Since Hawke was PM,perhaps even since Rudd,something has shifted. In 2015 Abbott publicly skolled a beer. In a piece discussing what felt odd about this,journalist Judith Ireland wrote,“perhaps it is that it was an unmistakably and assertively macho act – amid a chanting group of hyped-up dudes. And that it came from a Prime Minister who has been trying for the last 18 months to convince us that he is also the Minister for Women.”
The way we read the act depends both on the times and the person,and the ways they are entangled. Hawke’s drinking was taken as a sign of who he was,which made sense in the context of the time he led the country. By the time Abbott led,masculinity and its place in the nation had shifted;the way Abbott personified a certain version of masculinity had become troubling.
We have changed the way we interpret drinking,but there is something that hasn’t changed,too. In 2018,Jacqueline Maleywrote in this masthead that a woman would not be allowed the “level of personal complexity” that Joyce was. When a woman transgresses,it is used to point back to her as a cartoonish type of some sort. Men’s failings are used as pointers to their depth. What is common to the cases of Hawke,Rudd,Abbott and Joyce – despite the changing interpretations of drinking – is that each time that interpretation was used as an aid to better understanding them as people,a new and useful clue to their character.
There is a more sinister comparison,though it depends on the same mechanics. In a piece about Indigenous deaths in police custody,Amy McQuire writes of Rebecca Maher,a 36-year-old mother,detained for being drunk,who hours later was dead;and of Kwementyaye Briscoe,28,arrested for being drunk in public,who was dying while the officer on duty listened to his iPod.
Following the footpath video,some asked the questions:what if Joyce had been arrested last week? What if he had died in a cell? These ideas seem absurd,in part because it should be absurd that anyone dies in such conditions. But if the comparison itself seems absurd – unsurprising that Indigenous people die this way,inconceivable that Joyce might – it can only be because we accept the different ways that drunkenness is read,and the different consequences that result.
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Too many of us – certainly too many of our police – see the drunkenness of an Indigenous person not as a clue to their individuality,as a door that might be pushed upon to see where it might take us,but as a blocked passage,a place to stop. Our racist incuriosity (or contempt,or hatred) leaves us satisfied with just two facts:they are drunk,and they are Indigenous. That,it often seems,is enough to justify their death.
I hope there is a bright side to our reactions to Joyce:that our indifference to the video comes from a tiredness with expending our outrage on trivial things. And perhaps,too,it comes from a tiredness with attempting to interpret the personalities of our politicians. I wonder if Scott Morrison showed us the limits of that approach,leading us to conclude,on some level,that what matters about a politician is what they do with their power.
But it is also possible that it comes from a despairing sense that our politicians no longer sit above us;that we do not look to them as people we might admire;which also means they can’t disappoint.
Or perhaps there is nothing broader to say,and it is merely a simple story about Joyce alone:once we found him interesting,now we don’t.
Sean Kelly is author ofThe Game:A Portrait of Scott Morrison,a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.