Angus Taylor Beginning To Genuinely Wonder If He’s Either Too Dumb Or Too Smart For Politics

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact

He stood at the mirror in the men’s toilets of the Australia Club, the faint sound of silverware and muffled conversation leaking through the timber door behind him. The light was too bright. It threw his reflection back at him like he was on trial.

Angus Taylor looked at himself for a long time. He had the right look. Rugged. Capable. The kind of face that could still sell a few bulls at the Goulburn saleyards if the politics thing went south. Hair on the arms. Sun in the skin. A neck like a fence post. He was one of those King’s School boarders with the instinctive posture of a man who could boot a football through a window from fifty paces. He’d always been good with his hands, good with his words too, when they were written down first.

Sydney University. Oxford. McKinsey. Agriculture. Economics. Rugby. He’d been built for success. All the pieces were there. A life carefully assembled by pedigree and promise.

And yet.

He looked at the man in the mirror and felt something missing. Something that could not be taught or inherited. It wasn’t intellect, or charm, or even empathy. It was that strange, rare thing that made people believe you when you spoke. The invisible skill that turns a public statement into something you can snap off and hold the weight of. He could close a deal in a boardroom and talk yields and margins until his cows came home, but put a microphone and camera in front of him and the cracks appear like the bottom of a Dubbo dam back in 05.

Maybe it wasn’t something you could learn. Maybe you had to be born with it. The easy ignorance that the public mistakes for honesty. The glint in the eye that says I don’t know much, but I know you.

He thought of Barnaby Joyce, a man who could barely keep a gate closed yet somehow convinced half the country he was the last true farmer left alive. Barnaby couldn’t actually run a farm to save himself, but he knew how to cut up a wether in the dark. Angus knew how to run a farm, how to model the yield, hedge the risk, forecast the rainfall but he never held the knife.

Then there was Albanese. A man who had never read the Bible, Angus was sure of that. Maybe a biography of George Piggins or Clive Churchill, but that would be about it. A man who had probably never stood on the edge of a frost-bitten paddock at dawn and felt his heart ache with the sound of crows and the pleasant stench of burning ironbark.

It wasn’t that Angus disliked him. It was that he couldn’t understand him. How could someone so average make it look so effortless? How could someone who’d never been the smartest man in the room convince everyone he probably was?

The truth came to him slowly. Maybe you had to be the right kind of dumb to survive in politics. Smart enough to talk, dumb enough to believe it matters. Like Malcolm said. You can just sack someone at Goldman Sachs for being useless. You can’t do that to the Member for West Bumblefuck because he’s a factional capo.

He thought of everything he had built, everything he had studied, everything he had been told he was destined for. He wondered if he was standing in the wrong arena. Perhaps he had mistaken calculation for conviction.

The door creaked open. A retired Supreme Court judge shuffled in, expression neutral. Without a word, the old man unzipped and emptied his artificial bladder into the sink, citing concerns about splashback on his Italian wool trousers.

Angus nodded politely, washed his hands, and left.

More to come.