By Annabel Crabb
Otto von Bismarck, Germany's first Chancellor, is usually credited with the famous remark likening laws to sausages: for peace of mind, one should never see either being made.
On Monday, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull boldly expanded the concept to cover the public consumption of sausages.
The opportunity to critique the Prime Minister's approach to eating is a pleasure, if not a right.Credit: Andrew Meares
"That's lovely, that's very kind of you but I think I am running around a bit much to be eating that," the PM responded firmly to a CWA volunteer who advanced upon him in flood-ravaged Lismore to offer Australia's national emergency pick-me-up, a snag in a bit of bread.
The snag was politely placed back on its trestle table. Then the internet exploded.
Now first: the case for the defence.
Many long-serving politicians develop eating disorders of a complexity that would elicit low whistles from your average teen ballet class.
Bob Carr had a horror of meat pies, which he called "fat sacks", and subsisted mainly on a diet of hot water. Christopher Pyne's avoidance of carbohydrates is legendary. Tony Abbott, in office as prime minister, was so dependent on exercise that he was loath to eat at all if he hadn't cycled around Tasmania that morning. Mr Turnbull himself dropped about 15kg five years ago by consuming nothing but Chinese herbs for a month or so.
To an external eye, these measures might seem extreme.
But consider the life of a politician, for whom an average day might involve two or three outings at which one is simultaneously offered deep-fried food and yelled at by a series of strangers, and you might edge a little closer to understanding how such Byzantine arrangements might psychologically evolve.
None of this, however, should be considered an excuse for the Prime Minister's calamitous breach of basic disaster-visit principles.
These visits are tricky by definition. Not showing up is unforgivable, of course. You have to go. But no leader should ever make the error of thinking they are actually "helping" by being at the scene of a disaster. What they are actually doing is imposing a considerable new complication (cameras, gormless city folk with brand-new rubber boots, demands for telephone reception and double espressos and so on) on a bunch of locals for whom life is already pretty hectic. The purpose for the visit is symbolic; for the afflicted to be assured that the rest of Australia actually cares that they got flooded/burnt out/consumed by fire ants. Tactically, you're the proverbial tits on a bull.
Bearing that in mind, when someone is generous enough to offer you a sausage sandwich, you don't declare yourself too busy to eat it.
In failing to consume the proffered item for the cameras, moreover, Mr Turnbull deprived both the local community and the broader television audience of a rare pleasure: the opportunity to critique their Prime Minister's approach to sausage-eating.
Now, this is just a mean-spirited act.
It's not actually spelled out in the constitution or anything, but I think any reasonable-minded jurist would agree that there is an implied obligation for an elected representative to provide reasonably regular opportunities for their constituents to rip the piss out of the way they eat.
Tony Abbott, for all his recorded failings in office, understood this well, regularly dispatching a raw onion or a small light-beer shandy for the cameras.
Even Bill Shorten has done his duty; on election day last year, he accepted a Democracy Sausage in a long bun at the Strathfield North Public School, turned it on its side and nibbled the thing amidships, provoking extensive comment.
Presumably Mr Shorten was hedging against inclusion in one of those awkward photo galleries of politicians eating phallic foods, which tend to be dominated by US presidential candidates sweatily engulfing corn dogs under the supervision of hard-faced crowds in rural Minnesota.
A newcomer to political leadership who has seamlessly incorporated his obligations is New Zealand Prime Minister Bill English, who last week posted to social media some images of the meal he had just cooked for his family.
It was a pizza. He'd cooked it slightly skew-whiff on an oven tray such that a bit of the topping had slid off the overhang; an upsetting sight for anyone who likes symmetry and order in the kitchen.
But it was the choice of topping that excited comment: a tin of spaghetti, drained slightly and augmented with pineapple chunks and grated cheese.
"Pizza was a bit soggy in the middle," he reported, somewhat redundantly.
The American late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel immediately called for Mr English's impeachment (a courageous move given that it might give the New Zealander some further ideas for toppings).
But here, surely, we have a leader with an appropriate sense of self-sacrifice. Make the sausages, eat them in public, and be sure to get some sauce down your front while you're at it.
@annabelcrabb