Why, among so many issues, Bronwyn Bishop's helicopter trip gets our attention

The issue was dubbed “Choppergate” after the 1972 Watergate scandal in the US. The suffix “-gate” is media shorthand for “here’s another public scandal”.

And that is precisely why this issue has lasted so long. People in democracies say they do not like politics and politicians. It’s common for ordinary folk to say that “they’re all as bad as each other”. Cartoons have depicted politicians as pigs with their snouts in the public trough. Here is the substratum of belief, or prejudice, that gives an issue a long life on the public agenda.

It’s also about the image

Roger Cobb and Charles Elder’s work predates the internet and social media. We might update it with a further suggestion. To last a long time, issues need to provide a vivid image.

The image of a woman dressed up to the nines with a bouffant hairdo riding in a helicopter is a very vivid one. It inspired scores of memes on social media.

Bishop’s expensive European trip fuelled the public debate. It was further revealed that she claimed for the flight to a colleague’s wedding and chartered expensive cars to take her from Mosman to the Sydney Opera House, a journey easily made by bus or ferry.

For comedians it was a gift: a figure who dresses in a distinctive way, fast becoming unpopular, using expensive transport unnecessarily in a dramatic way. ABC television showed Bishop in a helicopter to the soundtrack of Ride of the Valkyries. For film buffs, this was a reference to the helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now.

So much for an issue appearing on the public agenda. But on the government’s agenda, which Cobb and Elder termed the institutional agenda? That’s a different matter altogether.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has declared that Bishop is “on probation”. Commentators have questioned what this means and suggested that the Speaker is now firmly under the prime ministerial thumb.

Issues tend to come in bundles, as Cobb and Elder argue. So when the “Choppergate” issue arose, up came another, far more serious. What about Bishop’s performance as Speaker? Why has she ejected some 393 Labor MPs from the House of Representatives, but only a handful from the Coalition? The media have often mentioned this before but now it resonates.

The “Bishop issue” will be fodder for more debate when parliament resumes. Pure gold, as the comedians say.