It’s a common complaint from voters that politicians don’t live in the real world, and it’s evident when you see them trying to do ‘normal people’ things.
Late last month, Premier Ben Carroll hopped off the campaign bus for a pit stop at his local McDonald’s, during which he dipped his chips in soft serve.
It’s the kind of thing an alien might do to convince the humans it’s one of them.
Except Carroll isn’t from another planet. He’s from Airport West, where he once worked the checkout at Kmart, as he often reminds voters.
But less often mentioned is what came next: from a university degree straight into Steve Bracks’ office as an adviser, and later Federal Minister Stephen Conroy’s, before he won Niddrie in 2012.
He’s hardly alone when it comes to Labor MPs who have seldom ventured outside the political bubble.
In the 54 seats Labor already holds, almost half its candidates for the November 28 election, 48 per cent, have come straight from the political machine.
Their last job before running, or before they were first elected, was as a political staffer, ministerial adviser, union official, party official, or local councillor.
In the seats the Coalition holds, the figure is 18 per cent.
One Nation, as one might expect, has virtually no candidates with political experience.
When the analysis extends across every seat, not just currently held, Labor’s candidates ‘bubble candidates’ falls to 39 per cent, still almost three times Coalition’s 14 per cent, and well ahead of One Nation’s 3 per cent.
This is because in seats there is little hope of winning, Labor runs local teachers, nurses, and public servants. The safe seats, the ones that actually produce MPs, go to the machine and the party ‘hacks’.
The Coalition, for its part, lives up to its billing as the party of small business.
One in four of its candidates at the upcoming state election have run their own business before they stood, even One Nation beats Labor when it comes to representation from small business.
One Nation also fields the most candidates from the trades and military if anything, they are the party of the working class, not Labor, although its horde of union officials would say representing workers is exactly what they do.
Only two of Labor’s candidates came to politics from a trade or blue-collar job. One Nation has 11, more than Labor and the Coalition combined.
Opposition Leader Jess Wilson spent two years as a graduate consultant at KPMG, then 17 months advising Josh Frydenberg, and five years at the Business Council of Australia.
The man she replaced, Brad Battin, was a police officer for six years and ran a Bakers Delight franchise.
One Nation’s state leader, Warren Pickering, laid bricks and spent a decade as an Army combat engineer before working in Queensland’s coal mines.
Candidates’ backgrounds and experience living and working a ‘real job’ matters now more than ever with trust in politicians plunging, and voters don’t see their struggles represented.
In the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, an MP on a generous salary, with allowances and four years of guaranteed work, is insulated from rising prices and the insecure work so many of their constituents face.
To be fair, none of this means staffers make bad MPs.
The worry is the path that skips the real world altogether: from university, to the intern of an MP, an electorate office, and finally a seat in Parliament.
Whether that matters is up to you. A doctor doesn’t need to have had an illness to treat it, but they do need to have listened to enough patients to know what’s wrong.
The skills needed to run a department are not the skills needed to do the work it does.
And a staffer who has spent a decade drafting legislation and managing crises knows how government works better than most surgeons ever will.
The ‘drain the swamp’ crowd would say political experience is the problem, or that parties should preselect more outsiders, especially in safe seats, where preselection is the real contest.
So perhaps journalists should retire their favourite campaign gotcha: the price of a litre of petrol.
The better question is simpler: What was your last job outside politics?
NOTE
Labor’s 39 per cent overall figure is diluted by the local outsiders it runs in seats it doesn’t hold. In the 54 seats it already holds, 48 per cent of its candidates came straight from political jobs, against 18 per cent for the Coalition in its own seats, so I’d lead with the held-seat comparison. Figures are as at November 4 (258 announced candidates) and I’ll confirm them against the VEC’s final list after the ballot draw on November 9.
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