Alcohol is a force in our national politics.

Sometimes this is pleasant, comical. “I think quite a few bottles of wine were consumed by the three of us,” said Tony Abbott once, recalling drinking with colleagues. “Peter [Costello] was close to leaving at that stage, and I think all of us were in a mellow and reflective mood, so the reflections went on for longer, and later, than they should have.” Abbott fell asleep on his office couch and missed the vote on Kevin Rudd’s stimulus bill.

Parliament House has a long and storied drinking culture.Credit: Jim Pavlidis

That force can also be malicious. In 2021, Senator Sam McMahon lost her preselection race just days after suggestions she had been drunk in the parliament – which she denied, saying she had hypertension, which her opponents had exploited.

It can wreck lives: the role it has played in the culture at Parliament House, including allegations of both sexual harassment and assault. Often it is merely melancholy. Last year, Senator Lidia Thorpe painted a picture of existential desperation when she questioned the mental health of female senators “staggering around drunk by themselves” at night.

In Barnaby Joyce’s autobiography, he writes of drinking heavily while deputy prime minister. This was, at least in part, a response to what seems to have been quite a serious depression.

It is harder to weaponise accusations of drinking against people who are open about it, which may explain some of what felt to me like a collective shrug at Joyce’s latest quasi-scandal. Last week, a video appeared in the Daily Mail of Joyce swearing into his phone while lying on his back on a Canberra footpath. There are reports he had attended two functions at Parliament House that night, and Joyce told several colleagues he was feeling the effects of mixing alcohol with medication when he fell off a plant box and swore about it.

People seem a little interested in this, enough to mention it; but hardly outraged, perhaps mildly amused. I’m the same; I neither mind nor care. But our level of interest is itself revealing, for the two contrasts to which it points.

The first is historical. Not long ago drunk politicians were heroes. Bob Hawke’s larrikin reputation was built to a fair extent on his drinking feats before he was prime minister. In 2007, when Kevin Rudd’s trip to a New York strip club became news, some in Labor braced for impact, but voters seemed to love it.