), Abbott has managed to tie himself into a rhetorical knot. First he couldn't recollect such an incident, then he denied it outright and now he's looking particularly awkward, protesting that he couldn't recollect something that didn't happen and blaming the story on a Labor ''dirt unit''.
He'd have helped himself if he'd ignored his advisers and admitted that, like a lot of the rest of us, he was an utter dill at 20. He's not accused of punching anyone, but a wall. Thirty-five years ago.
Abbott could throw a punch, mind. Back in those same university days, during a game of rugby, big Joe Hockey recognised a chance to take a bit of wind out of Abbott's sails. Abbott was sprawled on the ground and Joe dropped both of his knees into his kidneys. Figuring he'd done a good day's work, big Joe was mightily surprised when Abbott leapt to his feet and knocked his lights out. Gave him two black eyes. Joe's been retelling the story for years.
The new story about Abbott's assault upon a wall, of course, blends into polls showing he's not popular with voters, particularly women, and the current broader outcry about bullying in the workplace and on social media. He walks with the rolling gait of a colonial boss on a plantation. He's got to be a bully … why, he's been one since he was 20, as the story proves.
It does nothing of the sort. If it did, everyone who has ever behaved like spoiled, overexcited and unrestrained jackasses when they were young would have to be judged by the same measure. To do so would be to deny that people are capable of growing up and learning a bit about acceptable behaviour.
Julia Gillard has recently confronted old allegations about her behaviour when she was a young lawyer. It all went to the narrative about whether she was a trustworthy character, her accusers declared.
In the absence of any further evidence, it actually boiled down to this: as a young woman, she helped out a boyfriend with the principal skill she had to offer at the time - legal advice. That the rotter then used that advice to funnel ill-gotten gains to his own purposes does not, on the evidence known, mean that Ms Gillard took any knowing part in that. She simply made a bad choice as a young person in love. Who hasn't?
There are politicians of all sides shifting uneasily about the latest delirium concerning Abbott the younger.
''Of all the reasons I have to object to the idea of Abbott becoming prime minister, his antics all those years ago at university aren't among them,'' a senior ALP senator told me yesterday. ''God, if anyone dredged up the things we did at university we'd all be buggered.''
Best, surely, to judge those who wish to be prime ministers on their current behaviour.
Abbott can be damned for offering promises that make no apparent economic sense - canning the carbon and mining taxes while proposing to produce budget surpluses and making unspecified spending cuts that will pay for individual and social largesse - and for reducing his political message to ''turning back the boats'' and making freehanded doomsday prophecies about carbon pricing. We might find offence in his stance on all manner of social issues and worry about whether he has a handle on foreign policy.
But to spend much more time wringing our hands about whether he punched a wall and intimidated a woman in the overheated atmosphere of a university election 35 years ago, however cackhanded his current response to the matter might be, is to demand that we all be judged forever by the dunderheaded misjudgments of our bratling years.
For the record, I haven't chundered on a policeman's boots for 40 years or so.
