A guest post by DavidP
Julia Gillard probably knows Shakespeare’s story of Macbeth. It was a standard high school text in English during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Noble lord, ambition stoked by witches’ prophesies, murders his king, turns into a bloody tyrant, and then himself is killed on the battlefield by his successors. And, if she missed learning at high school, odds on she saw Roman Polanski’s violent film version which was regularly screened at places like the Valhalla while completing her studies at Melbourne Uni. The underlying message of the play for Elizabethan audiences, as stressed by my English teacher at Eltham High, was: You don’t kill the king! Bad things will happen to people who remove their ruler! A message that recent events suggest seems still relevant.
The Prime Minister and her colleagues presumably ignored the message of Macbeth when removing her predecessor. They must have calculated that the benefits of removing the king outweighed the costs and proceeded. And, like in the play, at first, things seemed to go well. All hail the new queen! But as the story has unfolded, striking parallels with the story of Macbeth have occurred and it looks more and more likely that we may be living through a modern interpretation of the classic play.
First, like the noble lords Banquo and Macduff, senior colleagues Lindsay Tanner and John Faulkner quickly departed after the coronation. While they weren’t removed like in the play, they certainly left surrounded by questions. And the queen seemed unable to escape the way she seized the throne. Questions about the removal continued. The Labor party was dogged by leaks. And the slightly panicked policy announcements suggested a government not at ease with its position. Am surprised a cartoonist hasn’t thought to depict the Prime Minister washing her hands saying again and again “Out Damned Spot”!
One of the things Polanski’s film made very clear, from the first battlefield scene, was that while Duncan’s murder was shocking, these were violent times. And similarly, the election campaign has reminded us of the turbulence at the highest level of politics. The king returned, like a ghost, being visible but unable to answer questions (at least from the media). And ghosts of past removed kings soon swirled around distracting and disturbing the Prime Minister as she attempted to campaign and announce policies.
The parallels to the play are not exact. We may have to wait for someone’s memoirs to learn which factional warloads or journalists played the role of the witches stoking Macbeth’s ambition and bringing the bad news of the end. And it is too early to say whether the Opposition leader will be able to bring Birnham Wood to Dunsinane and overthrow Macbeth. Though at different times it has looked like the trees were busy packing their bags for the trip. But the play and the film make it clear that all this toil and trouble was not good for Scotland. And the quality of policies proposed during the campaign, suggests it is not good for Australia either.
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