Paying the price of infamy


Edition 3SUN 09 FEB 1997, Page 126
Paying the price of infamy
By RICHARD FARMER 
WHEN you choose to take a job where you determine for people what is best for them, it should not surprise you that there is a price to be paid.
Being in public life inevitably means that your life becomes far more public than that of an ordinary citizen.
Even the politicians last week pretending outrage at the publication of some pictures embarrassing to one of their own would concede that much.
Which is why the attack on the newspapers is for their invading the privacy of the wife of Senator Bob Woods rather than that of the resigning senator himself.
Yet in truth it ever was, and ever will be, impossible to insulate the families of politicians from the consequences of the actions of the politicians. It is rather like, I suppose, that the families of a convicted murderer end up having to live with the embarrassment of having been close to the killer.
It was not their fault that they were thrust in to the limelight because of birth or marriage, but thrust they were.
Why was it less fair, for example, to show a picture of Mrs Woods than in the same week to highlight the distress of the second Mrs Alan Bond as her husband was led back to the cells?
There was no cacophony of noise from politicians expressing their horror at that intrusion into the privacy of an innocent woman, and nor should there have been on behalf of Mrs Woods.
If you marry a politician, or allow your spouse to become one, then the disruption of your life is one of the consequences.
Mrs Woods, as the daughter of a politician, was better prepared than most women to know that. The sympathy which people will have for her is not because she had her picture in the paper but because of what her husband has put her through. Compounding the interest in this latest story of the frailties of the political flesh is the dash of hypocrisy that will continue to rear its head whenever one of the Liberal Party fold is shown to be human after all.
It is the Prime Minister, John Howard, who has been preaching about traditional Christian family values and is aiding and abetting the imposition of his moral standards on the majority of Australians who have, for example, a quite different view to him on a question like voluntary euthanasia.
That puts a new dimension on questions of this kind and should lead to a more intensive scrutiny of the personal moral actions of those who are preaching morality to others.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Is Scott Morrison getting ahead of Malcolm Turnbull in the GST debate?

Prime Minister Scott Morrison under pressure as the question about knowledge of a rape gets embarrassing

Remembering that Labor only lost last time because of Bill Shorten