The Pollies — Who was Australia’s worst politician in 2017?

Whatever time it is, welcome to the inaugural Pollies — the award for the worst political performance of 2017. I was going to kick off the Pollies in 2016 but I feared the offerings were so dismal we would have been obliged to scrape the bottom of the barrel and include state aspirants.

For what it’s worth, last year’s winner would almost certainly have been Mike Baird. The then NSW premier last year spoke with furrowed brow, delivering his personal Gettysburg Address, tut-tutting at people who did bad things and with a casual wave of his hand, banned the greyhound industry, apparently unaware that only those people who would never vote for him or his party would endorse it.

Shortly afterwards someone explained to him his cri de coeur would almost certainly lead to a ghastly spectacle of a mountain of dead dishies piling up outside his office. Baird back-pedalled at Guinness Book of Records speed, left politics shortly afterwards and moved into the comforting arms of the banking industry.

Happily this year the federal sphere is brimming with eager hopefuls or the utterly hopeless depending on your view.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m not a fan of awards nights. I never go. Ever. There’s no point in inviting me because I won’t turn up.

I know what you’re thinking. I hate awards nights in my chosen field because I haven’t received any nominations, let alone risen triumphant from my seat since I won the Under 16 batting average, the trophy of which now sits forlorn and lonely gathering dust and cobwebs, a painful, ever-present reminder of mediocrity and a bleak measure of chronic underachievement.

That is a half truth. I could go on and moan about the Machiavellian machinations of media awards and how the humble are nearly always overlooked but I won’t. Besides the trophy and the little gold man playing a classic cover drive atop it gets a work out with the duster most weeks.

The real issue I have with media awards is the sheer number of them. It seems not a month goes by where journalists are not backslapping one another over the chicken almondine with honeyed carrots while sipping on an unwooded NZ chardonnay of little note or distinction. Walkleys, Ossies, Quills, Kennedys, Lizzies … I could go on. The calendar is simply cluttered with them.

Seriously my brothers and sisters are becoming like old theatre lovies, desperately seeking tributes and testimonials like thirsty men at a dry wedding who’ve snuck out for a schooner, akin to junkies scratching away at their arms craving the panegyrics and plaudits of their peers like smack.

The Walkleys, especially, are dead to me.

A few years ago, I was asked by an MEAA rep to appear at the Walkleys, get up on stage and do a bit, as we say in the biz. We discussed what the bit would be and chatted amiably until I summoned the temerity to ask how much I would be paid. “Well erm, we can’t pay you per se but just think of the publicity.”

Having jogged around the block a couple of times, I have encountered this schtick before and I don’t care for it. In other words, money talks and bullshit runs the City to Surf. Needless to say negotiations quickly broke down. How a union can countenance paying a working slob like me precisely nothing for my time and energy is beyond my comprehension but it is all you need to know about the MEAA.

That’s not to say there aren’t some wonderful journalists out there, some of whom win awards while many good ones don’t.

I can feel your eyes glazing over so without further ado, the nominees for the inaugural 2017 Pollies are:

Sam “Can you make that out to cash?” Dastyari, our man not in China or not just at the minute, counter surveillance expert and man of the people providing those people aren’t wearing Toll uniforms. Shanghai Sam is what we in the political caper describe as a policy wonk. That is to say he loves a bit of the old policy and Sam’s preferred policy is the sort of policy the Chinese tell him they like.

Most of us can say with some degree of certainty how many houses we own and where we come from but these trifling matters are beneath the member for Batman, David Feeney. In 2013, the Labor powerbroker took the short but sometimes difficult walk from the Senate to the House of Representatives, from the vegetables to the animals, as it were. Against the odds in 2016, Feeney managed to defeat a candidate from a minor party by a whacking 0.07 per cent, despite the handicap of having forgotten his ownership of a $2.3 million dollar house and land package.

Now the member for Batman is unable to locate the sorts of documents you and I keep in a shoe box underneath our beds. Like, say, a birth certificate. God only knows how the man ever opened a bank account but that’s David Feeney for you. Never mind the details, feel the quality.

Earlier this year, the Dame Nellie Melba of the Liberal-National Party, George Christensen was hilariously photographed bearing a cat-o’-nine tails and sporting a tattoo so bad it looked like it had been drawn by SMH ‘toonist Cathy Wilcox. Rather than a back room party dominant, it seems the member for Dawson’s tastes are more of the self-flagellation type. Say what you like about the Liberal Party and its long and not always illustrious history but it is generally not in the business of being manipulated by a grossly obese half-wit. Put The Art of War down, George. It was not meant for someone as beautiful as you.

Michaelia Cash is both currently employed and a woman which made her a walk-up start for the quinella in the Turnbull cabinet in 2016. Since then she’s stumbled from shambles to crisis and back again, culminating last week when she took the Fifth, claiming something she called “public interest immunity” about her office’s involvement in giving the media a hurry along to see an AFP raid on the Australian Workers’ Union’s office. Meanwhile, her office has developed eerie supernatural powers. It’s become the Bermuda Triangle of Canberra where members of her staff have vanished without trace. Spooky.

And the winner is …

This column was published in The Australian on 6 December 2017