Culture

Derryn Hinch Fell Asleep In Parliament On His First Day In The Senate, And It Was Glorious

He told reporters he was just "resting the eyes".

by Sinead Stubbins  31 August 2016

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Parliament is back and in case you suspect that you’re trapped in a nightmare, let us refresh you: Pauline Hanson is in the Senate! Derryn Hinch is too! Haha, let the terrible, wild rumpus start.

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Despite the sense of nameless dread that has descended over the country, there was one beautiful moment during the first parliamentary sitting this week. As Governor-General Peter Cosgrove delievered his welcoming address, Derryn Hinch proceeded to fall asleep in his chair. On his first day.

There he sat, rumpled and leaning to the side, until the bloke next to him gently prodded him awake, like a grandpa on a train who is at risk of missing his stop. Derryn was sleepy. Derryn just wanted to sleep. Later on he told Fairfax that he was “just resting the eyes for a minute”, which is an excuse I used for going to sleep early at every sleepover I attended from 1997 to 2002.

In Derryn’s defence, he tried to get “a half-hour kip” during the afternoon but “the bloody bell started ringing” in parliament and woke him up (I initially assumed he was talking about an alarm clock at his house, or that maybe Derryn Hinch actually pays someone to stand in his house and arbitrarily ring bells to wake him up from naps).

The best bit about this photo is that Hinch himself has been a vocal advocate for allowing photographers in parliament, saying only last week that: “The media – and thus the public – should be able to see us in action, or photograph our inaction. If you get caught nibbling your ear wax, or counting your money or dozing: tough.”

Eventually Derryn Hinch admitted that this wasn’t just an instance of him blinking for a super long time, and that he did indeed fall asleep. But it wasn’t Derryn’s fault! It was the Governor-General’s fault for having a boring speech! “I fell asleep,” he told the ABC. “We had a 40 minute speech by one man reading somebody else’s words which we heard on the campaign trail for nine weeks.”

Derryn wasn’t the only one to find it boring — Barnaby Joyce told Sunrise that: “He was not alone. Let’s put it that way”. Herein lies the problem with our government, friends: the thought leaders of this fine country are so bloody bored by the silly, unnecessary bureaucracy and tradition of our parliament that they’d rather bloody fall asleep during the nonsense and wait for the real action to start!!

Don’t worry Australia, today Derryn is ready to rule this school.