Prime Minister Tony Abbott made international news the other day by eating a raw onion, skin and all.
This is a peculiarly Australian test of hegemonic masculinity – ruling class males must, before reaching retirement age, eat a raw onion to camera, ensuring a visual record of arrival at full status in the dominant group.
It is required of males in the political hierarchy that the Initiation of the Onion be performed sooner rather than later. Prime Minister Abbott has been somewhat tardy in fulfilling his obligations, as was evidenced by the discontent among his back benchers, who attempted some weeks ago to move a spill motion in an attempt to unseat him.
Eat the raw onion! they demanded, or get off the pot.
Hopes are running high now that after completing his final initiation Abbott, having absorbed the mystical power of the onion much in the way that primitive peoples believed that eating the heart and liver of warrior enemies would increase their strength and fortitude, will change his leadership style to one that better accommodates the many layers of complexity any leader must deal with in his followers.
It is the opinion of this writer that Prime Minister Abbott might have better served the country and his own interests by retaining the onion, intact, between his teeth, in the manner of a pig on a spit with an apple in its jaws. That way he would not have been able to yet again put his foot in his mouth, as he did when two days ago he decided to describe Indigenous people living in remote communities as making a “lifestyle choice.”
There are perhaps few other phrases so redolent of white middle-class privilege as the phrase “lifestyle choice.” Such language could not be more irrelevant when discussing remote Aboriginal communities, unless the Prime Minister is so impoverished in imagination as to believe that forty thousand years of attachment to country can be reduced to the contemporary concept of “lifestyle choice.”
A more outstanding example of solipsism would be difficult to find, even from this Prime Minister whose great talent is his ability to perceive the world and everyone in it as existing only through his eyes. If he stops looking at us, we aren’t here.
Of course the term “lifestyle choice” has been used by ruling-class hegemonic masculinists before in relation to asylum seekers arriving here by boat. These people are not refugees fleeing persecution, they are serial pests flitting from country to country, stubbornly intent on fulfilling their lifestyle choices. Otherwise they are terrorists. Yes. The hegemonic masculine mind projects its own understandings on to the world outside of it, and look what it comes up with.
Personally, I think it would have been far more interesting had the Prime Minister shoved the onion up his arse. Much more of a talking point, and a unique way of adding value to that asset. After all, the apprehension is taking hold amongst Australian people that our PM speaks, increasingly, from that orifice.
Of course it would first be necessary to remove the suppository of wisdom in order to make room for the onion, but the shelf-life of suppositories is a short one, and much of it may have melted, making removal a relatively straightforward procedure.
Perhaps the consumption of the onion indicates the PM has taken a new if tentative step along the long and winding road to wisdom. It was Socrates, I believe, whose advice for a good, wise and moral life was to first, Know Thine Onions.
No Place For Sheep 
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