Final week, Crikey broke the information of the bag of weed that some stoner with dangerous handwriting despatched to Scott Morrison shortly after he ceased to be prime minister.
PhD researcher and affiliate lecturer on the ANU’s faculty of politics and worldwide relations Daniel Casey acquired in contact to tell us that was simply the tip of the iceberg. Casey’s analysis focuses on letters from members of the general public to political leaders — primarily long-ago-PM John Howard.
The analysis paints an enchanting, generally touching, regularly quietly heartbreaking different historical past of residents trying to be heard. There are the homeowners of a “small resort” providing Howard the possibility to come back “for a counter lunch” two days earlier than the 1998 election: “I can advocate the cutlets on Mondays.” There’s the letter calling for an apology to the Stolen Generations — which Howard famously resisted to the tip — which ends with a tantalising, allusive hand-written postscript:
You as soon as stood below our Hills hoist when accumulating Melanie from a Sunday faculty get together we organised. I can’t sense the identical decency now. I need to. What occurred?
Each letters acquired standardised replies.
“Folks write to political leaders searching for to make a distinction, to point out their leaders that they care about a problem,” Casey informed Crikey. “Nonetheless, they know that usually their letters are ignored. How can they reveal the depth of their emotions? A method is to submit ‘issues’, hoping that this marketing campaign may additionally collect media consideration, making a snowball impact.”
This ends in, as Casey put it, “every kind of bizarre shit” being despatched to the PM of the day: “I interviewed one of many public servants whose job it was to open the mail. They recalled folks sending in rice to prime minister Howard. They informed me: ‘So there can be moist, soggy rice in an envelope that may rock up in the remainder of the mail … There was a particular bin within the mail room, only for the rice.’ ”
Once they began, the general public servant informed Casey, they requested: ” ‘What’s this bin for?’ They usually’re like: ‘The rice.’ I used to be like, ‘The what?’ “
Casey mentioned the rice was despatched as a protest towards the invasion of Iraq — regularly accompanied by a be aware referencing the biblical verse Romans 12:20: “In case your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he’s thirsty, give him one thing to drink.”
The identical public servant informed Casey a couple of marketing campaign that concerned “farmers sending Howard the shirts off their again. Actually. So it was T-shirts the place they’d written usually very offended feedback or slurs and issues about how Howard was taking the shirts off their backs.”
The large query is: does stuff like this work?
Casey mentioned: “Nicely, the general public servant couldn’t recall what both of those campaigns have been even about! For them, they have been only a drawback to be handled. Their considerations have been round what the Archives Act necessities have been for these merchandise. Did they must be filed and archived? In the event that they needed to be archived, what did [they] must do to make sure they wouldn’t deteriorate? Might they be thrown out?”
Howard and his employees — who Casey interviewed earlier than speaking to the mailroom public servant — didn’t assume to say both marketing campaign, and maybe most dispiriting for the submit field protesters, neither the T-shirts nor the rice made any type of splash within the media.
“The rice protest acquired one point out that I may discover, in a Margo Kingston piece,” Casey mentioned. “I searched by means of numerous archives for hours for any point out of the ‘shirt off our backs’ marketing campaign from farmers. I discovered nothing.”
One prop that regularly does get consideration, Casey mentioned, was sending menstrual merchandise to politicians, each in Australia and overseas. Used tampons and sanitary pads have been despatched to Texas Governor Greg Abbott to protest his harsh anti-abortion stance, and then-immigration minister Morrison acquired unused merchandise after it was reported — though denied by his workplace — that “humiliating” restrictions on sanitary merchandise have been being imposed on asylum seeker ladies in detention.
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