There is just something wonderfully satisfying - in a perverse way - about a pollie press conference going wrong courtesy of a heckler.
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Those carefully stage-managed events, choreographed to within an inch of their rehearsed, sound-bite lives, being upstaged by a well-timed piece of interjection.
The public gets to see a little about how the pollie deals with situations gone south and wallow in the awkward schadenfreude.
Thus we were treated to a beauty this week when MPs and would-be MPs lined up at the site for a timber mill at Hampshire.
The Advocate’s Sean Ford’s report of the incident reads like a cross between Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 and a scene from Monty Python's Holy Grail.
“I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper,” you could almost hear yelled. “I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!”
OK, it wasn’t quite so eloquent and involved the simple repetition advising where the group might like to go off to.
When Sean followed up after the press conference and asked, “Were you yelling, what I thought you were yelling?” Our man of the moment replied: “Well my dog's name isn’t f--- off”.
Don’t get the wrong idea - this is a brilliant project for North-West and Northern Tasmania and it’s not the proponents’ fault it was upstaged; they handled it really well.
But what is it with pollies in general who think it’s a good media opportunity to don a hardhat, traipse across a construction site in their dress shoes stopping the real workers?
The ludicrousness is amplified if there’s a group and they all try to ceremoniously clutch the same clean shovel. (The record I’ve seen stands at four.)
They seem to think wearing a hi-vis vest makes them part of the proletariat - men (or women) of the people - but here’s a tip: it ain’t a cloaking device, we can see your suits and Windsor knots.
Obviously I don’t really condone the abuse of public officials or politicians but there is an art to dealing with it and it’s not ignoring the elephant in the room.
It’s the old rule of stand-up comedy that if a car crashes through the wall and into the audience, that has to become part of the act.
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews repeatedly ignored an angry man who drove back and forth hurling invective from his ute. You could see Andrews’ brain chanting, “stay on message, stay on message, stay on message”.
But when one solitary passer-by yelled a word of praise, he commented, waved, and invited the terrific example of humanity and good sense back to Parliament House for high tea – most probably.
If there was a better metaphor for politicians listening to feedback, I've not seen it: totally ignore the negative, completely overplay the positive.
Even our Prime Minister copped a mouthful at a pub this week when one drinker objected to him getting priority service.
Premier Will Hodgman seems to have survived his Pub Test exploits better.
That’s because there are rules for these staged shows or blokey verisimilitude.
- Buy your own beer and make sure it’s a full-strength local beer from the tap
- Don’t sip it - have a decent swig and don’t pull a funny face
- Pay for it yourself but don’t do so by opening a wallet full of pineapples or granny smiths (and know what they are)
- Whatever you do, don’t jump the queue.
- Mark Baker is Fairfax Tasmania and South Australia managing editor