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I saw my share of bird-dogging before I’d even met the word. Geelong, say, 2021. Scott Morrison, the then-PM, was on the campaign trail. Amid a press scrum, one voice arose: “Prime Minister, Geelong Council’s put a feasibility study into a big ute for the region, a ute on a pole as a tourist attraction. It’s got the support of Daniel Andrews and Anthony Albanese. Do you support a big ute for Geelong?”
Hardly the question Morrison was expecting, but that’s the gist of bird-dogging, the spookier flipside of a Dorothy Dixer, where a journo or zealous local will “confront a politician at a public event with direct questions to draw attention to a specific issue, or call them to account”, as per the Macquarie.
Albo and ScoMo, brothers in arms when it comes to political pollywaffle.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Origins lie in hunting, where a bird-dog is trained to sniff out quail, say, and point the hunter towards the game. Though, in a media huddle, the game is flushing one topic into the light, not that ScoMo was quailing. Tourism was his former hustle after all, the PM responding, “Well, I love utes. How good are utes? And how good would a Big Ute be?” As good as bird-dogging, if you do it right.
We see the sport nightly now, the ambusher asking about fracking, or housing, or coral bleaching. Calling the senator to account, perhaps, on the rubber chicken circuit – that loop of official dinners a pollie must attend. Animals in general dominate the Canberra glossary, from dog whistles to donkey votes, lapdogs to koala diplomacy (bung a native bear in Xi Jinping’s arms to soothe the dragon), each phrase listed in Dirty Politics: A-Z of Trickery, Treachery and Other Tasty Treats (Pan Macmillan, 2025).
With parliament on extended smoko, treat this stocking filler as your chance to revive the pollywaffle, reliving all your faves, like shovel-ready and razor gang, preference whisperer and feeding the chooks. Food, in fact, is another flavour, the House of Reps our House of Wraps, bundling the democracy sausage as a barbecue stopper or delivering pork barrels behind the quinoa curtain.
This last slang identifies the “imaginary line marking a socio-economic and cultural division”, alias the latte line or goat-cheese curtain, as coined by demographer Bernard Salt. Delicious, though not as tasty as the pure Australianisms in Dirty Politics, stuff like bonk ban or light on the hill, strollout or captain’s pick.
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Even archaisms such as bunyip aristocracy and do a Harold Holt possess a quaint charm compared with the spate of American imports, ranging from gerrymander to astroturfing (fake version of grassroots), drain the swamp to pass the buck. That said, I love the US cynicism of log-cabin story – a pollie’s so-called humble origins – and sanewashing, where a complicit news outlet bathes batshit crazy in plausibility.
New words bobbed up too, a la bird-dogging, or the backflip verbs of undorsing and front-stabbing. Even MOGing (or mogging), which any public servant knows, denoting the “machinery of government” reset triggered by a new party’s arrival to power. Or the nasty slur of crumb maiden, a flunky sustaining the regime for the spillage of minor benefits. Or perhaps the creepy hybrid of laberal, that shadowy overlap of not dissimilar policies. PS: almost six years on, minister, and Geelong still awaits its big ute.
