Hey Hey It's Tony Abb- WHAT THE SHIT WAS HE DOING ON HEY HEY

Jesus, Australia. I mean, really. God knows we don't ask all that much of our politicians. Indeed, I'd say, objectively, we tend to hold our politicians to some exactingly low standards. An ability to string a sentence together, a certain perceived reliability perhaps, but likability? When has Australia ever cared about likability? Pretty much every Prime Minister for the last three decades has been so unlikable as to encourage pity in the broader community. Rudd was an angry bureaucrat, Howard could look uncomfortable and out of place while breathing, Keating was filled with needless hostility and Hawke... well, sure you'd have a beer with Hawke but you got the feeling that there was every chance he'd headbutt you afterwards. Even with Rudd, for most of his Prime Minister-ship the most popular politician this country had seen in decades, it seemed like the profound turning of sentiment against him - like milk in the Saharan sun - was primarily a reaction to the sense that we'd been somehow fleeced into liking the dude when in actual fact he was just as bad as everyone else. The only Prime Minister whose memory people ever seem to invoke with some measure of awed reverence is Whitlam and he was forcibly ousted after a couple of years anyway. Our affection for him only seems to have kicked in with the benefit of thirty years hindsight. So, why, in God's good name, with all of this in mind, and with decades of political evidence behind them, did anyone at the Liberal Party think it was going to be a good idea for Tony Abbott to go on Hey Hey, It's Saturwednesday?



So, here we have a leader of a major party being booed for appearing on a reanimated corpse of a variety show - that, tellingly, has itself been cancelled due to lack of popularity - to be sat next to a flamboyantly gay man and a gay music icon, subjected to a string of entry-level sex puns and then to look generally uncomfortable while being serenaded by a song about incest. I just want to know: who thought this was going to be a good idea? Who? Why? And how did they sell it to everybody else in the campaign room? If The West Wing taught me anything, it's that you never let your candidate be put into a position where they can't control the message... what part of Abbott's message was this projecting?! "I like crap television and sub-par comedy"? "I'm OK with being booed"? "I'm a man of the people because I appear on a television show that most of the people don't watch"?

As way of pointed comparison, here's Barack Obama on The Daily Show just before the 2008 US Presidential election:



Oh, look at that smile. You could just... set up camp in there.

But I think the major, fundamental problem with this whole charade - besides it being such an obvious and hamfisted attempt to encourage people to like Tony Abbott that he may as well be trying to buy our votes with candy - was that by appearing as a judge on Red Faces, he upended the natural order of things in Australian politics. You see, in Australian politics, politicians are generally expected to be unlikable and uninspiring, and thus we, the public, media and pretty much anything else with voicebox feel entitled to respond to their flounderings with excoriating if weary disdain. And although it's not the prettiest of systems, it seems to work in it's strange, half-crippled way. Things are perhaps not at their most exciting, or enervating because of it, but the country just rolls on, y'know? The politicians potter away, we grumble away and things are generally OK.

But by appearing as a judge on Red Faces, Tony presumed too much. He broke the system. He tried to become one of us, oblivious to the fact that he's actually supposed to be one of the contestants. He wanted to be part of the joke, without realising that in the Australian political scene he IS the joke. And so we all looked on, with baffled amazement, as Abbott mugged and grinned for the camera, looking every inch the invitee from 1998 French farce, The Dinner Game, a man being brought in for the amusement of others without himself realising he was the cause of all the amusement. I'm sure it was all Red Symonds could do not to gong him at the end of the segment.

All up, it wasn't really an election-defining moment, and I'm sure there'll be other, better catastrophic moments to come, but as a stirring testament to the generally dismal and low-ball nature of of our political landscape there will perhaps be no better symbol than the sight of the potential leader of this country stammering and holding up scorecards on a show that deservedly died close to two decades ago. Just another sterling moment for the tightly run ship that appears to be Abbott's 2010 election tilt.