“Right, the Christmas party, not my favourite night of the year, and your unhappy task to organise.” So Harry (Alan Rickman) tells his flirtatious PA in what seems to be everyone’s (or is that every girl’s?) favourite Christmas movie, Love Actually.
I’m with Harry on that one. The sort of forced fraternisation that occurs in workplace Christmas parties all over the nation never appealed to me. In my late 1980’s workplace (the last time I had a real job, yes), someone always got legless and had to be sent home with one of the boss’s vouchers in a taxi, and the same guy who did it every year would think it hilarious if he photocopied his butt on the Xerox machine. I’m sure things are much more sophisticated now. That is, if the old workplace even has a Christmas party, it might well be an end of year ‘happy holidays’ barbecue these days, free of beer and pork sausages so as not to the offend the easily offended. What hellishly fun days we live in.
So what are you not looking forward to this Christmas? Seeing the in-laws, finding out who cousin whatever is sleeping with this year, having the born again Christian in the family tell the kids that ‘Santa’ spelled another way is ‘Satan’? Just when you thought there was nothing you could possibly think of doing worse than any of the above this Christmas, enter Tanya Plibersek, the joyless Labor front-bencher (is there any other type?), who told the waiting media today, with a straight face:
“We’ve released well over 50 policies and I think it’s a great idea if people have a little bit of time over the quiet Christmas break that they have a look at those on the ALP website.”
Thanks Tanya, but, well, no, I think I’ll give the ALP website a miss this Christmas, especially since Grease 2 and Xanadu are bound to be re-run somewhere on the telly, and then there’s a Climate Council fundraiser to get to, or the annual ritual of listening to grown men wetting themselves in excitement over the start of a yacht race over at the ABC.
But you knock yourself out Tanya and see if you can’t get through all fifty of those policies by New Year. At least then you will know one person in Australia has read them.
Photo by Senator Kate Lundy 
