While following the discussion among the media gibberati about Tony Abbott's alleged undergraduate indiscretion (punching a wall next to a terrified damsel's head) of 35 years ago, one seldom heard a contribution from anyone who is 35, yet. It seems a little arrogant of these youths, with the bloom of puberty still on their acne-stippled cheeks, to pontificate on the subject.
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Of course, the point of the speculation has been the notion that if Abbott was a misogynist bully and swine 35 years ago then he may very well still be one today.
My own instinct, as a 66-year-old who doesn't seem to have anything left, good or bad, of the personality or of the beliefs of 35 years ago, is to give Abbott the benefit of the doubt in this. And, lacking the arrogance of the under-35s of the gibberati and having an oldie's perverse fascination with facts and the truth, I've gone looking for what science says.
In 2011 the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published a paper catchily-titled ''Stability and change of personality across the life course: The impact of age and major life events on mean-level and rank-order stability of the Big Five.'' It used huge haystacks of data harvested over many, many years from 14,718 Germans monitored ''across all of adulthood''. The ''Big Five'' are the traits of emotional stability, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness.
The monster study's findings are complex (readers can look them up online) but basically what was found was that our personalities have lots of the qualities of Play Dough and change and change and change across our lifetimes.
It doesn't follow from this that Abbott is bound, now, to be nicer than he was. He may now be an even nastier bit of work and may well believe (from the look of his swaggering body language) that he has the biggest Big Five of any man in Australia. It's just that science won't let us assume his personality is marooned where it was all those years ago.
One of the towering cliches of the gibberati has been the claim that of course we all do wild things when we're young, and especially when we're young, and, as Abbott was at the time of his alleged wall punchings, at uni.
Is this true? Some of us remember our university years as the most responsible and genteel times of our otherwise irresponsible lives. I was intellectually and politically busy while at uni but was more chaste, law-abiding and kind then than I've ever been since. I'm horrible, now.
Modern university students, poor impecunious robots who don't have the time or the intellects or the imagination (or, often, the command of English) to do wild, untamed, free-thinking things, will be baffled by this very 1960s/1970s notion of the uni years as years of play and mayhem. In my few semesters of tutoring at the University of Canberra, the poor students seemed oppressed by the tyranny of qualification-seeking.
Mention of this reminds me of an item, ''Have you seen our vice-chancellor?'' in the latest edition of The Poppletonian, the Official Newsletter of Poppleton University, a modern English university that sounds very like the University of Canberra. I read it online.
The story reads ''Following the discovery from a recent staff survey that 35 per cent of Poppleton academics had never seen our current vice-chancellor, we learn of a new university initiative to increase his visibility … There will be a brand-new 'Open Access' visibility policy in which the vice-chancellor will make a brief appearance at the left-hand mullioned window of his third-floor executive suite every other Thursday afternoon at round about half past three (weather and other engagements permitting). It is hoped that these regular appearances by the vice-chancellor will go some way to offset the widely held view (22 per cent of all survey respondents) that he is no longer in situ.''
I offer this idea to the vice-chancellor of the University of Canberra. A similar ''visibility policy'' might be useful for him. Certainly when I was teaching at his university few students knew him by sight and very few knew his name. Lots of them, alas, didn't know what a vice-chancellor was or that their university had one of them.
While on this ''Have you seen?'' theme it strikes me that I've not yet seen, in the flesh, a single candidate for the ACT Assembly elections. Is it that they are shy and retiring? Perhaps, to give us all a glimpse of them, to see the cuts of their jibs, they could imitate the vice-chancellor of Poppleton and appear at the left-hand mullioned window of a third-floor executive suite of a prominent Canberra building every other Thursday afternoon at round about half past three (weather and other engagements permitting).
PS. In last week's column I marvelled at the mystery of how it is that, as the latest ratings show yet again, FM 104.7 (to my ear all condom ads, gibberings, Americanisms, trivia and jungle music) is our city's most popular radio station. Meanwhile my own favourite, ABC Radio National (to my ear all ideas) has so few listeners the Nielsen organisation cannot find a trace of us large enough to even mention in its ACT statistics. I pledged to address this mystery by spending time listening to FM 104.7. This painful experiment continues. I will report soon on its impact on my teeny-weeny Big Five.
