The Urbane Republic

Inside Out is a perennial favourite at our place, and along with the sequel, is on high rotation for movie nights. When we discovered the spin-off Dream Productions, the franchise’s hold on our household only deepened.

Liking Pixar is easy, and calling their work ‘clever’ doesn’t offer any great insight. Even saying ‘it’s all in the details’ is more than a little passé. They constantly sweat the details. It’s what they do.

But there was one detail in Dream Productions that caught my eye, and stuck with me long after the fifth or sixth viewing (we have a child, repeat binge viewings are a thing). In case you haven’t seen it, Dream Productions sits between the two Inside Out films and follows the work of Riley’s dream factory, the ones who help her make sense of the day. The set up is that it’s run like a Hollywood studio, and follows the work of one director, Paula Persimmon.

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Back then, Australia used first-past-the-post (FPTP): whoever got the most votes won, even without a majority. But when Labor looked like nabbing the seat of Flinders in a by-election, the conservatives had to reach for the smelling salts.

The reason for Labor’s likely victory was that the non-Labor vote was split between the newly formed Country Party and the Nationalist Party (the main conservative party at the time). With the vote split, Labor was set to do a Bradbury and skate through to take a seat where the majority of voters would have preferred a non-Labor MP. Thus pointing out the absurdity of FPTP systems.

In the end, the Nationalist Party’s Stanley Bruce persuaded the Country Party candidate to drop out, avoiding a split in the vote and Bruce went on to win the seat and eventually become prime minister.

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Reading some of the hagiography from the bobbleheads, Peter Dutton appears to have become a master political strategist with rhetorical flair and an instinct for power. “Look how he defeated the Voice to Parliament referendum,” they proclaim. “Marvel at the opposition’s polling!” they exhort. “Look upon his policies and weep” (actually, this last one may be accurate).

Let’s start with the prime example of Dutton’s supposed political genius — the Voice referendum. You don’t need a PhD in Australian politics to know that killing a referendum in this country isn’t hard. Getting one over the line? That’s the real trick. The blokes who wrote our Big Book of Rules (aka the Constitution) set the bar so high it’s almost impossible to clear.

A majority of voters in a majority of states have to say yes. And unless both sides of politics are on board, it’s dead in the water. Want to kill a referendum? Just say “no.” When that starts sounding too petulant, demand “more details.” When you get them, say, “Not those details — the other ones.”

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Give a Canberran a long weekend during the warmer parts of the year, and chances are they’ll make a beeline for the South Coast of New South Wales. Like the British Raj upping sticks and shifting out of Delhi for the cooler climes of Shimla, Canberra’s residents pack their tents, fill their eskies and head for the coast as soon as the temperature rises and the calendar allows.

It’s not hard to see why; Canberrans are among the minority of Australians (some 15 per cent) who do not live within 50 kilometres of the coast. In fact, Canberrans live closer to space than they do to the ocean and such is the pulling power of places like Batemans Bay that you may as well call it Canberra-by-Sea during the summer.

Of course, Canberra does have its own little slice of the coast, Jervis Bay, which was set aside in 1915 to give the landlocked capital access to the sea. Why not just build the capital by the sea in the first place and join the other 85 per cent of Australians within reach of the coast?

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It was early August and the weather forecast was good: a cloudy day that would clear into a crisp Canberra night. Perfect for stargazing on Mt Stromlo. We’d been warned that the single road to the observatory could get packed from 6.45 to 7.30, but driving along the winding road, deeper into the bush, we wondered if we’d missed the crowds.

Then we found them. A long snake of tail lights stretching up the mountain told us this was going to be popular. Walking to the observatory from the car park we passed the burnt-out shell of a building, a reminder that more than 20 years ago the bushland around here burst into flames, gutting the observatory and destroying its historic telescopes and buildings.

With our daughter and two of her friends in tow, we passed more damaged buildings on our way to the operating telescopes — more modern affairs and smaller than the ones that were destroyed, they’re housed in fibreglass domes a short walk from the visitor centre. The queue for parking was a warm-up for the queues to use the telescopes, but the mood was chatty and almost festive, with kids running around and volunteers setting up their own telescopes for people in line to use while they waited.

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One was “peak oil”, the rather obvious idea that there’s a finite amount of the stuff in the ground and that at some point we’ll reach the halfway point in terms of supply. As I say, all pretty uncontroversial, even the oil companies are prepared for it.

There’s always an exception, and the exception in this case was Senator Santo Santoro.

Now, Senator Santoro became a member of Australia’s Upper House by way of a casual vacancy, when someone is appointed to fill the spot after another senator has left the building. Unlike the Lower House, which uses by-elections to deal with vacancies, the Senate’s structure means a new senator is simply parachuted in from the same state and, thanks to an amendment to the country’s Big Book of Rules, the same political party as the former senator. To be clear, there is no election involved — the new senator just gets the nod from their state legislature and off they go to Canberra and an annual salary in excess of $200,000.

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Yes, if Christmas is the silly season, the fag end of a parliament is circle-jerk season for the political commentariat, who shall henceforth be known as the “bobbleheads” because that is how I imagine them, all their oversized heads wobbling, none of them paying any attention to anything.

The bobbleheads love this phase of the election cycle because it gives them a chance to do the thing they love best — speculate. Speculation is great because it fills hours of airtime and column inches with nothing but opinion as they spread the metaphorical entrails across a slab under the Budget Tree and try to divine meaning from the fact that Albo wore his tie half an inch shorter than he did the day before.

“Well, clearly, Carl, this is an indication from the Prime Minister that the parliamentary session is going to be cut short, which is of course at odds with Mr Albanese’s promise of going a full term.”

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