Australian Notes | 3 March 2012

I cannot be the only one to have been irritated by the tears of Anthony Albanese MP. Yes, gender roles have changed over recent decades and it is now considered OK for politicians to cry like footballers in public. Yet Winston Churchill was able to lead his blitzed country against Hitler without blubbering in public. So was Charles de Gaulle. Harry Truman led the US through the Korean War without breaking down in public. But Albo chokes up when he thinks about the Labor party! I can’t believe he was just turning it on for the cameras, can you?

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The Prime Minister was right to keep telling us that politics is not to be reduced to a ratings war on television. Kevin Rudd’s appeal to ‘People Power’ may have been the only pitch available to him, but it diminished Parliament. MPs are not messenger boys for their constituents. Edmund Burke gave the classic expression of Parliamentary tradition in his great speech to his constituents in Bristol in the 1770s:

Your representative owes you, not only his industry but his judgment, and he betrays you instead of serving you if he sacrifices his judgment to your opinion.