Distant Voices

Nobody smiles much on the 6.55am tram.  Drawn faces and tired eyes stare out the windows at the darkness as we limp through the northern suburbs of Melbourne.  Outside, cars streams by bumper-to-bumper. Close, but still moving for now.  The world is a busy place at this hour.  Stop-by-stop, the tram fills uncomfortably.  Office managers, apprentices, retail workers, hospital staff, receptionists, the occasional suit, you and me.  All of us joined in our lonely migration and the weird silence that hangs all around us.  When we get caught at traffic lights, up and down the tram there are anxious glances at watches .  Mental calculations, consequences and responses.  We’d be on the train if they weren’t so few and far between.  Meanwhile, my phone goes off in my pocket.  My wife has sent through a photo of my young son. I didn’t get to see him again this morning as he was still asleep when I left.  Seeing his little face makes my chest feel tight.  I wonder what sacrifices my fellow passengers also make to be here on this tram every morning and I’m sure there are many who give away a lot more than me.  The unrequited nobility of work-a-day people.

We are the people who were forgotten in last week’s hollow leadership tantrum within the Gillard government.  We were forgotten by too many of our federal Labor parliamentarians in their ambition-induced amnesia, cocooned in their own mythology.  Forgotten by the virginal young turks in Ministerial offices as they spun the bottle and trembled in breathless anticipation.  Forgotten by the over-heated ideologues in the media as they clutched their loaded pens and bemoaned the lack of a money shot.

So when Labor Senator David Feeney fronts the ABC’s 7.30 program to speak on behalf of the government after the day’s pointless furies and says that now Labor can get back to its “core business” of defeating the Liberals in the polls, it is confirmed that the federal parliamentary Labor Party has become more consumed with power than with people.  So when Julia Gillard fires another cynical accusation of misogyny at Tony Abbott and then cuts support to single mothers and families with newborns, while posing for photos with vile woman-hater Kyle Sandilands, it is confirmed that this is a government obsessed with means rather than ends.  When we see our representatives more focussed on their own protection rather than ours, it is confirmed that this is government that has lost its way and drifted far from the people and values it purports to stand for.  Indeed, the idea of its re-election may now be the only thing that would crack open a smile on the 6.55am tram.

But governments never really pay their failures.  Ultimately, the joke is on us.  And this one is a joke in two parts, with a bitter punchline that will be played out with the (now certain) election of a rampant and emboldened Abbott government. A punchline set up by the failure of this Gillard government.  There is always tragedy at the heart of comedy ... [fades to static]