‘Is there much of an upstairs-downstairs feel in Parliament House?’

‘Yeah, we’ve got people upstairs who have probably never been down to the basement… if I wanted people to take note, I’d stop delivering coffee and toilet paper.’

These are the words of Sandy McInerney, Logistics Manager of Parliament House’s underground ‘catacombs’, in conversation with Annabel Crabb in her 2017 docuseries The House. Offhand words in one twenty-second conversation of a three-hour documentary series, which amongst all those exploring the glory and intricacies of Parliament’s ‘upstairs’ rooms, were the ones that lingered in my mind. 

Parliament is a living, breathing organism of democracy, of high-level thinking, of the most important people in Australia. But McInerney’s words starkly remind us that no well-pressed suit, nor feet on immaculately steamed red and green carpet, exempt our high-calibre Parliamentarians from their human needs.

It does, however, seemingly exempt them from having to fulfil these needs themselves.

Our most important figures simply float through the halls of Parliament unaffected by such lowly considerations as where to buy their next coffee, or whether the toilet will be clean for them to use. They take blissful baths in the upstairs glory of The House, while a hidden workforce who ‘rarely sees the light of day’ weaves its way through an underground road and tunnel network, ensuring the functionality and comfort of Parliament; it’s just part of the job. The structural hierarchy – the dichotomy between the presentable and the obscured, the up and the down, the fore- and background – is built into the building itself, and subsequently built into parliamentary culture. This culture only works to perpetuate complex notions of ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ that pervade public reality: if the physical manifestation of Australian freedom and justice, representing the views and interests of the Australian people, is so plainly hierarchised, how can we expect society’s culture to reflect or embody anything else?

As I watch the flag fly atop Parliament’s glistening roof from just down the street, I contemplate the people I’m surrounded by, studying at Australia’s National University. I’ve met many a person in my eight months on campus who I could confidently say will sit in Parliament in twenty years. ANU graduates ‘go on to become leaders in government.’ I’m decidedly nestled in a culture that is fostering the minds that will fill the rooms of Parliament soon enough, and who similarly have their day-to-day needs managed in a basement that they will likely never lay eyes on.

My realisation, then, was that these future parliamentarians are, given the immense population of fellow first-year students living on campus, living their day-to-day lives now in much the same dynamic.

When I moved to Canberra, one of the biggest shocks to my system was learning that the kitchens, the bathrooms, the dining areas, and everything short of the individual rooms (unless you’re a Johns resident, if I’m to disseminate frivolous rumours) of my residential hall got cleaned not by those that used it, but by cleaning staff who have nothing to do with the dirtying of these spaces. Clogged sinks filled to the brim with ominous soup turned to sparkling silver overnight. Abandoned pots and pans and knives and forks left strewn across benches after the 7pm rush disappeared eventually. Moulding food was swept away when it got too apparent that its owner was probably not coming back for it.

I couldn’t believe it – I’d gone from being a nineteen-year-old who, despite her freeloading at home, had some semblance of responsibility for cleanliness, to a twenty-year-old who could ultimately leave whatever mess she’d like with very limited real consequences, despite likely dirty looks from others trying to use the stoves.

While having cleaning staff in itself is by no means condemnable, it highlights a crucial element of residential hall existence – that there is a certain, in-built element to this lifestyle that places our education and frankly, in many cases, our exercise of privilege in attending university, above our need to take responsibility for our everyday existence. We are being implicitly told that our intelligence and our ability to pay to live on campus – or, more commonly, to be paid for – places us above the need to engage with the mundane aspects of adult living, particularly for those living in catered residences. In this respect, we are young parliamentarians in more ways than being students of politics and law: living as if we are too important to change a toilet roll.

So many of us wouldn’t know the names of the people who mop our floors for us, and no matter how clean we keep our spaces, we therefore play a part in being the upstairs residents who would take most note of our cleaning staff if they stopped filling the paper towel dispensers and wiping the desks we study on. We can beg the question of whether living in residences, being fed and cleaned for, prepares us for the ‘real world’, but the cold truth is that, for many people, it sure does. Their real world will become the professionalised version: a workplace where they are cushioned by assurance that they need not lift a finger to feel cared for and have not since their first day at college. They will not see the insides of a maintenance cupboard nor the basement of whichever sunlit office they work in and will learn that this is what they worked for: to have the less palatable requirements of comfortable existence offloaded onto someone else.

The wake-up call here is not to drop out of college and start a commune, by any means. This lifestyle gives so many people the opportunities to pursue elements of independent living and study that they otherwise never would have dreamt possible. What lingers in my mind, though, is that this way of living is not as natural or normal as it can begin to feel when immersed in the insularity of it all. Hierarchy does not sit well in houses of any description, yet Australia’s most important House has it coursing through its veins; food for discomforting thought.

The wake-up call is, instead, to thank your cleaners, next time you see them; they are the people who underpin the lifestyle we’re lucky enough to lead, and there will never come a fictitiously constructed hierarchy that changes that.