The Political Story

As if things weren’t bad enough already for the Liberal Party. 

Currently preparing for at least 6 years in Opposition at the Federal level, with the highest ranking party member being a mayor in Brisbane, and not a victory in sight at the State level for several years…

Along comes Troy “Nostrils” Buswell.

In case you have been living under a rock for the past week, the short story is that the leader of the WA Liberal Party, Troy Buswell, confessed to “sniffing” a woman’s chair (in front of her, and then in front of colleagues) after she had been sitting in it. His media confession had the works: regret, apologies, choking-up with tears.

But the real story isn’t that he sniffed the chair. It’s that the chair sniffer apparently remains the best guy for the leadership job in WA, after a failed leadership coup today. 

So it really is hard to know which is worse - the fact that the leader of their party in WA appears to be a chauvinistic loon, or that they don’t have anyone actually up to the task of replacing him. 

One might think the Federal Liberals would seek to put some distance between themselves and Troy’s snoz… but Deputy Leader Julie Bishop hits the airwaves asking for a “second chance” for poor old Nostrils. After all, she argues, Kevin did hit the strip club in NY and went on to become P.M.

Sorry Julie. We are hardly comparing apples with apples here.

Firstly, Nostrils doesn’t quite seem to be a politician of the calibre of Kevin07.

But aside from that, lets look at the details… Kevin gets pissed with a Newspaper guy, stumbles into Scores, perves on a few dancers… and the first thing he does the next day (after taking a few asprin) is call the wife to ‘fess up. And when the story breaks, two things happen: Aussie men love the fact he has some red blood pumping through his Mandarin-speaking veins, and Aussie women love the fact he phoned home to confess. If Kevin had waited till after it hit the media to confess, we may well have seen a different response from female voters.

Now, let’s actually just stop and think through what Troy managed to get up to. He has a meeting. Woman sits in chair. After she gets up, he heads on over, bends down to the ground and starts SNIFFING her chair… He sniffed it. Not once, but twice. Presumably to get a whiff of her woman-ness.

Short of actually tearing her skirt off, it is hard to imagine what Troy could have done that would be more offensive. And as far as we know, there was no immediate phone calls to the wife. Heck, he wasn’t even drunk when he did it. One has to wonder what Nostrils could muster if he’d sunk a few Tequilas…

Which brings us back to the leadership issue. There can be no doubt Nostrils is a dead man walking. But the fact he is holding on to the leadership is a stunning reflection of the lack of depth the Liberals have at both State and Federal levels at the moment. Is there one current leader (be it State or Federal) that anyone actually believes will be leading their respective Party to an election? 

The Liberals are in a tailspin. Short on leadership and short on ideas, it is going to be a long time in the wilderness. Forget about what they can smell… unless they can fix their leadership issues, they won’t be tasting electoral victory for quite a while.