By Bill Collopy
Have you ever uttered a peremptory ''thank you'' when you mean pipe down, you windbag? Ever heard teenage girls telling each other to ''shut up'' when they mean keep talking?
We enjoy our figures of speech. ''Yeah, right'' is our contemporary version of Eliza Doolittle's ''not bloody likely'', saying one thing while stabbing with its opposite. ''You're not wrong,'' would be Paul Hogan's litotic response.
However, when we consider Australian political parties, these conversational ironies are small beer in a big brewery. As Mick Dundee might say, ''That's not an irony; this is an irony.''
Consider. Can the Labor Party in power be said to represent labour when it rejects wage claims and gags union leaders? Can the Greens claim a mandate on all verdant hues from sustainable development to eco-terrorism? Can we call the Nationals national any more? Did One Nation belong to any nation? Many elected ''independents'' are disaffected former members of major parties, and they can be wooed when the policy price is right. Yet all such paradox merchants are amateurs by comparison: nobody does irony quite like the Liberal Party.
Do we say ''small-l lesbian'' to distinguish gay women from natives of the isle of Lesbos?
Do we say ''small-l lap dancer'' to distinguish men's club practitioners from prancing nomads in Lappland? Why then do we need the phrase ''small-l liberal''?
Robert Menzies, colossus of conservative politics and master of irony, hoodwinked the electorate in 1944 when christening his newly minted anti-Labor party. Instead of naming his brainchild the Conservative, Tory or Loyalist party, he aimed for the middle-class vote, his ''forgotten people''. In 2010 we talk of ''mainstream'' or ''swinging'' voters. John Howard appropriated the term ''battlers''. Mark Latham spoke of ''aspirationals''. Pig-iron Bob mastered wedge politics before they had a name. That cunning linguist knew there'd be nothing liberal about his Liberals, and yet his new party's name hinted at a Whig tradition of moderation and common sense, evoking Lloyd George, Gladstone and Alfred Deakin.
Bob and his right-Ming followers succeeded in shanghaiing a political term that meant ''middle-of-the-road reformist'' in Britain, and in the USA was tantamount to ''socialist''. A hero to his forgotten people and a raging political success. That's how we like our irony served Down Under: well done. Liberal equals Conservative? Must puzzle the heck out of American psephologists. Now we witness the birth of an ironic coalition in Britain, the ConDems. And talk of proportional representation? Aussie Rules, OK?
Recalling Menzies' wit has set me wondering about antipodean ironies. Consider the following figures of speech: Alliteration (Gordon Grech got greedy), Anaphora (Working families . . . working families . . . working families . . .), Antithesis (Australian Labor Party National Conference), Apposition (Malcolm Turnbull, former Apposition leader), Litotes (Malcolm Turnbull, not wrong on the environment), Metaphor (Climate change for the Liberal Party), Oxymoron (Liberals for Forests), Paradox (Kevin Rudd, Labor Party Prime Minister), Pun (Warren Truss, for coalition support), and Syllepsis (Wilson Tuckey needs to have a Bex and a good lie down.)
During the Howard years we saw grey-flannel politics. Today's flannel comes with red tape around green packaging. A few in the opposition might miss Costello's clown antics but hardly anyone would pine for the humour of Downer, Alston or Reith, each installed with an irony bypass. One survivor stand-up comic, an ex-pugilist with an ecclesiastically ironic surname, promises a Liberal fightback. In grammatical terms, I can't decide whether this amounts to hyperbole, chiasmus or catachresis: the alliterative Anthony Abbott versus a fiscal conservative with a name that means ''red''.
Thus equipped with tools of irony, we can offer an insulting ''Thank you'' to candidates accosting us in shopping centres. ''Shut up,'' we can urge major parties as they roll out the pork barrel. Leaders may plead for our trust. They may promise to fix things, pay for things and improve the weather. We can respond with liberal courtesy. Yeah, right.
Bill Collopy is a novelist who also teaches writing at Swinburne University. He is currently writing a book about the misuse of language.