Gilbert and Sullivan comes alive in Brendan Smyth appointment

If the last of those job titles rings a bell it is because it is, newsworthily, a post just imaginatively invented by the ACT government and then quite quickly filled by it with the Liberals' Brendan Smyth. Lots of Canberrans are aghast at what they see as the alleged shameless machiavellianism of the Barr government in luring Smyth away from the Liberals ahead of October's election at which he would have been a sparkling vote-magnet. Angry Liberals wish Smyth had known better than to yield to this temptation.

The other three titles in our introduction, Exalted Cyclops, Chief Amazement Officer and Eternal Bosom of Hot Love are all true titles in use in the real world of business and statesmanship. Korea's late dictator Kim Jong Il who is allowed to keep his 1200 titles until poets run out of rhyme, is the Eternal Bosom.

Should Brendan Smyth ever attract a biographer we now have just the title for the biography. Echoing the title of William Thayer's US classic From Log-Cabin to White House: Life of James A. Garfield, President of the United States it would be From Paper-Boy to Commissioner for International Engagement, Life of Brendan Smyth...

For, yes, Brendan Smyth was once a fresh-faced suburban paper-boy and has risen to be Commissioner for International Engagement.

Just like the title of Thayer's biography of Garfield my proposed title for the Smyth biography has that stirring rags-to-riches, humbleness-to-greatness vibe about it.

Creating titles for invented jobs and roles is an art form and it is entertaining to see the Barr government showing its artistic side in this. "Commissioner for International Engagement" is a doozy, a masterpiece.

The job may perhaps prove to be insubstantial and Smyth may perhaps turn out to have almost nothing to do, but the job's title has majesty, swagger and gravitas about it. The word "commissioner" hints at exalted diplomatic status while the word "international" resonates with something somehow of global importance.

The corporate world has been especially creative in this artistic field. Fossicking with Google one finds one company that has a Director of First Impressions (he or she is a kind of sophisticated receptionist).

Then there is a Digital Prophet (he or she attempts to predict trends). There is a Crayon Evangelist overseeing all the graphic design needs of InteQ Corp. Another company is blessed with an Ambassador of Buzz (he or she directs their conglomerate's corporate communications). Newspapers surely, their very business being buzz, could stop labelling people as mere Editors and give them titles with the Buzz word in them. I would sooner be a Buzzer than just a Reporter.

As I never tire of boasting, my forebears were molecatchers. But perhaps, alive and molecatching today, my great grandfather (designated a "Molecatcher" in the census of 1901) might have a grander title. Today there is a trend sometimes called "title-fluffing" which for example sees garbos called "recycling officers". Today my great grandfather, a molecatcher, might expect to be called a Commissioner for Burrowing Mammal Engagement.

Smyth's job name and the way in which he seems to have come by the plum post feel, almost, beyond satire. But they are just the sorts of matters that great satirists and fabulists of the past have tackled with aplomb.

Gilbert and Sullivan, with us today, would have made hay with the Smyth appointment. Librettist W.S. Gilbert loved to scoff at ways in which British governments created grand posts out of nothing to reward people who had no qualifications other than blue-blooded-breeding and lordly connections. If our Brendan Smyth has somehow become Commissioner for International Engagement without ever having done any international engaging he is an echo of the Right Honourable Sir Joseph Porter KCB - First Lord of the Admiralty of G&S's HMS Pinafore.

Gilbert, a scathing genius (how lucky the Barrs and Smyths of today are that there is no one like Gilbert around to poke their foibles with sharp satirical sticks) based Sir Joseph on the actual case of the appointment of notorious landlubber W. H. Smith as First Lord of the Admiralty.

In a song Sir Joseph confides that he has got to the dizzying rank he has by a series of privileged accidents and that he has become First Lord of the Admiralty without previously ever having set foot on a ship. We see him set foot gingerly aboard HMS Pinafore.

There will probably be nothing about Brendan Smyth's grand new role that will make him queasy but in HMS Pinafore Sir Joseph, as new to ships as Smyth is to international engagement, is a martyr to seasickness. In some productions of the opera he is given a white or a sea-green face. In any opera based on the Smyth appointment the singers playing the Chief Minister and the Commissioner may instead need little tints of rouge to hint at embarrassment at the allegedly brazen deal that's been done.