L.W. Lower, “Oh, for a Gold Pass … Sighs Lower!”
The Australian Women’s Weekly, December 2, 1933, p. 9.

Are you girls interested in politics? Neither am I.

Of course, if elections were not too much trouble, I would have liked to have been elected a member. I would have hung my gold pass around my neck and spent whole days riding up and down in trams and trains free.

But apart from small privileges such as gold passes, a politician’s life is a hard and strenuous one. For instance, they are continually called upon to move things about.

You read: “Mr. Soandso then got up and moved the adjournment.” They have to move the thing practically every day, and why they haven’t got rid of it altogether puzzles me. Then, again, you read about a motion being carried by a majority of fourteen. It makes my blood boil to think that our leaders have to get fourteen of their number to carry this motion to wherever it has to be carried when there are so many men out of work, some of them with lorries, too.

It’s a precarious job, being a member of Parliament. Just when you think you’re set for life, you find yourself pushed out into the cold by a herd of unsympathetic electors. The Prime Minister, Mr. Lyons, is doing his best to safeguard himself against such a possibility. With himself, his wife and his eleven children. In a few years time he will have thirteen sure votes. If he can keep going he will soon have an electorate of his own with no possible chance of being defeated.

It must be rather interesting to be married to a politician. For instance, the wife, accompanied by her children, would find her husband considering weighty affairs of state in the washhouse or the garden.

“What would you like for dinner tonight?” she asks.

The politician clears his throat, draws himself up to his full height and commences:

Ladies and gentlemen! I feel sure that you will agree with me when I say this is a question which cannot be passed over lightly. Wages are going down while the cost of living goes up. We are confronted with the appalling spectacle of thousands of hungry women and starving children. Why should they not have steak for their dinner? I ask you … why?

“What about chops?” interjects little Willie.

Certainly you shall have chops! There will be chops for all when I am returned to Parliament.

“But I want sausages!” pipes little Annie.

You shall have them! There will be chops and sausages and steak and corned beef and onions and carrots and potatoes and cucumbers and beetroot and asparagus and nuts and jelly beans. The Government will see to that!

Then the whole family cheers themselves black in the face and the meeting disperses. And for dinner that night they have tripe and bread.