What A Silly (Democracy) Sausage!

It has been quite a while since I read the classic Mr Men series by Roger Hargraves. I assume it was in primary school, which is now 45 years ago.

Hence I am not sure, but I do believe such expressions as ‘you silly banana’ or ‘you silly sausage’ originate in those books.

The phrase ‘Democracy Sausage’ is a more recent invention. It started getting used circa 2013 at the WA State Election, in relation to the sausage sizzles which community groups would hold outside polling booths. But such BBQ activities have been happening on election day for a long time before someone chose to give a name to the practice. For instance, I remember buying a sausage from a polling booth in Carlton on Election Day 1998.

‘Silly Democracy Sausage’ is a term of my own invention, taking the above two expressions and merging them. It can be taken as meaning a particularly inept political candidate who makes a major fool of himself and his party.

Like, for example, Peter Dutton.

Under Dutton, the Liberals have been accused of running the most incompetent election campaign in living memory. It is very clear, even four hours (at time I am writing) before polling booths on the eastern seaboard close, that the Coalition is not going to win this election, and may even go backwards in their primary vote.

This is despite a rather lacklustre Labor government led by Anthony Albanese, whose lustre as an authentic heartland Labor man has faded greatly in the past three years, aided by Qantas VIP Lounge membership rorts, purchasing a luxury seaside villa for his post prime ministerial future, and his tone deaf decision to adopt Hawthorn Football Club as his AFL team of choice.

I do not pay much attention to election promises, as my mind is usually made up very far in advance. The decision usually is whether to put the Liberals first in the House of Reps (which is my default position), or to preference them above Labor after giving my first preference as a protest vote to some conservative minor party (as I was forced to do in disgust in 2019 and 2022).

This election upended this, and all because Peter Dutton is not actually aware that at least one of his promises threaten integrity of the federal government apparatus on a major level.

In mid February, Dutton promised in an interview with SBS that he was going to reinstate Michael Pezzullo to a senior position as a Federal bureaucrat if he was elected. When this news first emerged, the certainty that I was going to vote Liberal faltered for the first time ever. Two weeks ago, in an interview with the Age, Dutton very stupidly double downed and repeated his intention of giving ‘The Pezz’ a senior appointment in his government.

For those who are not aware, Pezzullo was, until 20 months ago, the long serving Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs. He was ignominiously sacked, and then stripped of his Order of Australia Honour (an AM to be precise), due to the discovery that contrary to expectations of professional conduct of a senior public servant, he had been using his position to communicate secretly with backroom Liberal Party powerbrokers, as a back channel to the then Prime Minister.

Not only was this contrary to the Code of Conduct that public servants are meant to follow, but this also contradicted everything in Pezzullo’s public utterances about his expectations of the professional conduct of public servants and their balancing act in serving the Government of the Day. In other words, he was exercising significant hypocrisy.

Dutton’s decision to ignore the lack of integrity demonstrated by Pezzullo has broader ramifications than just promising to reinstate a much reviled and despised individual to a senior position. It sends a message that integrity in the Public Service does not matter. This is a serious shortcoming on the part of the prospective prime minister.

We are lucky in Australia that the Public Service is virtually incorruptible. This is due to its culture of honesty and integrity. The few bad eggs are quickly discovered, as in the case of Michael Pezzullo AM, and sacked. Where the conduct is particularly egregious, as in bribery or theft, the culprits are prosecuted and punished. But these are very rare, because the overwhelming majority of public servants are not only honest, but unwilling to tolerate dishonest conduct.

[Unless of course, when your name is Pezzullo. Not only did Michael say one thing in public whilst secretly doing the opposite, but his younger brother Fabio, many years earlier, had to leave the public service in disgrace for his own unrelated misconduct.]

Tolerating and defending people like Pezzullo, including when there first was talk of stripping him of his AM, as the Opposition has done over the past 20 months, is unbecoming of a party which wants to form government. It threatens to lower the professional standards which are required of the Public Service in an Anglophonic first world democracy to those of third world despotisms.

Perhaps the reason for this is that politicians themselves do not hold themselves to the same standards anymore that they hold their Public Service. So many of the people on the Coalition front bench have committed infractions in relation to their own conduct or conflicts of interest which would have resulted in their sacking if they were mere public servants. So they now appear to be applying the same standards of conduct which they apply to themselves to those whom they would employ as their intermediaries with the Public Service.

Hence, I am currently utterly disgusted with the Liberals on this one issue of character, decency and integrity alone. All the other ineptitudes and prevarications of their election campaign do not matter to me – I would have rolled my eyes and ignored them as simply amateurism.

But it only takes one truly stupid policy to undo much good and to do much evil, and that is to promise to do anything but shun Michael Pezzullo for the vile technocratic hypocrite that he is.