The Fashionability of Cynicism

People have had an awful lot to say about what Julia Gillard's been feeling and expressing lately.

She's been wooden, stiff, mechanical, and unfeeling we've been told. Everyone's been luxuriating in elaborate performance analogies, with images of over rehearsed lines and stale gestures flying across newspapers and the online world.

And following yesterday, when she made an emotional tribute to both victims and volunteers of the Queensland floods, she is under a new form of criticism. She has expressed emotion, and it seems that many are crying false.

And I believe that the main reason that this is happening is because of the earlier reports. Because of the assessments with all the vitriol of a film critic and the maturity of a child, claiming that a mechanical delivery represented an inability to feel. Suggestions that the Prime Minister is incapable of expressing emotion properly. All of these reports have been doing their job, hemming the public perception of Ms Gillard into a small box.

And suddenly when she breaks the box we thought we'd only just established, we are confused.

But rather than realise that human behaviour is incredibly complex, and not something which can be so easily read, predicted, and judged as the last few weeks' headlines would have us believe, people assume the opposite - this current behaviour is a charade.

And this is the problem I have with an obsession on how politicians 'perform', as everyone becomes an expert on what advice Ms Gillard is getting, and on when someone should express grief and how.

As "james from sydney" opined on a Herald Sun article: "the time for that emotion was at the time of the crisis, at that instant, at least that would have been a little bit more believeable."

It would be unthinkable to suggest to someone who has recently lost a loved one that there is a correct way to express emotion - that the crying must come first, and that mechanical shock is always wrong. Yet it feels to me that a similar standard is being applied by some people here.

I, like most Australians, have no way of knowing exactly what our Prime Minister is feeling at any given moment. Like any of us, her emotions can manifest themselves in different and sometimes uncontrollable ways - perhaps even more so, given the constant stress she is put under to behave in certain ways.

And so I do not believe any of us can really make smug, sweeping criticisms of her 'performances' without failing to consider what it is to be human.

As a teenager, I haven't been exposed to politics for long.

But I firmly believe, and will continue to believe, that a healthy political scene is one where policy will be the subject of discussion, not emotions, appearances, and performance.