On a day when speculation ran rife that WA had lost the nation’s biggest resource development project, the Inpex Liquefied Natural Gas project in the Kimberley valued at $25 billion, Alan Carpenter announced yesterday he would be closing the bars at Parliament House.

That announcement, aimed at wedging Colin Barnett over his predecessor Troy Buswell, was pretty typical of how this election has gone in the first two weeks and might explain why at the halfway mark of the campaign Labor finds itself in a tight contest against a crisis-ridden Opposition that only settled on a leader the day before the election was called.

Barnett may be obsessed with Brian Burke, but the Labor campaign is a little too fond of the Buswell jokes they had prepared to let them go this quickly. There are many valid points to be made about Buswell’s continued political success, in particular the effect it’s had, and will continue to have, on women in the Liberal Party, which translates to the women whom they seek to govern. But stunts like this impress nobody, and they belittle the real issues that Buswell’s behaviour brings to light. The problem with Buswell, and the boys’ clubs on both sides, is not that there are bars in parliament house.

There’s an even bigger problem with this kind of stunt, though, which is that it helps paint Carps as arrogant, but arrogant in the service of very little except his ego. “No-one else would have dared to try this,” he would have thought to himself, though it probably wouldn’t have occurred to him to wonder why that was. As Barnett pointed out, it’s the Speaker’s job to make these kinds of decisions. Quite aside from the issue of whether a Premier should be involving himself in such trivial matters, it doesn’t help his standing within his party to be attempting to take on yet another power that isn’t his.

Outside of legal restrictions and standing orders, the only standards for MPs are those that their constituents set for them. The issue isn’t whether they share a bottle of wine during a meeting, it’s whether they make the right decision. It’s not about drinking during work hours, as if they’re operating heavy machinery; work hours for an MP are a fluid thing. Is networking a work requirement or a social opportunity? It’s both.

The problems this is supposed to be a fix for are serious. The treatment of women, the seriousness with which political decisions are made, the amount of work done by our politicians, a lack of transparency and democracy in decision-making… State politics is certainly in need of a lot of work. But this is just a way to hide some of the symptoms. It will do nothing to make MPs take their responsibilities more seriously. It won’t prevent a single meeting with a lobbyist. It won’t stop women being excluded from the exercise of real power(if anything, it could reduce the ability for women to be included, if it forces people to meet and network elsewhere), and it won’t stop them being objectified and harassed .

Election campaigns are mostly for those who haven’t paid attention for the rest of the term. Stunts can be useful; they’re certainly understandable. But it’s best to consider the long-term implications before pulling them out.