The puff piece on Abbott was a complete farce with a flawed premise. Discuss.

In 2012, someone in the volcano in which the Liberal Party strategists meet decided that Tony Abbott’s image needed rehabilitating. People saw the Opposition Leader as an old-world social conservative, a threat to the rights of women and minority groups like the LGBT community. Some argue this is because of a smear campaign from the government and the left; others argue it’s because Tony Abbott has spent vast swathes of his life behaving like a massive fuckwit. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Whatever the reason, the problem was clear, and something needed to be done.

The rehabilitation of Tony Abbott has been hamfisted in the way that a person with hams on the end of their arms where fists should be is hamfisted. The strategy has been blindingly simple and perhaps for that reason so effective. If there’s a criticism about Tony Abbott’s character, it falls to the personal testimony of someone close to him to refute it. The Leader of the Opposition, we are told, cannot possibly be a misogynist because he has a wife and three daughters, all of whom, they’ll remind you, are women. I’ve made this point before, but defending Tony Abbott against the charge of misogyny with the fact that he sired three females with his female wife is setting the bar awfully low, and the fact that he’s nice to his family is surely the bare minimum. But maybe that’s the point: we’re so distrustful of this man that we need to be assured that he’s doesn’t run his household like a Dickensian villain.

And with the election lumbering toward the nation like some kind of gigantic and tedious Godzilla, the rehabilitation effort continues. Sunday evening sawrun a piece on the opposition leader in which he further tried to smooth his rough edges. The story was filed by Liz Hayes and is less a news segment than a bloated canary corpse in the mines of journalism. To be clear, it’s not entirely her fault. It’s all of our fault, really. We’ve become so obsessed with the politics of the personal that we’ve asked to be subjected to segments like Hayes’s on a regular basis.

It’s clear that the Liberals are wasting no opportunity to save Tony Abbott from his chequered past of being Tony Abbott. When The Opposition Leader is haunted by his own stupid comments, he’ll usually deal with it in one of two ways: he’ll either say the offensive comment in question was ‘careless’, or he’ll say that it was ‘in the past’. The latter is a pretty hollow thing to say about anything, really, because yep, that’s just how time works. The implication, of course, is that it’s unfair to judge someone on something they said in the past, because people can and do change. But if you, like Tony Abbott, were an unremitting shithead in your university days, then the onus is on you to prove that you’ve changed. It’s not enough to just point out that the concept of change is one that exists. We all know that; some of us were unfortunate enough to study it in detail in HSC English. The former defense, that his wording was careless or unrefined, also smacks of obfuscating bullshit. It makes it sound like these were things overheard in the pub, not, as they were, drafted statements read in parliament or crafted for the media.

But when it came to defending his statement three years ago that he was ‘threatened’ by gays, he chose neither of his traditional options. Instead he went for an explanation that was as tortured as it was ridiculous, a detailed dissection of which is another article entirely – but it suffices to say that he basically hides behind his lesbian sister like she’s some kind of big gay shield.

The segment was a complete farce and the premise flawed; it was as insightful as a dog dressed up to look like a professor. But that’s not the biggest problem.

The biggest problem is this: Because of reasons, we have it in our heads that how our politicians behave on an interpersonal level is wholly indicative of what they will do when running the country. This assumption, taken to its logical conclusion, ends with a reporter on a beach asking a politician’s mates what kind of a guy he is, as if this is, in any way, in any universe, in any conceivable reality, enlightening. This sort of thing has become so commonplace that we don’t reel from the absurdity in the way we really ought.

What Mr Abbott’s wife and children and mates and sister and sister’s partner think of him is, to put it mildly, completely and utterly irrelevant. Finding out what Tony is like at home is totally pointless because we, as Australians, will not be experiencing him in the capacity of a father or husband or surf-bud or brother or not-brother-in-law-because-he-won’t-allow-a-conscience-vote-on-the-issue-within-his-own-party. We will be experiencing Tony Abbott as a Prime Minister with a party, and that party will have policies that will affect people’s lives. And it’s these policies that it would have just been super to find out about within the bounds of a 15 minute segment on a weekly news program.

Instead we got the scoop that his family and friends don’t hate him, that he thinks more mustard is better than less mustard in a salad, and that he moisturises.

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Ben Jenkins is a Sydney based writer. He writes for TheVine and Daily Life, as well as The Chaser. He has a politics blog called A Baffling Ordeal, and one where he and his friends are snide about the cryptic crossword. You can follow him @bencjenkins if that’s a thing you’d like to do.