To assist this week's column and to assist the nation (by enriching its vocabulary) I have invented a new word, porkbarrelate.
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A verb, to porkbarrelate is to engage in the activity of pork-barrelling, an activity much on the national mind at the moment because of the Bridget McKenzie imbroglio. It is a long time since we have seen a federal government minister porkbarrelate to the extent and with the shameless gusto with which minister McKenzie, when sports minister, allocated the choice cuts of pork/sports grants in ways that favoured the re-election of the Morrison government. One might even say, if one was a smart arse, that hers was double-barrelled pork-barrelling.
More than ever, the analogy intensified by the Bridget McKenzie imbroglio, the nation's worst federal politicians remind us of the Daleks, the arch enemies of the good Doctor Who.
Everyone knows the Dalek's terrifying war cry is their rasped bellow of "Ex-ter-min-ate!" And so it has amused me, as I look at the eerie amoral similarity of the Daleks and the Morrison government, to imagine Morrison MPs going about their shady, voter-seducing business rasping "Pork-bar-rel-ate!" as they go.
The widening gulf between ordinary but admirable Australians and our most wicked politicians is eerily similar to the gulf between the decent, empathy-capable humans of the Doctor Who series and the series' callous, robotic Daleks.
Every survey of our political life shows, now, a dramatic disenchantment. So for example the recent Australian National University Australian Election Study found, astonishing even the scholars behind the study, a record three-quarters of voters now believe politicians act out of self-interest and cannot be trusted to look after the needs of the public. One shudders to think how the McKenzie shamelessness and the shamelessness of the prime minister's analysis of it (that the minister did nothing wrong but only breached a minor conflict-of-interest by-law) will accelerate these disenchantments
My point is that our worst politicians horrify us, just as the Daleks do, by being so radically, horrifically, unfeelingly, amorally different from us. Can an understanding of our fear and loathing of the Daleks (anyone who has never hidden behind the couch while the Daleks are on TV is showing an emotional numbness for which they should seek help) help us understand why Dalek-like politicians so unnerve us?
I am thinking about this, one of the Great Questions of Our Time, with the assistance of Dr Robert Bunce of Cambridge University. His field is intellectual history and he has written a scholarly paper about the Daleks and their strange and enduring power (for they and Dr Who have been with us since 1963, when this columnist watched the first-ever series) to frighten us. The university has posted an online piece, Ex-tra-po-late! The Daleks and Moral Philosophy, about Dr Bunce's findings.
The Cambridge piece reports that "Dr Bunce believes that the Daleks succeed because they offer us a moral lesson in what it means to be human in the first place. They terrify us, he argues, because they are a vision of what we ourselves might become".
"The reason the Daleks are evil is because we recognise that they were once better," Dr Bunce explained. They are the nightmare future we dread."
"According to their back-story, once they were capable of genuine emotion and real moral good. Now they are sexless, heartless brains, shut up in machines incapable of intimacy, who have forgotten what it means to laugh ... We recognise the Daleks as evil because they have lost all [and especially a moral capacity for empathy] that we hold most dear.''
The fact that they are so morally repugnant is, he suggests, what makes them both frightening for viewers and (as a result) an enduring success.
"Daleks are more rational than humans, but also far more evil. Instead of losing their capacity for rational thought, they have lost their ability to feel. The fact that they were once better, Bunce says, makes them horrifying: 'We dread becoming like them.' "
Similarly, perhaps, our fear and loathing of McKenzie-esque, Morrisonesque, Dalek-like politicians is (subconsciously) that in their shameless amorality they represent what we are all in danger of becoming.
As this sports-rort episode unfolds one notices various commentators arguing that what minister McKenzie did is no big deal, really, in the context of today's unprincipled Australia.
For the time being, good Australians may fancy, aghast, that they have no more in moral common with Bridget McKenzie and Scott Morrison than the good Doctor Who has with his loathsome Dalek foes. But are the times-a-changing? Will these morality-sapping Morrison years see us all de-gen-er-ate! de-gen-er-ate! until the day when we look in the mirror and see a Dalek-Liberal-National there?