Men Are Stupid, Women Are Crazy by Ruehl Peter;

Author:Ruehl, Peter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 5718410
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2011-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

Politics

© David Rowe/Australian Financial Review

Ruehl Britannia

10 May 1988

It was a bit like going to a party which you had assumed would be worthy of a police bust, only to find out it was a bunch of seminarians munching cookies. Somehow this whole spectacle became derailed. They had ten years to plan it (87, if you are a stickler for accuracy, federally speaking), but the opening of the new Parliament House yesterday packed the emotional torque of a Moscow May Day parade. Don’t blame the Queen. This is not a woman who seeks inspiration from Tina Turner, but we knew that when we invited her. She did not disappoint.

Start with the crowd itself. Predictions called for 100 000 but the forecasters must have been drawn from the same well of talent that tells you how the weather will be in three days. In other words, the 20 000 people who showed up did not unduly tax Canberra’s municipal services. (There is a pattern here. When they opened up the old Parliament House in 1927, the same thing happened, which resulted in the mass burial of several tons of meat pies. The local worms had gastritis well into the late 1930s.)

The 1927 ceremony was held on the steps of the old building, but yesterday’s punctilio was in the Great Hall, which sounds a little bit like a place where Chairman Mao might have given a speech. The rites were piped outside via a public address system but it is always more gratifying to see, rather than just hear, your tax dollars being consumed.

In terms of theatre, this was a Donnie and Marie performance. We shouldn’t mention music but it’s too late now. Before the Queen, the Primo, the Governor-General and respective consorts arrived, John Williamson was the opening act. There are many songs in the world that would have been better off unwritten but ‘True Blue’, sung one more time—with feeling—is close to the top of that reverse hit parade. And at the end of the ceremonies, the Labor Party sadist who persists in doing this did it again: Julie Anthony chanteused her way through ‘Advance Australia Fair’, the world’s most unsung national anthem (she’s the only one who knows the words).

One can’t just blame the performers. The crowd itself was not the tapestry of historic proportions, and that does not refer merely to size. If this is the wave of the future, then democracy is in the hands of people who appear headed for a rock concert. The paintings of the 1927 fete depict men in high hats and morning suits, and women decked out in equally full regalia. Their grandchildren now find shorts and thongs sartorially appropriate for similar occasions.

Neighbours, things just weren’t always clicking. In the Great Hall, great things were going awry. As Bob Hawke, with the Queen at his side, followed by Hazel Hawke and Prince Philip (let your imaginations dwell on those pairings), approached the dais, no one seemed to know exactly where to sit. These

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