Who cares if Glenn Lazarus disagrees, Christopher Pyne's apparent offer of chocolates and red roses to sway crossbench senators to back his higher education reforms is not without precedent in parliamentary circles.
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Senator Lazarus grumbled on Tuesday that no amount of text messages, chocolates or red roses would sway him to support the Education Minister's universities reforms. Lazarus is a hard man, and yet roses have for years softened Australians' antipathy toward Canberra. If Pyne fails, it's no fault of red roses and probably more to do with his shrill righteousness.
When the gardens at Old Parliament House fell into neglect after the new Parliament House opened in 1988, Tamie Fraser launched a rose patronage plea across the nation. Given Australians' traditional indifference to their national capital, you would expect such a plea would meet a Lazarus-like response.
But retired landscape architect John Gray recalls Fraser's request for $100, which covered the cost of a rose, planting and 10 years of maintenance, struck gold far and wide across the land.
"The Old Parliament House has many memories for people in Australia, especially people in their latter years, who remember it before [the Parliament] moved in 1988," Gray says.
"By 2005, 3000 individuals and organisations had made a donation and, in the end, 4200 roses were planted," he says.
All up, more than $400,000 was donated. Tickled pink with the success, the National Capital Authority commissioned Gray to write a book about the garden.
After spending much of his professional career in Canberra becoming the guru of all things green in parks and gardens, Gray turned to research. Here, he uncovered the gentle persuasion that politicians used around Old Parliament House that, if copied today, could help Pyne and his ilk negotiate more successfully.
The original rose garden dates to 1933 when wives of parliamentarians gathered donations of one shilling and four pence per rose. When Bill Yates, who sat in both the British Parliament and our House of Representatives, arrived in Parliament in 1975, he brought with him two beehives, while representing the citizens of Dandenong in Victoria.
Yates' honey was popular and was available in the refreshment rooms. Once, after an "argy-bargy" with former opposition leader Gough Whitlam in the chamber, Yates sent Whitlam a jar of honey in the hope his gift might "sweeten him up".
On Thursday, the National Capital Authority will unveil new interpretive signage in the gardens to mark 10 years since they were replanted after the original ones were temporarily neglected. The patrons' program is going to conclude.
Gray says the head gardener has about 10,000 roses to tend.
Gray's book, Roses, Tennis and Democracy, will be delivered to the patrons, including, as it turns out, to a relation of mine, Donal Dwyer, who donated a rose for the Macarthur Rose Garden. Dwyer's ancestor, Edward Thistleton (my great-great-grandfather), had been a convict (horse stealing), who worked for John and Elizabeth Macarthur at Camden in the 1820s and 1830s.
