Peter Garrett and the art of career suicide

And there we have it folks, proof yet again that idealism and politics simply do not mix. I mean, it all started so well. A giddy disbelief seemed to pervade the air when it was first announced that Peter Garrett was going to run for Parliament. "Really?" the air seemed to say, "The Peter Garrett? The man who angried up Australian rock? The man who made Australia care about the environment and Aboriginal rights? The man who saw the Elaine Bennis full body dry heave and thought 'those assholes stole my shtick!" "Yes" Mark Latham seemed to reply "That Peter Garrett. In these difficult times Australia needs men of his integrity, men of his cheekbones". "Uh... Mr Latham?" a concerned looking aide seemed to say "You appear to be talking to someone that isn't actually there". At which point Mark Latham screamed, turned into Goro from Mortal Kombat, punched a taxi driver in the face four times with his four fists and lost the election.

Or at least such is my memory of events.

I was playing a lot of Mortal Kombat at the time.

I'm beginning to suspect I may have had a stroke as well.

Quite the year.

But poor Peter. I mean, really. The guy only wanted to help. He even disbanded Midnight Oil just so he could help more [Curiosity of the day: Garrett also ran for the Senate in 1984 with the Nuclear Disarmament Party. He would have gotten in as well if it wasn't for those pesky ALP preferences going to the National Party... Hmmm. Perhaps not my finest Scooby Doo reference]. And when K-Rudd stepped in an installed Garrett as Minister for Environment and the Arts? How perfect was that shit? After all, this is a man who spent much of his life singing about the environment. He even received an Order of Australia in 2003 for exactly those two things. Here was a man who could restore honour and conviction to the Australian political landscape!

Things started going wrong for Peter almost immediately though, as the profound inconsistencies between his own vigourously stated/sung political beliefs and those of the all-things-considered-actually-quite-conservative Labor party became really rather apparent rather quickly. And while it might have seemed like a serendipitous appointment to all concerned when it first happened, people forgot to take into account that the general populace - and lobby groups in particular - tend to take very badly to a) hypocrisy; and b) betrayal. As such, a decision to significantly expand a uranium mine in 2008 went down like the proverbial sack of shit. Because all the best proverbs involve sacks filled with shit.

There's been a few other Garrett-related eruptions since, but nothing of the scale that the Rudd Government is facing up to over this whole insulation debacle.
From what I can gather, across 2009 Garrett oversaw the installation of a whole lot of very badly planned, Government-subsidised foil insulation in homes across Australia. To date, this has killed four of the installers, caused 93 house fires, cost tens of millions of dollars and pissed off pretty much everybody, resulting in - over the course of the last week - the abrupt axing of the program, the need to compensate the now thoroughly out of pocket Australian insulation industry and requiring the safety inspection of some 48 000 homes.

So, not a great week then. Especially when it also surfaced that concerns had been raised with the department a year before but Garrett had never looked at the letter in question. On the ball. A couple of days ago, K-Rudd committed a Matrix-esque feat of bullet dodging by managing to avoid fully sacking Garrett, instead changing the 'Environment' in his title to 'Environment (Protection)' - apparently more his cup of tea - and by passing the remainder of Garrett's former responsibilities across to the more competent/less politically toxic Penny Wong by tacking the phrase 'Energy Efficiency' on to her previously standalone 'Climate Change'. Oh, I see what you did there Kev. Smooooooth.

The fact that Garrett still has a job at all is quite amazing really, although I guess that's ministerial responsibility for you: a concept that was once the cornerstone of the Westminster system of government, but which now has roughly as much content as your average Wizard of Id comic.


HA HA! FUNNY JOKE!

In Australia the ethic of ministerial responsibility started crumbling at around the time that Howard rose to power and promptly wrote A Guide on Key Elements of Ministerial Responsibility. This has been, almost without doubt, the single most ignored document since The Bible. The list of unpunished ministerial transgressions committed by members of the Howard Government were legion, but included at one point Alexander Downer spending some eight years overseeing the funnelling of $290 million dollars to Saddam Hussein's regime in exchange for wheat contracts. If it's impressive that Rudd has managed to avoid sacking Garrett over the insulation brouhaha, then the wheat incident should be considered the political equivalent of Mary managing to convince Joseph that she had been impregnated by God himself, and not Barry from down the road. Barry of Nazareth. (/sacrilege)

In short though, the Howard years have really just produced a precedent that gives most ministers next best thing to tenure. A move that - in this age of lay-offs and redundancies - is a gesture toward job security that I'm sure we can all applaud. Or at the very least Peter Garrett can applaud. And hey Peter, even if things go really badly, there's every chance your party will be tipped out at the next election (possibly by your hand) and then you can be quietly relocated to the backseat of Parliament where you can say and do whatever you want and no-one will actually care. You could probably even sing a few songs with your old band. Just for fun and fancy.

Although it does strike me that after the exercise in political backflipping that has been your last six years, the acid tang of some of those lyrics might be a little hard to get out.