A series of seriously bad judgement calls from across the Australian political spectrum

Reputations are built on a series of judgement calls and the way in which those calls are received by others. We make a mistake, a bad call, and our reputation declines in the eyes of others. Good calls are rewarded with general acclamation and a restoration of our public esteem. A few years back, two Italian academics, Pierluigi Barrotta and Eleonora Montuschi, explored the idea of what judgement calls really were. Their conclusion was sound: it's a combination of judgement based on what they call "scientific knowledge" (otherwise known as our expertise) and that's combined with local knowledge, which I guess is about understanding the context.

This week, we've seen a number of strange judgement calls from all kinds of public figures. Number one on the Stranger Things list is a local Canberra renovator. We discovered the Governor-General David Hurley appeared in an advertisement for his builder. I'm going to take at face value the GG's explanation he didn't know the footage (of Hurley and his wife talking about how great his builders were) would be public. But I have to ask, why would you agree to be recorded doing this?

So let me issue an instruction to Hurley and to anyone else who needs to hear this. Don't do advertisements if you are on the public teat. You don't have the right to do that. You are leveraging the power our nation gave you to provide commercial benefit. Yes, the testimonial was provided in a private capacity and there was no payment, discount or any gifts in kind. But there is no way the governor-general has a private capacity at this very moment.

Also, c'mon, video footage is universally one of the greatest risks to personkind (this is only a slight overstatement). It gets repurposed, remixed, remastered and redistributed and God knows where it will end up or how it will be received. In this case, it was unaltered but it ended up looking like the Queen's rep was out touting for his builder. Builder By Royal Assent. Awkward. And I'm puzzled this didn't ring alarm bills for months and months.

And apparently no alarm bells went off within the Prime Minister's team at the decision to delete numbers of advisor staff for crossbenchers. Let me remind you how Mr Albanese sold himself. Calm, collaborative, co-operative, consensus-driven. This decision made it look like Albo was hunting Bambi instead of Voldemort. Let me remind you in case you've wiped the last nine years from your minds, the dementors are the enemy.

Is this decision a way of cutting costs? Is it wanting to wind back what looks like overindulgence by failed former prime minister Scott Morrison, trying to keep crossbenchers onside? Whatever it was, the optics were dreadful.

Instead of looking like sensible cautious management, it looked bitter and punitive. And what's surprised me even more is that those criticising this decision have been met with a volley of "why are you picking on Labor?" remarks. Here's why. We need a government which looks both sober and kind, both careful and generous. One minute, it's all "we will treat the teals with care" and charm. Nekminet, their staff are necked. Nearly the weirdest vibe of the week.

That probably belongs to Senator Hollie Hughes. Oh my god where does the Coalition recruit these people? At a Sydney Institute dinner, she was asked how the Liberals would recover the youth vote.

She replied: "One of the issues ... [is] we've got an education system that's basically run by Marxists."

"When kids are at school and they're being taught all this absolute leftwing rubbish, that's where they're leaving school and that's where they're landing ... when you've got a problem in your education system it's going to take a generation to fix it."

So first she dumps on schools, then she tells parents they need to turn the internet off. Then she says: "Stop them [the kids I guess] using the car to make them get public transport."

READ MORE JENNA PRICE:

Now I'm not sure whether these comments are actually damaging Hughes's reputation. After all, she was the person who backed Alan Tudge, the minister who decided to have an affair with staffer Rachelle Miller. Hughes said she backed Tudge to the hilt, declaring "I also stand with Tudgey!" But attacking teachers, whose work is extraordinary, is on par with attacking health workers. She lowers herself and her political class in the public eye when she attacks those who educate our children and grandchildren.

And Hughes is part of the problem. A new book, Constructing Teacher Identities by Nicole Mockler, reveals the way in which journalists and politicians consistently pillory teachers and damage the reputations of educators. No wonder we are struggling to recruit and retain the people responsible for leading our children into the future. Those like Hughes, who degrade and demean teachers (and defame them as a class) instead of supporting them, inflict permanent damage on a system which should be being built up, supported and sustained.

I don't hold much hope that the Coalition will get the public to believe it has moved on from immature LNP culture wars but the continuation of the war on education does nothing to rebuild the party's trashed reputation. It should take care not to become utterly irrelevant unless it wants to spend 23 years in the wilderness.

The last week has shown us how tenuous is the grip on good reputations and public images. Hurley's might be dismissed as overexcitement at finding a decent builder during a pandemic but his judgement was clouded. Hughes should have known better but perhaps she is more interested in building a culture war than a better Australia. And god knows what got into Albo but let's hope he changes his mind. He has to live up to all those promises he made, the promise of a better, fairer and kinder Australia. Be clever and recognise our new context.