By Derek Schlennstedt
Many woke millennials will be familiar with ‘the circle of life’.
It’s a term coined in the Lion King, and refers to how everything in life comes full circle.
“When we die, our bodies become the grass, and the antelope eat the grass. And so we are all connected in the great Circle of Life,” says the wise Mufasa to his son, Simba.
What Mufasa could not have foretold though, is how that circle of life would relate to the current political landscape in Australia – in particular, the Sports Rorts scandal.
Because, should Bridget McKenzie survive this week and return to Parliament when it resumes on 4 February, our very own Casey MP and Speaker For The House, Tony Smith will have achieved the very embodiment of ‘the circle of life’.
You see, twenty six years ago, at the height of another political conniption over another sports minister and her prime minister, it was Tony Smith himself who invented the absolute ruinous rhyme “sports rorts”.
To set the scene, in the early 1990s Smith was a young staffer of shadow finance minister Peter Costello.
Costello made his political presence in the 90s by effectively blowing up Ros Kelly’s political career when she fell afoul of the auditor-general for keeping no records of the $30 million in sports grants she handed out…sound familiar?
Anywho, while this was all happening, that poet of pestilence, Tony Smith came up with an absolute ripping rhyme. In fact, even Costello admitted the man had outdone himself and was spitting absolute political fire.
“Tony Smith thought of a name for it: sports rorts,” Costello wrote years later in a memoir.
The term caught the nation’s imagination and pushed Kelly out of the ministry. Less than a year later, she was also out of Parliament. The Liberals won her seat, foreshadowing the Keating government’s defeat in 1996.
26 years later and The Liberal Government will most likely, at some point, have to address the very verbal grenade that Tony Smith used to demolish the credibility of Prime Minister Paul Keating’s sports minister, Ros Kelly all those years ago. And thus my friends, the life cycle is completed.
It’s the circle of life in action people, and it moves us all.
