Webmaster's note: This unremitting critique from Senator Lees's home town has an apt irony in view of the reliance placed on 'perceptions' by Meg and her soul-sister Cheryl Kernot in citing adverse press reports as part of the justification for ending the internal participatory democracy of the Australian Democrats.
Meg's ship sinking in luxury
PETER GOERS
Opinion
SENATOR Meg Lees loves pandas, the Australian Democrats and all endangered species. The leader of the Democrats is an unusual lady with all the charisma of Canberra.
A former chalkie, she has the demeanor of a deputy headmistress you'd be anxious to avoid in the corridor.
I'd been promised an hour with her, but I had 56 minutes and didn't feel short-changed. To me minutes with Meg felt like hours. We met in her swank new suite of offices on The Parade at chic Kensington with ducted air-con and lots of earnest staff members with the faces of the early martyred saints.
Meg's minder, and just-failed political candidate John Schumann, sat in on the interview. The luxurious offices are very cheerless. She was clearly a "not happy, Jan", but then her party had just been devastated in WA with very little hope on the horizon.
I was not invited to call her Meg just Senator - but that's fair enough because she obviously craves respect as the most powerful shiela in Australia since the Australian Democrats hold the balance of power in Canberra - not that it does us much good.
Her offices are anonymous with no sign nor shingle outside. Perhaps she's waiting until the next Federal Election to put her sign out in case she has to take it down. Perhaps she's embarrassed to be a Democrat and many may sympathise with that.
The epicentre of Democratland is stark and soulless. Unlike community-minded politicians there are no posters or raffles or charity donations or notices of fundraisers or memorabilia of worthy causes.
There are no photographs of the penguins so close to the Senator's heart.
As an amateur lenswoman she loves to sit around in the Antarctic waiting for penguins to move and take a snap.
I asked her if she was a "bluestocking"? "Please define?", she snapped as a variant on Pauline Hanson's "please explain?" A bluestocking is an oldfashioned fond term for a female intellectual and I suppose if you don't know what it is - you aren't one.
THE Senator deplores "the growing divide between rich and poor" and I'll return to that. She admires Nelson Mandela (hardly original), but won't admit to admiring any Australian politician - apart, one supposes, from fellow Democrats although quite a few of them don't like her much.
The Australian Democrats have long touted themselves as the party which "keeps the bastards honest". Pauline Hanson has swiped that line and turned it back on the Democrats by saying; "Let's not just keep the bastards honest - let's get rid of the bastards". Perhaps the Democrats have become what they are trying to protect us from.
One Nation is indeed more popular than the Democrats, which must worry the Senator. One Nation won more first preference votes in the last Federal Election for the Senate than the Democrats. The Australian Democrats remain a second preference party, essentially, and second preferences have largely secured their 13 seats in the nation.
She's Meg "GST" Lees. We wouldn't have had the GST without her and we recall and recoil from the photographs of her triumphantly shaking hands with the PM after the GST deal was struck and after the parliament and the nation argued about cooked chooks for weeks. Meg loves the GST: "I'm proud to be known as the politician who gave us GST".
Unfortunately, she didn't stop the labyrinthine tax system with all the bloody BAS bun fights. The Democrats are proudly the party of small business which is rapidly going out of business. "We didn't want small business to suffer," she says. Oops.
Fortunately, small businesses know who to blame - not perhaps John Howard so much since we probably needed tax reform, but the Democrats who made it so complicated. (The electorate has enough to blame John Howard for and let's start with the broken promise on no petrol price rise because of the GST - why didn't Meg Lees preclude that in her deal?)
UNLIKE the Senator, I canvassed the opinion of the owners of the four closest delis to her luxurious new offices. All of the hardworking proprietors loathe the GST and the BAS.
At Sam's Deli across the road from the Senator's splendid offices Sam's wife Samisa says the GST is "a headache costing us big money". Up the road at Ransom's Deli the husband and wife proprietors, who put in a 60-hour week, say the GST has cost them at least 10 per cent of their business and that "Meg Lees doesn't live in the real world". They say tradesmen are going without lunch because of the cost of petrol.
At Michael's Deli, Helen Habib, the wife of the manager, nearly wept as she told how much money - and customers - they have lost because of the GST and they may be forced out of business because they are unable to support their five kids. Thanks Meg Lees.
All complain about the time and money involved in doing their BAS and it is estimated that 25 per cent of small businesses will go out of business because of the GST. So much for the Australian Democrats supporting small business.
Senator Lees is full of contradictions. "I'm not in favour of privatisation" she pontificates. I remind her that the Democrats voted to privatise the Ports Corporation in SA. "Oh...yes...well!"
Senator Lees and her new husband, the admirable and crusading Matthew Mitchell, joined the PM's Federation junket to London last year at enormous expense to the taxpayers. She met the Queen (how thrilling!) and attended five Federation functions in a gruelling schedule. She defends the junket by saying that "It was a celebration of Australia's history which all began in London". I disagree. Australia's history, began 50,000 years before the English invasion, but perhaps the Senator isn't aware of that.
Then I dropped a clanger. I suggested that the Senator may leave parliament as a millionaire - there are many precedents. She got very cross and for one horrible moment I thought she was going to send me outside on yard duty.
The Senator earns up to $240,000 in salary and allowances a year. Her travel allowance for six months in 1999 was $48,249. I rang to cheek these facts with John Schumann, but he told me, "I haven't got time to do your research", but then he called back to advise me that some other Democrat would be calling me to tell me how the Democrats help small business. At the time of writing no-one has bothered to call.
Barry at Ransom's Deli up the road from the Senator's offices says that $240,000 is his entire gross yearly turnover, out of which he and his wife share a mere 15 per cent as wages. So much for the gap between the battlers and the-one supposed to be keeping the bastards honest.
Senator Lees is the captain of a sinking ship.
The best that can be said for her is that she dislikes the Olsen Government and its expensive car races.
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