George Brandis
George Brandis (Image: AAP)

While a pompous clown as politician and attorney-general, George Brandis “QC” was no fool when it came to extracting dollars from taxpayers. There was the time he charged taxpayers to attend the wedding of failed right-wing shock-jock Michael Smith. Then there were the infamous bookshelves — the $15,000 waste of money for bookshelves for Brandis’ $13,000 taxpayer-funded library.

And after 18 years on the public teat as senator for Queensland, the provincial lawyer scored another lucrative taxpayer-funded gig in 2018: high commissioner in London. Having adorned that role with his usual mediocrity for four long, doubtlessly arduous years, Brandis has returned to Australia. And after more than two decades of taxpayer largesse, one might have thought he was ready to make his own way in the world again.

Alas, no: he fetched up at Australian National University. At ANU’s prestigious College of Law, of course? Well, not quite. According to the gushing media release from ANU, Brandis will be “a professor in the Practice of National Security and will be primarily based at the National Security College in the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. He will also lend his incredible expertise to the ANU College of Law.”

To be fair, claims of Brandis’ expertise are indeed pretty incredible. But it depends on what kind of expertise. Expertise in singlehandedly wrecking a legislative proposal? Check — see George’s notorious “people have a right to be bigots” line about reform of the Racial Discrimination Act. Expertise in communicating policy? Check — see the famous Speers interview on data retention, less a trainwreck than watching an ant get fried under a magnifying glass. Expertise in the arts? Sure — see the $100 million in cuts so he could establish his own personal fund. Well, how about legal aid? He also slashed funding for that.

How about stacking the Administrative Appeals Tribunal — perhaps there’s an ANU College professorship in that?

In politics, Brandis was the Man With the Sadim Touch: everything he touched turned to shit, usually shit accompanied by some arbitrary Latin phrase or inaccurate historical reference, designed to lend a pretence of gravitas to the otiose wafflings of the deliverer. Over the course of his storied time in the ministry, he had arts, counter-terrorism and, finally, much of the A-G’s portfolio taken away from him. Expertise in downsizing, perhaps?

ANU staff immediately jacked up about the prospect of Brandis swanning into a professorship at a time of academic austerity, with no consultation about the appointment. That the current ANU chancellor is Julie Bishop surely has nothing to do with the appointment. Nothing at all.

As if to demonstrate that Brandis has undergone no miraculous transmogrification into someone capable of complex thought while in London, he has overnight graced us with his hot take on the departure of Boris Johnson, whom he deems the most important British leader since Thatcher. Not for George Tony Blair, who cemented the legacy of Thatcher and helped author the colossal historical tragedy of Iraq, or Gordon Brown, who expertly helped save the British economy from collapse during the financial crisis, or even David Cameron, who restored the Tories to electability after a generation in the wilderness. “He is a winner,” Brandis trills about Johnson, an observation that current circumstances perhaps lend a slight air of rubberiness to.

What’s really going on is that Johnson is secretly the politician Brandis wishes he has been. George, too, likes to drop the occasional Latin pearler and wants everyone to know how clever he is, but he could never quite pull off Johnson’s carefully cultivated image of the fop with the common touch, a bloke as well as a chap, equally at home in the common room, the pub or the parliament.

Johnson, at least, has made his own way in the world and never particularly needed taxpayer money. For Professor Brandis, that’s not something to emulate.