Last week, Crikey broke the news of the bag of weed that some stoner with bad handwriting sent to Scott Morrison shortly after he ceased to be prime minister.
PhD researcher and associate lecturer at the ANU’s school of politics and international relations Daniel Casey got in touch to let us know that was just the tip of the iceberg. Casey’s research focuses on letters from members of the public to political leaders — primarily long-ago-PM John Howard.
The research paints a fascinating, sometimes touching, frequently quietly heartbreaking alternative history of citizens attempting to be heard. There are the owners of a “small hotel” offering Howard the chance to come “for a counter lunch” two days before the 1998 election: “I can recommend the cutlets on Mondays.” There’s the letter calling for an apology to the Stolen Generations — which Howard famously resisted to the end — which ends with a tantalising, allusive hand-written postscript:
You once stood under our Hills hoist when collecting Melanie from a Sunday school party we organised. I can’t sense the same decency now. I want to. What happened?
Both letters received standardised replies.
“People write to political leaders seeking to make a difference, to show their leaders that they care about an issue,” Casey told Crikey. “However, they know that often their letters are ignored. How can they demonstrate the intensity of their feelings? One way is to post ‘things’, hoping that this campaign might also gather media attention, creating a snowball effect.”
This results in, as Casey put it, “all kinds of weird shit” being sent to the PM of the day: “I interviewed one of the public servants whose job it was to open the mail. They recalled people sending in rice to prime minister Howard. They told me: ‘So there would be wet, soggy rice in an envelope that would rock up in the rest of the mail … There was a special bin in the mail room, just for the rice.’ ”
When they started, the public servant told Casey, they asked: ” ‘What’s this bin for?’ And they’re like: ‘The rice.’ I was like, ‘The what?’ “
Casey said the rice was sent as a protest against the invasion of Iraq — frequently accompanied by a note referencing the biblical verse Romans 12:20: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.”
The same public servant told Casey about a campaign that involved “farmers sending Howard the shirts off their back. Literally. So it was T-shirts where they’d written often very angry comments or slurs and things about how Howard was taking the shirts off their backs.”
The big question is: does stuff like this work?
Casey said: “Well, the public servant couldn’t recall what either of these campaigns were even about! For them, they were just a problem to be dealt with. Their concerns were around what the Archives Act requirements were for these products. Did they need to be filed and archived? If they had to be archived, what did [they] need to do to ensure they wouldn’t deteriorate? Could they be thrown out?”
Howard and his staff — who Casey interviewed before talking to the mailroom public servant — didn’t think to mention either campaign, and perhaps most dispiriting for the post box protesters, neither the T-shirts nor the rice made any kind of splash in the media.
“The rice protest got one mention that I could find, in a Margo Kingston piece,” Casey said. “I searched through various archives for hours for any mention of the ‘shirt off our backs’ campaign from farmers. I found nothing.”
One prop that frequently does get attention, Casey said, was sending menstrual products to politicians, both in Australia and abroad. Used tampons and sanitary pads were sent to Texas Governor Greg Abbott to protest his harsh anti-abortion stance, and then-immigration minister Morrison received unused products after it was reported — although denied by his office — that “humiliating” restrictions on sanitary products were being imposed on asylum seeker women in detention.
What have you wanted to send to a politician? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
