hoses to hold

When we approach an election I am always on alert for the significant words or phrases that become permanent items of Australian English.  John Howard produced one in the 2001 Election — the barbecue stopper, and now we always ask What’s the barbecue stopper for this election?

So far in the preliminaries to the official campaign we have had Manchurian candidate, a smear designed to portray the Labor Party as being in cahoots with the Chinese government.  Asked to withdraw this in Parliament, Morrison retreated to the veiled reference — the preferred candidate.

He has tried to leverage the war in Ukraine to again highlight his courageous resistance to China by creating the line — the Arc of Autocracy.  This is modelled on the Axis of Evil but more clunky.

His response to the scathing comments about his attempt at welding he dismissed as coming from the narks in Canberra.  Good to see that the term nark is still of use in political name-calling. He likes to distance himself from the Canberra bubble which seems to encompass journalists, bureaucrats and politicians who are opposed to him.  Remember he did this in the last election except that that time he was picking strawberries in Queensland. 

And as the theme of bullying in politics continues on into the election context we have had ‘the mean girls’ contrasted with ‘the mean boy’.

Nothing has emerged yet, in the unacknowledged or the real campaign, that has stuck or that has captured the mood of the election.  Except perhaps the poster I saw recently which had the headshot of Morrison wearing a Hawaiian lei over the text ‘doesn’t hold a hose’.  This is at the moment so Morrison-specific that it is hard to see how it would generalise.  Would we say  ‘Oh the boss doesn’t hold a hose’, meaning the boss is always absent in a crisis.  

Virginia Trioli came up with the following:

‘For a government, that’s an awful lot of fires to put out; an awful lot of hoses to hold.’

Annabel Crabb played with the idea of house prices being ablaze:

‘But such is the pressure for governments to hold a hose in this conflagration, it matters not that they’re squirting kerosene.’

So we may be getting somewhere with this image.

It was an American who came up with the term Mummy party for the party that was about caring, and Daddy party for the party that was about security.  Despite a couple of major setbacks, Morrison is attempting to plug the line that security lies with the Liberals, while Albanese is pushing the ways in which the Labor Party will make everything better for the people who have felt the pinch.

Albanese’s use of juniorburger to refer to the relatively lowly Minister for the Pacific who was sent by Morrison to negotiate with the Prime Minister of the Samoan Islands was briefly amusing but probably won’t catch on.

I’m still waiting for the word or phrase of the 2022 election to take the stage.