How would it play out, in the media, and I guess I’d better include the courts, if a bloke at a community gathering with senior politicians – cabinet ministers – did a Ron Casey on one of them?
See, I nearly did this in 2008. I REALLY nearly did it!
I was recovering from a nervous breakdown which I had after quitting my career as a world-renowned research scientist. I had returned from 2 prestigious international fellowships and couldn’t get a job, and wanting to start a family before the biological clock took that chance away from us, and with house prices having over doubled in the short period we were away and resettled after returning, and then our rent being increased by 30% in one year taking home ownership further away from us, I had quit my career to become a stay at home dad… and did I mention by this time our second child was on the way …
And, well, I was really vulnerable, to say the least.
And that powerful politician answered to my face the question that I had posed to him as the Treasurer of the country, along with Prime Minister Rudd, and Anna Blye (then Qld Premier, now head of the bank lobby, of course) in a letter as to whether negative gearing might be restricted to new builds before being eliminated.
I had really soaked up the “bringing back the fair go” message from their recent election and I thought they were fair dinkum.
Boy was I wrong to believe them!
As I approached Wayne Swan to request a direct conversation, from a metre away I was taken by how his oversized mandible was even larger in real life…
and when he looked me in the eyes and said, “you’re dreaming if you think negative gearing will ever be ended”
his huge jaw was all I could look at as my mind had already calculated that he was within easy reach of my right hook.
At that split moment my mind shifted from the controlled (but feeling much smaller) man in the above AI generated image to another (former) version of myself (below) …
Keep in mind that I grew up in a culture where my parents’ school friend Warwick Crossland, a really nice bloke, was widely admired as the “King of Kurrumba”, the best bar brawler in the Gulf.
Somehow I stopped myself from reacting to Swan’s vile taunt.
Honestly I still don’t really know how I did.
As I walked away from the throng of people surrounding him and the others I was in a state of anxious shock – at what was said to me and at what I actually contemplated in a split moment of my life when so much could have changed depending on my reaction.
I literally shook all of the half hour drive home and the first thing I said to my wife is that I nearly punched the Treasurer of the country.
Over the past 17 years I’ve often deliberated about that moment in 2008 when I almost lost control and punched Australian Treasurer Wayne Swan in the jaw, and it still brings echoes of the strong anxiety I felt then. But the overriding question remains what might have happened because the court of public opinion would have been critical, not just the judicial court, in what happened.
Now as a lad from the country, not a faux larrikin as all those pollies become outside of the CBD, I well know the Aussie pub test goes along the line of …
“Well Swan was being a prick, and Edgo just dropped one on his jaw – he gave him what he deserved just like anyone being a goose around here on a Friday night would get”.
Don’t agree? What did Mick Dundee do to the arrogant New Yorker who took him and his ‘sheila’ to a swanky Italian restaurant to show him up? Mick gave him a quick chop across the jaw, politely out of sight of the lovely lady so as not to embarrass her.
And didn’t we all love it!
So I ask again, how does this play out?
Because, to be honest, it’s a question I’ve asked myself a lot over the years. I even wonder whether it might not have been such a pivotal moment that maybe the whole history of the Australian housing bubble might be very different if I did not manage to control myself and show the decency that Wayne Swan arrogantly failed to show me …
I do pride myself on being a thought-leading progressive man and exemplary role model to my sons.
But like all human beings I do try to calculate the pros and cons to my actions which flow from my values …
And, after all, the same narrative that excuses selfish behaviour as human nature also says we will revert to our primitive caveman state when provoked sufficiently …
So maybe, just maybe, on that one occasion the ends may have justified the (aggressive and uncontrolled) means.
Rest assured, President (of federal ALP) Swan is well aware that he has an open invitation from me to step outside and settle things the way men from the country do on occasions. I know for sure that I’ll enjoy the support of generations of young and not so young Aussies that have been deeply hurt by another 17 years in the squeeze of entirely unnecessary atmospherically high housing prices.
But I’ll settle for a public apology from Swan and a commitment from the Labor party to be authentic and ensure their actions mirror the values they spruik …
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© Copyright Brett Edgerton 2024
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