Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce — the country’s greatest retail politician, and a man who acted as our prime minister on several occasions — spent Saturday evening thinking he was cheering on the Matildas to a quarter-final victory in the FIFA Women’s World Cup.
The former party leader posted footage of the team beating the French — “In every country pub, city club, suburban home they are doing this tonight. Watching the Matildas,” he said in a video he posted to Facebook. Well, yes and no: people were watching those two teams play, but the match he was watching was a pre-tournament friendly, not the gut-churning nil-all leading into the longest penalty shootout in the history of all World Cup matches that everyone else had tuned into.
Joyce’s later concession that he may have been “watching the wrong game” raises so many questions. For instance, did no one check their phone that night and wonder why everyone else was so stressed? Perhaps most of all, however, what the hell kind of pub decides its patrons love the beautiful game so much that they’d happily sit through a relatively meaningless old friendly, but not so much that they’d care to watch the historic quarter-final currently happening? It’s also a prime example of the fraught relationship between politicians and television sets.
Michael MacKellar and John Moore
The fate of Fraser government ministers Michael MacKellar and John Moore has long been the go to example for any columnist wanting to quickly point out deteriorating standards in public life, and with good reason. In 1982, an inaccurately labelled colour TV achieved what the robodebt royal commission could not, claiming not one but two ministerial scalps. MacKellar had failed to pay the appropriate duty on an imported colour TV and Moore, in his capacity as the minister who oversaw the customs act at the time, had failed to properly act when alerted to this fact, and both eventually offered their resignations.
It was only the first of a series of humiliations the idiot box was to inflict on our elected officials.
Malcolm Turnbull
Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull is famously a tech-savvy guy. According to his dear friend and job-sharer Tony Abbott, he “virtually invented the internet in this country”. So what in the name of the NBN is going on with his TV set-ups?
There he is, watching Sky News’ coverage of the marriage equality debate. He is standing up, despite the fact that his teensy telly has, unaccountably, been put on the floor in a little cupboard.
Quite incredibly, he pursued the opposite approach with even worse results that very same day, via a (since deleted) PMO tweet commemorating the men’s football team’s qualification for the upcoming World Cup.
Turnbull manages to make himself looked photoshopped into his own “here’s me chilling out watching the Socceroos just like you” pic, while the writhing mass of exposed electrical cords illicit the same kind of nameless dread and unplaceable nausea as the “name one thing in this picture” image.
Gladys Berejiklian
Former New South Wales premier Gladys Berejiklian must long for the days when this was the most embarrassing thing she’d done.
Still, the sight of the then-premier, can of Coke in hand, standing in the centre of the room looking at a TV mounted way too high on the wall, apparently in preparation for a game that was still four hours away from starting might be the greatest example of a politician attempting to use TV to be relatable and coming across like they’d been taken over by an ill-prepared alien. It managed the impressive feat of being mocked by her successors both on her side and opponents, and presumably will be an annual tradition required of every new leader the state elects.
