LARRIKIN OR LOUT?

Former Prime Minister Bob Hawke, a proudly self-confessed larrikin, launched a new book about new Opposition Leader Mark Latham yesterday and hailed him as a “larrikin politician” who will blaze his own trail from The Lodge and not turn Australia into the “52nd state of the United States”.

Well, leaving foreign policy aside, I have a confession to make: I don’t want a larrikin as Prime Minister of this country.

That’s not to say I don’t want Mark Latham. Or prefer John Howard. It means I think this so-called larrikin image demeans this country’s style, culture and intellect. Why wear larrikinism on your sleeve?

I actually looked up the dictionary definition today. “Larrikin -- Rough or hooligan. Someone who is careless of usual social conventions or behaviour.”

In recent decades we have had two larrikin leaders one from each side of politics. One was Hawke, the Silver Bodgie. The other was John Gorton.

Their boozing and gauche behaviour was legendary. One of my jobs as a foreign correspondent was to phone singer Liza Minnelli and ask her did the Prime Minister of Australia (Gorton) really try to tongue kiss her in her dressing room after a boozy night watching her perform at a Sydney nightclub. The answer was yes.

And then there was the notorious and diplomatically dangerous time when a larrikin Prime Minister took journalist Geraldine Willesee for late night drinks at the American Embassy in Canberra and discussed foreign policy in front of her.

Larrikin Bob Hawke, as our esteemed leader, said that any boss who penalised an employee for taking a day off on the piss after we won the America’s Cup was “a bum” and in Adelaide he called a protesting pensioner a “ silly old bugger” during an election campaign.

You could hardly call Malcolm Fraser a larrikin. I once said he looked like a po-faced souvenir from the Easter Islands. But he did show some decidedly larrikin behaviour when he lost his pants in Memphis. And when he put the hard word on a female Aussie journo in a limo in New York.

John Howard, who believe it or not used to throw the most riotous Budget night parties in Canberra and can certainly “cut a rug” on the dance floor as they used to say, would never be described as a larrikin. Dour, stodgy, droning, even boring, some would say. But no larrikin. And he has been elected three times.

And yesterday at an old age village in Sydney he was playing on that. Sending a warning not only to the younger Latham but to his own impatient deputy, Peter Costello.

Howard said: “I think people should continue in the workforce for as long as they want to and as long as they are making a contribution and age is irrelevant.”

They are certainly not the words of a larrikin.

Wednesday, August 25, 2004

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2004