Australians have been talking about foodstuffs this week after the prime minister was unable to nominate the price of a loaf of bread when quizzed during his National Press Club appearance.
A Sky News journalist on Tuesday asked Scott Morrison if he had “lost touch with ordinary Australians”. Could the PM, for instance, name the price of “a loaf of bread, a litre of petrol and a rapid antigen test?” Morrison stated that he “wasn’t going to pretend to you that I go out each day and I buy a loaf of bread and I buy a litre of milk”.
To make matters worse, the prime minister’s frontbench colleague Stuart Robert came to his defence on Wednesday, suggesting on the ABC that if Morrison’s wife, Jen, was with him she’d be able to “rattle off all the prices of all the things they buy”.
Morrison is not the first politician to fall at this incredibly low hurdle. In fact, it seems every time a politician talks about, or even worse enters, a supermarket, disaster ensues.
Here are some of the strangest and most embarrassing retail-based political blunders.
Of course, we must begin with the infamous incident when a bloke called then prime minister Tony Abbott a “dickhead” in a hardware store.
On the other side of the aisle (literally) former Labor leader Bill Shorten may not have been quizzed on the price of lettuce, but he did manage to produce some of the most excruciatingly awkward small talk in human history in the salad section at Woolworths.
There was also that time in 2012 when now deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce suggested Labor’s carbon tax would hike up the price of a Sunday roast to $100. Despite his efforts to justify this wild prediction to the media in the following days the statement was still roundly derided as ridiculous.
Back in the days before Brexit, the British prime minister David Cameron was cornered in a radio interview, unable to name the price of a cheap loaf of bread.
“I don’t buy the value sliced loaf, I’ve got a breadmaker at home … but you can buy a loaf in the supermarket for well north of a pound.”
The price was not “well north of a pound” for the record, at the time it was 47p. To make matters worse he then recommended people buy a £100 breadmaker instead, and use Cotswold Crunch flour which cost £30.20 for a 16kg bag.
Now, you might think there is no way to make yourself seem posher than that, but the then London mayor – now UK prime minister – Boris Johnson found a way the very next day.
When asked the same bread-based question by a reporter, Johnson initially got it right, suggesting 40-50p, but managed to undo all that good work by sarcastically stating that he has “no idea” how much value bread costs but could “tell you the price of a bottle of champagne” instead. Unfortunately, the country didn’t seem to find the joke as funny as he did.
Back home and back in time, there was of course the infamous birthday cake debacle between Labor prime minister Paul Keating and opposition leader John Hewson.
The year was 1993 and Hewson was basing his election campaign on this wild new concept of a “goods and services tax”, or GST. But he faced a wave of public humiliation after an infamous interview on A Current Affair, where he was unable to explain if a birthday cake (candles and all) would cost more or less under his new taxation system.
Keating had a field day with this, staging a media opportunity in Brisbane whereby he entered a pharmacy and asked which items would be subject to GST. The pharmacist didn’t know, the media lapped it up, it was a great success.
But alas there was food-based humiliation to come for Keating as well.
He attempted the stunt a second time, this time walking into a Nowra bakery suggested by Labor’s local candidate for Gilmore, Peter Knott.
But instead of happily chatting about how bloody confusing the idea of GST was, the bakery owner grilled Keating for minutes on end about the payroll tax in front of a crowd of eager journalists. The payroll tax was actually a state tax, but the damage was done.
Legend has it that Keating referred to Knott from that time on only as “the cunt from the pie shop”.
It truly is a wonder that media minders still let politicians within a kilometre of a supermarket.
