Passive Complicity is delighted to welcome the renown Australian Political Commentator, Paddy 0’Cearmada, to our pages.  He will comment on the progress of the election campaigns of players on the Australian Federal stage. Here is his first report

The second coming  by Paddy 0’Cearmada
And John in his prison sent messengers to Jesus to ask: “Are you the one who is to come or do we have to wait for someone else?” Matthew chapter 11.

I set out to vote on 24 November 2007 with my daughter.  We walked the few blocks from my house to the local high school and as it was her first time to vote she was asking me what to expect.  I explained that the process was quite simple, and that people from each party would have how to vote cards.  Waxing philosophical I explained that I always politely accepted these from all parties, as the secret ballot, an Australian invention, was a treasured right.  My daughter could see right through that conceit commenting wryly that our Kevin 07 t-shirts she had bought online would rather negate any secrecy.  For a moment I wondered aloud whether we would be allowed into the voting hall, bearing as it were across my middle aged chest and her fine young breasts a political slogan. My daughter asked if we should turn back and change and looking at her youthful figure I asked if she was wearing a bra, when she said a little hotly ‘yes’ I said if challenged we would just take them off. Fortunately this was not required and no one in the leafy surrounds of Balwyn North lost their composure or their breakfast as a consequence.

My journey to the polls almost 3 years later on October 5 2010 was solitary and sullen.  The hyped hope of the Rudd-slide had turned into a mudslide with a choice of a fractured Labor party under Julia Gillard or the leering ambition of Tony Abbott.  I walked past the party volunteers ignoring the whispered advice from the shiny young Liberal to ‘stop the boats’ and took the Greens how to vote card.

Now at the end of a first week of campaigning I am no wiser.  In a breathless reportage of which ill-chosen candidate said what to make a fool of themselves, or what atrocities have been revealed about the bullying tactics of other candidates, or which superannuated Premier has been persuaded to stand in a possibly winnable marginal seat, policy, vision and most certainly truth have been invisible.  Kevin Abbott and Tony Rudd each present themselves as messiahs, prophets from a wilderness of their own making, furiously agreeing with each other while finding crueller and meaner ways to seem tough.

John was right to send messengers to Jesus.  After all we know from all the gospels including those outside the Christian canon, that messiahs were everywhere at the time.  Indeed John had been confused as one, and the whole promise to the Jews by their God was based on waiting.   Jesus in reply confirmed by his actions the prophecies of his coming, a neat literary trick on the part of the evangelist who was after all writing for a Jewish audience in the wake of the destruction of the Temple.  70 years after the crucifixion of Jesus, a messiah was really needed and the propagandists seized their moment.  But it all could have been so different.  The most popular rival cult to Jesus of Nazareth was for Antinous, the beautiful Greek boyfriend of Hadrian, tragically drowned in the Nile.  If it had prevailed would we have Tony Abbott railing against a movement to heterosexual marriage?

I wonder in all of this about my daughter and her vote.  After all this election is being fought by two men who each had a part in destroying the first woman Prime Minister three years and a day after she removed Rudd.  Samuel Beckett knew about the absurdity of waiting.  Vladimir and Estragon continued a conversation about nothing for a person who never came.  Sadly at the end of this campaign the messiah won’t have come and instead one of the vagrants will be Prime Minister.