After last night’s State of Origin match, Queensland forward Sam Thaiday was asked for a comment. So he gave one: “It was a bit like losing your virginity. It wasn’t very nice but we got the job done.”

Outrage ensued. More precisely, OUTRAGE ensued. Commentators, media outlets, Labor candidate Linda Burney, NSW Family First spokesman Phil Jobe: everyone thought Thaiday was out of line, offensive, and should apologise. So, as is the way of these things, Thaiday was asked about the incident this morning by a reporter from Channel Seven. This was the exchange:

“Do you regret your comments from last night?” “No, not at all.” “You don’t think they’re inappropriate at all?” “Nah.” “You’re a professional athlete and you’re referring to winning a game like losing your virginity.” “Yeah.” “You don’t think that’s inappropriate?” “Nah, not at all.” “There’s been backlash online and overall about it, people have described your comments as vile.” “Vile? OK. Thanks for that.” “Aren’t you a family man?” “Yeah I am a family man. I’m a human being too.”

You can watch it here, and I recommend it. Thaiday does something few public figures, and almost no politicians, would be capable of doing, and treats the outrage with the amount of respect it deserves, i.e. none. He is clearly bemused, and laughs it off as the rubbish it is. He refuses to engage on the self-righteous level at which his attackers operate. Watching it, you can’t help but think: “Ahhh, right, that’s what a person with perspective looks like. You don’t always have to play this moronic media game if you don’t want to.”

Two other incidents made me think about this. The first was a depressingly stupid press conference given by Scott Morrison today. He not only continued with the government’s confected and bilious “Labor has declared war on business” rhetoric, inspired by Labor’s decision not to give business a tax cut (WAR!), but quintupled down:

[Labor] will continue to seek to attack growth with these toxic taxes that will be a toxin for our growth going forward … Every single thing Labor is doing, particularly through their war on business and their war on growth using tax as their bullets, is going to retard from growth and detract from growth.

As Matthew Knott pointed out, he used the word “war” 14 times. Turnbull, asked about the rhetoric later, backed his treasurer in.

This is absurd stuff. Not just because the substance is a little bit unhinged, given the paucity of what the government has to attack (Labor in fact supports the tax cut to businesses with turnover under $2 million), but because this bloke is one of our nation’s senior figures. Why is he talking to us like a rabid student politician?

This is all so depressing because we know Malcolm Turnbull is capable of more than this. When Tony Abbott was in the job, sure, it was frustrating, but complaining about slogans was like complaining about the wind. Turnbull, when he wants to, when he takes the time to prepare, can explain policy in detail and with force.

Sadly, this is not to say it is not an effective political tactic. In the short term, it may well do what the Coalition wants it to, which is, firstly, to drag the news agenda away from the messy superannuation situation, and, secondly, to plant that seed of doubt about Bill Shorten just a little deeper in voters’ minds. That’s what the Coalition has determined it must do to win this election, and everything it has done recently can be read through that filter.

But I am getting away from my point, which is: shouldn’t we all be giving Morrison the Sam Thaiday treatment? “Um, yeah, Scott, ok, whatever you reckon, you drongo. Aren’t you meant to be treasurer?” But we won’t, probably, because “objectivity” is too often read as treating both sides as though they are being reasonable, and because the opposition will be too worried about looking serious to run the risk of treating him unseriously.

But as a country we should expect a much higher level of public debate, and we should not be ashamed of asking for it.

The other incident is the report today that Roz Ward, Victorian Safe Schools coordinator and academic, has not only lost her position on a Victorian advisory board, but been suspended from her job at La Trobe University. La Trobe won’t say exactly why, but presumably the reason is the same as for the advisory group: Ward posted on Facebook, after the rainbow flag had been raised over the state’s Parliament House,

Now we just need to get rid of the racist Australian flag on top of state parliament and get a red one [a socialist flag] up there and my work is done.

Now, you can have a debate over the merits of the Australian flag – the whole country did in the 1990s. And of course we know that you can talk about the existence of racism in Australia – as both our prime minister and opposition leader did on the weekend – and about the fact that racist practices are embedded in Australia’s history – as another prime minister, Paul Keating, famously did at Redfern. But don’t you dare combine the two or you could be out of a job.

This is flat-out crazy. Is a person in this nation, which apparently prides itself on free speech and democracy, really not allowed to raise the prospect that our flag, which contains within it the flag of another nation, the United Kingdom, which – this is a matter of historical record – murdered many Indigenous people, might be racist? I am not saying that it is racist, by the way: but if we cannot even bear to have that debate in public we are truly a minnow of a nation.

And if the objection is, instead, to Ward’s invocation of socialism, then – my God, people, she was helping to run a program about sexuality, not advising the government on economic matters. She’s not running to be PM, or, say, president of the United States (though another self-identifying socialist, Bernie Sanders, is doing exactly that, with quite a bit of success).

Where's Sam Thaiday when you need him?

This is the point Australia has reached. Where the childish and hysterical level of media outrage destroys the possibility of reasoned debate about reasonable matters, a situation condoned by our leading politicians who deliberately play into it, and where a rugby league player seems like the only person of any sense or sanity. Try laughing that off.

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