FROM THE DESK OF Roland Rocchiccioli – January 31, 2019

Firstly I turned puce in the face, followed by a wave of total disbelief. Then, I was consumed by a creeping, incandescent rage!

IS there really someone in the Prime Minister’s office whose job it is to photoshop – what we used to call re-touch – ‘official pictures’ of the incumbent? It is too preposterous.

It transpires, when John Curtin was Prime Minister of Australia his private office phone number was the same numerical combination as a Canberra butcher. In recording the butcher’s number, Mrs. Pennefather had transposed a digit and continually dialled the wrong number. Mr. Curtin tried to explain but to no avail. Ultimately, he found it easier to take down the weekly meat order and phone it through to the butcher. Imagine one of our current politicians doing the same. More likely, they would call-in the Federal Police, storm her house, interrogate her, and possibly recommend incarceration.

Back to the touched-up photograph – the mere mention of which has me shaking my head incredulously: do we really pay from the commonwealth coffers for some flunky to spend any part of their working-day re-touching pictures of the Prime Minister, or, as it was in this case, him and his family – in, and about, whom I have absolutely no interest? No doubt they are all perfectly agreeable, but why would anyone want to know the names of politicians wives and children, where they live, what they eat, or the name of their dog – or cat? They can go where they choose for their holidays – providing we are not expected to pay! My interest in their private lives is zilch!!

What does it matter if Mr. Morrison chooses to wear ill-fitting suits, and shirts which strain at the buttonholes because of his distended girth? In his unrelenting pursuit to win-over voters – to be seen as ‘one of us’ and an everyday ‘daggy dad’ – he can gorge as many meat pies and scull as many beers in pubic as he chooses – it’s his waistline.

We should not be impressed, nor distracted. The shenanigans are a part of a clever political ruse and leave me with only one question; the same one I have been asking with monotonous regularity: “Wot’s he gunna do about the ‘ousing?”

For the literalists – you can read ‘housing’ to mean: hospitals, the doctors Medicare rebate, schools, education, the numeracy and literacy standards, aged care, domestic assault, drug addiction, unemployment, the slowed river flows and water salinity problems, farmers and the drought, climate change (I am not convinced by his dissembling), the Constitution and its recognition of the Nation’s Indigenous peoples, and the endless litany of tribulations which so bedevil this nation, and go-on ad nauseam.

In the case of Mr. Morrison’s two left feet runners, there is cause for disquiet. It is not simply replacing dirty runners with clean. It exposes a more serious malaise; a representation of a darker underbelly where all that glitters is not gold.

Politicians are not part of a reality television show, and the PM is not an actor. Occupying the highest office in the land is not about perception, nor is it a sinecure. It is about respecting and serving the trust of those constituents who elected them to office, and to act as their voice; to hear and react to their wants and needs; and to guide, carefully, the ship of state which is the security in everyone’s life. Without alarmingly over-egging the pudding, and I have no doubt touching-up was done for the right reasons – however misguided – it does reveal something about the ethos; a careless and insidious contamination of the truth. Never forget: ‘from the small acorn the huge oak grows’.

Troublingly, Australian politicians are following in the wake of US President, Donald Trump. Using his election success as a blueprint, they are wittingly playing fast-and-loose with the political truth, blatantly claiming that north is south, and black is white, regardless. The deliberate reiteration of tax policy falsifications by the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, is an instance.

The misrepresentations are a pursuit of voters on the margin, and not marginal voters (and there is a marked difference). The fudging is enveloped in a pervading stench of duplicity, not to mention a contempt for the voter’s intelligence, which is unhealthy and treacherous in politics, and, in the case of the touched-up photograph, a waste of the taxpayers’ money.

Contact Roland via [email protected] and he can be heard every Monday morning, 10.30am, on radio 3BA.