Recently, I met a trade unionist for a coffee. Relationship building. He explained his job: to go around to blue-collar workers and urge them to take out more superannuation. Ensuring this great Labor Party policy allowed workers to secure their financial future.
Simply put: this guy had the “It factor”. In spite of myself, I urged him to consider entering politics, the public sphere needed more people like him. He shrank away: No, no, no, no, no.
He’d already been scared off.
So, I phoned up some politicians, who agreed to speak anonymously and asked them: why do you bother?
Male MP: (Laughter.) “Good question. It’s a difficult job with a lot of costs.”
Female MP: (Laughs.) “Oh Stephen (laughs again). You are not going to use my name right? Let me think about how honest I want to be. Can I call you back? There’s lots of good reasons.”
Female MP: “As hard as the challenges to your personal life are, the thought of giving it up (is too much), when the reason you came into it in the first place is to make a difference. ”
Male MP: “A lot of people you meet through political parties are frankly pretty unpleasant people – they are not people you would be friends with in normal life. But the capacity to effect positive change is greater than any other job.”
Male MP: “Some of the programs I have helped to put in place are the most significant work of any kind that I have done. They will be there for years and will save lives. Where else can you do that?”
But the pressures are real.
Male MP: “Very few jobs voluntarily subject you to daily criticism, that takes a bit of getting used to. But if you develop too thick a skin you change and become too hardened.”
Female MP: “My children said that they hadn’t seen me all week.”
Female MP: “You have to drown out the white noise and focus on why you are here.”
And for some female MPs, “white noise” is vile gendered abuse and even threats of gang rape. Is that worth their mental health?
Sarah Newman, newbie politician and federal Greens candidate for the seat of Chisholm.
At the other end of the political continuum is Sarah Newman, sitting in a cafe in the eastern Melbourne suburb of Blackburn. Newman is a full-time university student who works part-time at JB Hi-Fi, and is a first-time federal political candidate standing for The Greens in the federal seat of Chisholm, against Australian Chinese Liberal MP Gladys Liu. “I might still be young, but I have learnt a lot and been through a lot in my life to know who I am. Being negative and nasty gets me nowhere.”
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For Newman, “a lot” includes a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 2018. “Odds are we aren’t going to win Chisholm, but we are going to grow our supporter base. We want to kick the Liberals out of the seat.”
It is all too easy to shout at politicians on the TV, but when they are sitting opposite, the feeling is of admiration and, yes, gratitude that someone is willing to chuck their hat in the ring on our behalf.
After spending time with Newman, I thought about a recent column I wrote on the crisis-ridden NDIS, which prompted a text from a politician I only slightly knew – Kimberley Kitching.
“Hi Stephen, your article on the NDIS is so touching and thoughtful. As the shadow assistant minister for the NDIS and for Government Services, I hope we can make the scheme the most responsive it can be. I hope your cousin [whom I wrote about and is an NDIS client] had a lovely birthday. I’m born in February too! (I’ll be in Estimates on my birthday!) Would you like to catch up? Warm Regards, Kimberley.”
Kimberley Kitching’s friends wondered what impact being an MP had on her untimely death.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
We never did. We planned a drink. “I am good at a drink,” she informed me, but I cancelled, sick. Fate took its turn and Kitching died of a suspected heart attack one month ago aged 52, a death that some attributed in part to the pressure of politics.
I have been thinking about that drink that never was often when viewing the political struggle and the election campaign, which will give us plenty of opportunity to loathe our political classes.
But part of me has to concede that they better than I because they are willing to have skin in the game. And I am not willing. Like the rest of you, I am content to continue sniping from the sidelines.
Kimberley Kitching and I planned to have a drink. And then she died
Source: Philippines Alive
