Recently TikTok-ing her way into Victoria’s psychologically bruised subconscious is Labor’s Legislative Council member Sonja Terpstra – clearly unhappy about the Jacinta-Ben switch-a-roo – heroically claiming her constituents really do like potholed roads because they regulate traffic by discouraging strangers driving down their residential streets.
Given the car damage, accidents, and death risk Victoria’s neglected roads are creating, this hints of that old Vietnam War saying about needing to destroy the Peninsula Link (M11) to save it.
Terpstra’s pothole defence is the type of crazy now taking over the newly minted Ben Carroll government as collective senior Labor rats abandon the ship (7 – and counting…) or what rioting French socialists might call a certain Je Ne Sais Quoi in between rolling a Citroen at an anti-Macron protest or what J D Vance wished he defined as le-cat-lady-ambiance because it sounds less insulting in French.
Watch any government implode and the big questions for journalists is: Which metaphor do you reach for?
Can someone put on Madonna’s Vogue as they all strike a pose? Is it the demolishing skyscraper where the explosions first start with a dull roar at the base before the whole building implodes? Or a re-launched Melbourne Wheel fireworks display where the skyrockets go off and you pick your favourite incendiary special effect – look, there’s the stabbed pedestrian and isn’t that the incinerated tobacco outlet?
Ben Carroll is trying to save the world – or at least his government. He’s announced a Big Build Royal Commission, claims he’s an SRL sceptic and work-from-office curious. Though, just because he tries it once doesn’t mean he’s into it.
This week’s revelation of a secret SRL public transport levy which Carroll claims he knew nothing about even though he was Public Transport Minister at one point suggests he really is as incurious as his drawled retro-Hymie-the-robot from Get Smart demeanour suggests.
We already have the campaign origin-story: Ben used to work at K-Mart, which is a great place to buy cheap products that break three days after you buy them. They’re pushing that K-Mart mythology hard, making it Carroll’s version of Albo’s ‘I grew up in public housing,’ Tony Abbott’s, ‘I used to be Peter Fitzsimon’s rugby coach’, and Malcolm Turnbull’s ’first ten million is the hardest’ struggle street narrative.
Carroll has a choir boy innocence, but he’s not convincing playing the Liberal Party policy doppelganger because there, and there, and there he is – as yet another Hi Vis-wearing nodding head glowing in Melbourne’s milky winter sunlight next to Jacinta, Dan and a rotating cement mixer as the policies he’s now questioning were announced.
But as the new Carroll government reinvents itself as the not-Jacinta-or-Dan Collective, I’m interested in how that old Left aphorism the standard you walk past is the standard you accept plays out.
Politicians and commentators talk about this walk-past standard so often it must be somewhere in the Constitution next to do unto others, eye for an eye and do you feel lucky, punk. Scratch a Guardian opinion piece and you’re bound to find it, in amongst the usual on Gaza, climate change, and some council arguing for the right to have a fourth bin.
But despite the ancient, football team moral clarity Standard You Walk Past (SYWP) raises all sorts of questions. For starters, what are these strange things called Standards in the Age of Oprah where everything is relative and based on Your Truth? Or to put it in Sonja Je Ne Sais Quoi terms: not all potholes are bad.
While SYWP commentators talk a big SYWP game they don’t follow their own moralising advice. They attack the Coalition for getting chummy with One Nation but don’t question Labor’s closeness to the hard-left Greens. Rather than recognise the terrible state of Victoria’s economy and evidence of corruption, they stroll past it, pointing out Labor’s great TikTok game, how all those Jacinta freebies were politically smart and the Jacinta-Ben switch-a-roo inspired.
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