A bile-drenched week in politics

We used to get our politics pre-digested for us by press, radio and television, but now we can suck it straight from the teat. This is my first online election. The unmoderated voice of the people. And it can be pretty raw.

In the wake of Penny Wong’s hapless attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable, disappointed former supporters lashed out. Online comments were sprinkled with puns, some wittier than others.

“Two Wongs Don’t Make a Right”, “Wong Pongs” and “Penny Wong — Pretty Wrong” — mostly schoolyard name-calling, bringing someone down a peg or two.

Some people thought it was racist, but the only commenter who identified himself as Asian thought otherwise.

“I, like Penny, was born in Malaysia,” he said. “I and others do not consider it offensive to play on a name.”

This is refreshing, I thought. Politics colliding with reality, the raw, immediate reactions of real people, feeling hurt and betrayed.

Crude and unpolished, stinging, and perhaps over the top at times, but real. A priceless chance for Wong to acknowledge and engage with the community that would like to love her, if she was allowed to be herself.

But then Labor spin doctors got in on the act, whipping up a froth of confected outrage. “Racist, sexist, misogynist vitriol,” they yelled on Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo Groups, trying to paint Wong as the victim and the community who thought she had wronged them as the villains.

What a great way to persuade them to vote for you. Instead of taking  the opportunity to build a bridge, they burned one. No wonder they’re losing. Wong herself vanished.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it is both racist and sexist to silence a woman, as Wong appears to have been silenced, and for white men to then presume to speak on her behalf, when she is perfectly capable of speaking for herself. It may be well intentioned, but it leaves Wong totally disempowered. The pain of that must cut deeper than any brief bout of angry name-calling typed in the heat of the moment.

This toxic meringue has a faintly colonial flavour, the big white Aussie hero — on Q&A Graham Richardson, of all people, got the gig — coming to the rescue of Wong, equally miscast as the poor defenceless Asian woman.

Or maybe it’s just the taste of bile. Because there seems to have been a lot of it about.

Someone in the Labor Party has been leaking their bile to a journalist to cruel Julia’s chances. And Mark Latham has made some bilious attacks in the press on Kevin Rudd, fingering him as the culprit (don’t linger too long over that image).

The big impacts on the campaign have been made via the old media, not the new.

So how gorgeously symbolic that in such a bile-drenched week, Kevin Rudd should end up in hospital because his bile-producing organ is on the blink.

Like everyone else’s, it’s probably been overworking.