Fifteen seconds of fame

Fifteen seconds of fame. When you are a new boy backbencher, it is flattering to have a journalist ask your opinion of anything. In Canberra your role is to be seen and not heard except for the occasional day when you are chosen to deliver the appropriate message at what these days they call “the doors” — the morning scrum at the entrance to Canberra’s Parliament House where media grabs are delivered to waiting journalists.

Darren Cheeseman, Labor MP for Corangamite, had his moment of glory yesterday but Kevin Rudd is likely to have banned from future appearances. Goodness knows what message was meant to be delivered but the instruction from the Government’s minders  certainly wasn’t to provide a peg on which speculation about a leadership challenge could be hung.

That peg, however, was just what the young Cheeseman provided and his 15 seconds of fame has now stretched into a second day. This morning the ABC was still reporting that “Labor backbencher Darren Cheeseman yesterday stoked speculation that the party was favouring Ms Gillard over Prime Minister Kevin Rudd after he described her as a ‘first-class deputy prime minister’ who was naturally in line to get the top job.”

Now that might seem an obvious truth and a fair description but in a political world where journalists just love to write stories about leadership challenges, young MPs are expected to have the skill to avoid making comments that encourage them. The deputy Prime Minister had to waste her 15 seconds this morning in trying to put an end to the inane speculation rather than spreading the message of the day the government would have preferred.

Sense from an old schoolmate. I was delighted to read this morning that an old schoolmate of mind has dissociated himself from the rubbish being spread by the Tasmanian Labor Party in the closing days of the state election campaign. Ross Butler scraped in as a Labor Member for Franklin on a recount to fill a vacancy part way through the parliamentary term and probably has little chance of still being an MLA after Saturday. But at least he will go out with some dignity intact after declaring that he could no longer sit quietly as Labor resorted to distasteful scare campaigns in its desperation to win Saturday’s state election. “I think it is dishonest, juvenile and counter-productive, and impairs the image of the entire Labor Party,” he told The Mercury.

I could not agree more. Perhaps the voters of Tasmania will now have enough sense to relegate Labor to being the third biggest party in the new Parliament after the Liberals and the Greens.

Have a chat with Chris. Immigration minister Chris Evans should ring one of his Labor predecessors, Chris Hurford, to get a reminder of what can happen when advice to evict a Muslim cleric is ignored for fear of some kind of electoral backlash. Hurford as immigration minister agreed that the former Mufti of Australia Taj El-Din Hilaly should be sent packing but was overruled after representations from Labor members with sizeable numbers of Muslims in their NSW electorates. El-Din Hilaly has been nothing but trouble ever since.

Minister Evans now has before him a final application by Dr Mansour Leghaei to avoid being sent back to Iran on the recommendation of ASIO.