There was loud jeering and chortling during Sussan Ley's outdoor press conference in Albury on Monday morning. The Turnbull government minister was denying any travel expenses rortings while announcing she was standing aside until investigations probe her behaviour.
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It wasn't the ever-polite journalists doing the scoffing but the local ravens. The Australian Raven (Corvus coronoides), is, like its northern hemisphere cousins, famous for its sceptical intelligence.
Everywhere ravens are revered and celebrated in folkore. As the Albury ravens chimed in on Monday I was reminded of how some North American native mythology credits ravens with all of Creation. But then, those plausible myths say and folklore scholars tell us, because ravens are tricksters, they have seen to it that the world they've made is a sometimes stressful place for our species.
Yes, you could tell Albury's cackling ravens were amused by the plight of the wriggling minister and of the government she has been serving with such frequent flying. The same ravens are surely enjoying the government's discomfort over disclosures that four Turnbull government ministers have charged taxpayers for their, the greedy quartet's, costs of attending the 2015 New Year party at Kirribilli. Another 18 ministers (perhaps, unlike the fab four, equipped with senses of shame) thought it fit to pay their own ways to this glittering, champagne-lubricated orgy.
And, readers, it is the possession of a sense of shame, isn't it, that makes most of us so very different from these shameless politicians?
With this latest spasm of greed detections there is renewed discussion of strengthening the formal, written, entitlements' "guidelines" for pollies. But decent folk already abide by inner, unwritten moral guidelines. We already have those guidelines attractively tattooed on that part of the brain that deals with explicit moral judgments.
Brain boffins say that suburb of the brain is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex or VMPFC. For most of us, finding ourselves in the ministers' (expensive, Swiss) shoes, the passing idea of having taxpayers pay for us to go real estate shopping or to go to Sydney harbourside orgies would have been subconsciously fed to the VMPFC. Then that powerful ethical supercomputer would have resolved this issue, ethically, in the twinkling of an eye.
And the eye that twinkled might have belonged to Plato, the first major moral philosopher. He thought a sense of shame was crucial. Coincidentally a highly-readable opinion piece Shame on you. What would Plato tweet? has emerged online. It is by Firmin DeBrabander a US professor of philosophy. Thinking readers will get a kick out of it.
The professor says that alive and tweeting today "Plato would be alarmed by the lack of shame online."
"He thought that shame was a crucial emotion, indispensable for … acting morally. For Plato shame is a force that helps us resist the urge to conform [to wickedness] when we know it's wrong to do so. A man without shame, Plato says, is a slave to desire – for material goods, power, fame …"
The great thinker seems to be tweeting that the perks-rapacious ministers know in their hearts that they are being wicked but lack the shame-driven willpower to keep their snouts out of troughs.
He may be right but this columnist thinks it more likely as argued above that these Liberals a wholly different, shameless species. This ethical columnist has as little in common with, say, minister Peter Dutton (one of the Kirribilli billygoats) as a Crinkle-collared Bird of Paradise (Manucodia chalybatus) has with the Common Warthog (Phacochoerus africanus).
Penalties and sackings (not that shamelessly politically amoral Turnbull will do anything so decisive) will probably only leave the ministerial offenders baffled and resentful. They seem to lack the moral compass that keeps most of us on the straight and narrow, that enables us to navigate around those troughs of temptingly glittering swill.
"Moral compass" has got lots of mentions in recent days and so too has the "the pub test". In her raven-enriched event at Albury Sussan Ley admitted that some of her behaviour had failed "the pub test". Senator Nick Xenophon says that the Kirribilli behaviour "miserably fails the pub test and would be laughed out of the pub".
What is this "pub test"? Do Australian pub-goers talk sensibly about politics when we are out a'pubbing? How likely is it that a group of ill-informed folk in a pub, their minds and tongues lubricated by the demon drink, will be a font of wisdom, of democratic common sense? A "pub test" of the earth's true shape is likely to find it is flat.
I fear that it is Australians in (figurative) pubs that are testing Pauline Hanson and other primitive (but artful) populists and increasingly are finding them preferable to the big parties, with their shameful Kirribilli partygoers.
Ms Hanson is making a lot of the latest perks scandals. She says these major party swine should be mightily punished. That is just what the Australian in the pub (he has never even heard of Plato, and, delusional, admires Hanson her for her apparent forthrightness and will vote One Nation next time) wants to hear.
