Making it into the top 10 of our wackiest politicians is not easy. Not when you're competing with the likes of Pauline Hanson, Mark Latham and an assortment of murderers, crooks and Prime Ministers who consult spirits for policy advice.

Anyway, the people have cast their votes so it is with great pleasure I present to you our ten most crazy politicians of all time. 

1) T.J. Ley

The undisputed king of amoral and insane politicians was 1920s NSW Justice minister T.J. Ley. Known as the hanging minister because of his love of capital punishment, he was also known as ‘Lemonade Ley' because he stood on a prohibition platform – the only problem was a local brewer funded his election campaign.

In a bid to go federal the staunch conservative tried to bribe a Labor MP to stand aside. When the hapless ALP hack dobbed, he went missing. At the same time Ley was gathering investors for a prickly-pear herbicide business – a devastating weed crippling Australian agriculture. Only problem was he spent all the money on a holiday for he and his mistress.

When one of Ley's backers squealed, he was found dead at the bottom of the cliffs at Coogee. Even Ley's powerful friends couldn't cover this one up, and he was forced to flee to England where he grew rich setting up illegal gambling ventures – making sure to steal plenty from his fellow investors. In 1946 he had a man killed because he mistakenly believed he was having an affair with his mistress. Ley was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. At the last moment his sentence was commuted on the grounds he was insane. He died soon after in Broadmoor mental asylum. 

2) Phuong Ngo

Ngo is the only representative of local government on our list, not that the Fairfield city councilor didn't have aspirations to rise higher. Only problem was his MO was not the usual branch-stacking and pork-barrelling, but having his main competitor, the local Cabramatta MP John Newman, executed. The 1994 assassination captured the nation's attention, occurring as it did against the background of the huge heroin problem that had developed in the Vietnamese-dominated suburb in Sydney's south west.    

3) Billy Snedden

While not a cold-blooded killer, the 1970s Federal Liberal leader certainly was a character. Legend has it he died on top of his mistress in a cheap Rushcutters Bay motel – apparently the unlucky lass was his son's old girlfriend. But the good-looking conservative would have been dead soon anyway, given his terminal case of foot in mouth disease. He once described a bunch of peaceful protesters as ‘political bikies pack-raping democracy'. Legend has it during a speech at a Liberal function in Queensland in the 1970's a well-lubricated Sneeden dropped this clanger: "Well, first I'd like to thank the good ladies of the branch for providing such a scrumptious repast, and old Jack here for fixing up the hall, and Fred for getting us the sound system and his lovely wife for the flowers, and well, I'm sure there are other people I've forgotten, but who gives a fuck". That kind of humour didn't really go down very well in pious Sir Joh country. 

4) Ross Lightfoot

Next is a Westralian Liberal senator who was last in the news in 2005 over reports he smuggled $25,000 in cash to Kurdish forces in Iraq sewn into the lining of his jacket.  Reports at the time insinuated the cash was taken to the Kurds, whose homeland is oil-rich, for Australian petroleum company Woodside Petroleum. But this was only one of Senator Lightfoot's many brushes with controversy. A few years ago the Federal court found Lightfoot breached the Racial Discrimination Act and fined him $10,000 for comments to The Australian Financial Review about Aboriginal people, and in 2002, the former mounted policeman was one of a handful of Liberals to publicly back Bill Heffernan after his homophobic attack on Justice Michael Kirby. In fact he went one step further and called on Kirby to resign, saying "Given that Bill Heffernan has stood aside I think it's appropriate for Justice Kirby to stand aside as well."

In the 2001 election the Nationals refused to preference the former boyfriend of federal Education minister Julie Bishop.  It didn't matter though because One Nation did, with a One Nation spokesperson saying, ‘He's gone out of his way to support us, I think at the end of the day we have returned the favour'.

In early 2000 Lightfoot described asylum seekers as criminals, wretches, and religious zealots, who were possible carriers of communicable disease, and who should be fined. But proving he still had a sense of humour he said in a press release ‘There is a perception that these people bring with them their prejudices and intolerances.' 

Not that Lightfoot is anti-refugee. In April 2000 when Zimbabwe's President Mugabe was kicking white farmers off their land Lightfoot called for 20,000 to be given refuge in Australia. He did not believe the same rights should be given back to their black countrymen because they "don't qualify under my terms of compatibility". Phillip Ruddock's office described his comments as bizarre. There's plenty more where that came from, like his novel about the Stolen Generation , but we've got to move onto number 5.   

5) The WA Libs

To be fair to Ross Lightfoot he's only following in the footsteps of a long line of Westralian nutters like Noel Crichton-Browne, Wilson ‘Ironbar' Tuckey and Graeme Campbell – the guy who ratted on Labor to join One Nation and who has links to the far right League of Rights. So to put Ross' antics in context, I now include a footnote for the entire state branch of the Westralian Liberal Party.

The current WA Liberal Opposition leader Paul Omodei has to get a mention for shooting his son in 2004. That's right, shooting his son. What's that, you didn't get it, oh – he shot his son. He was convicted of a dangerous act causing bodily harm and tried this year, unsuccessfully, to have the charges annulled.

Ok, let's get into former Senator Noel Crichton-Browne. After displaying this Vice-Presidential ballot to The Australian journo Colleen Egan at the state Liberal conference in 1995 he told her ‘If you report how I vote I'll screw your tits off'. When Egan said she was a journalist, he said, ‘Write this down: Would you like to have sex with me tonight?'. NCB was overheard, and soon half a dozen female delegates had approached Colleen urging her to report the comment, claiming ‘It's the sort of thing he says all the time'. NCB was expelled from the party in September 1995.

Are you getting some idea of how much the Liberal Party in WA hates itself? Well, over the next couple of years NCB's federal Liberal colleagues Eoin Cameron and Sue Knowles accused him of travel rorts in letters to the police and in parliament respectively. He was convicted in 1998.

Not that Cameron is lily white – he had his offices raided by Federal Police who suspected he sent threats from the office to NCB. And there's not even time to get into possibly the most hated and certainly the oldest member of the federal parliament Wilson ‘Ironbar' Tuckey – although I should note that he got his nickname from his 1967 conviction for belting an Aboriginal man with a piece of steel cable, allegedly while the man was being held down.    

6) Mark Latham

Mark Latham gets a guernsey in the top 10 craziest pollies of all time not for his ‘conga line of suckholes comment' or for his books slagging his former mates. Nor not for the delicious irony of him declaring the party political system dead even though it was a process he was quite happy to participate in for years. His is for pure violence.

The most famous incident was when he broke a cabbies arm after an argument over the way back to Liverpool. Latham says say he woke after falling asleep in the car and jumped out, refusing to pay the fare because the cabbie had taken the wrong way. The cabbie ran off with his briefcase and Latham gave chase crash tackling him and breaking his arm.

And then there was the blue he had with another Labor Party member many years his senior, when he was Liverpool Mayor. More recently, his theft of a Daily Telegraph photographer's camera and its return in tiny pieces in an envelope probably shows he is starting to regain his shattered mind.  

7) Pauline Hanson

There's so much you can talk about when it comes to Pauline Hanson. Most famous are her views on all the perceived favours the government was doing for Asians and Aboriginals. But it was when her One Nation party started churning out policies that the real fun started.

There was the plan to print more money to kick start the economy, to replace all taxes with a 2% flat tax on all financial transactions, and to re-introduce national service. She started to really lose support when she called for the abolition of pensions for single mothers and a reduction of the universal coverage of Australia's Medicare system. Soon she was recording video messages to the nation in the event she was murdered.

Later she was sentenced to three years imprisonment for electoral fraud after ex-One Nation members alleged the party was undemocratically constituted to concentrate all power in the hands of three rulers, Pauline Hanson, David Ettridge and former Liberal staffer David Oldfield. She was later acquitted. 

8) Alfred Deakin  Three-time Prime Minister Alfred Deakin sneaks in due to his insistence he communed with the spirits of long-dead politicians who instructed him on both policy and tactics. 9) Barry Morris The late Blue Mountains Liberal MP Barry Morris makes the top eight due to his conviction for sending death threats to an opponent on the Blue Mountains council in the early 1990s. The hilarious recordings of the bomb threats, in a comical Chinese accent, were so ridiculous that comedians played them on the radio during his trial. You can listen here:

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10) Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen

The last political nutter on our list farmed peanuts, appropriately. His Joh for PM campaign destroyed any chance John Howard had of winning the 1987 election. At the age of 76, and having been Queensland's Premier since the late 1960s, Sir Joh began an insane assault on Canberra. The National Party Premier aimed to smash the coalition by running candidates against all sitting Liberal MPs and then forming a new conservative party with him at the head. This was despite the fact he had neither the candidates nor the money to fund their campaigns – against not only Labor but the Liberals as well. And he didn't even have the support of his interstate National colleagues. Madness.

A year later the inarticulate nutball was before the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption. Soon he was to be put on trial for lying to the Inquiry – a conviction he only escaped because one jury member refused to convict him, a man who was a National party member.

Joh was was a man who turned gerrymandering and cronyism into an art form and whose administration reeked of corruption. A man who banned street marches in the late 1970's, gaoled sacked electricity workers during the SEQUEB dispute and withdrew government advertising from media outlets that crossed him. He even allowed police to ban the whistling of hymns on picket lines, effectively making praying illegal.  

If you have any stories of nutty politicians you'd like to share I'd love to hear them, so please add them on the comments section. Special thanks to political academics Dr Sarah Maddison (UNSW), Snr Lec Rodney Smith (Sydney Uni),  Mungo MacCallum, Alfred Deakin for speaking to me from the other side. Also to Michael Atkin.

timbrunero.com

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