And Vanity Fair has published a hit piece on Harry and Meghan, saying even the lefty celebrities in their adopted suburb of Montecito, California, are over them.

These are all reasons for ordinary people to think that the woke nightmare has peaked.

HAUNTED

Maybe, just maybe, we have seen the worst of the ubiquitous censorship, identity politics and environmental and medical dogmas that have haunted us throughout these benighted times.

All of which, if true, will be terrible news for the Australian Labor Party, which is gearing up for the forthcoming federal election by dusting off the same song book it’s been using since Kevin Rudd led a choir of zombies to power almost 20 years ago.

If the vibe really is shifting, it will be news to Industry & Science Minister Ed Husic, who two days ago jumped out of the gate in this year’s imminent federal election, boasting that he has throttled any prospect of resource companies exploring for gas under the ocean off Newcastle.

The permit for a company called Asset Energy to search for gas and oil under the ocean between Sydney and Newcastle (an area called PEP-11) has been refused for, among other reasons, “public interest”.

By which he means that the residents of big coastal houses who think that giant oil wells resembling an army of invading Daleks are going to obscure their expensive ocean views can relax. Not under his watch, they won’t.

(Curiously, those home owners now include Husic’s boss, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who recently bought a $4.3M retirement mansion in the exclusive enclave of Copacabana, right in the middle of PEP-11.)

It’s unlikely that Husic doesn’t realise he is stoking fears based on fake news.

In reality, the search area is over the horizon from the coastal constituents’ homes, so no views will be spoiled. And the most likely resource to be found is gas, which means there is no risk of oil spillage either, even though it has been 15 years since the last big oil spill, and they are becoming less frequent anyway.

You might recall a very similar story to this playing out during the previous election, in 2022, when the same company was again applying for the same permit.

Market research back then found an abundance of swinging voters in the adjacent electorates who had fallen for the Greens propaganda that granting an exploration licence would be the first step towards turning the ocean into an industrial wasteland and lining the beaches with gasping, half-dead fish covered in more oil than a Chippendales dancer at a Kings Cross hens party.

SPOIL

Even Dave Sharma, the Liberal incumbent in Wentworth, the southernmost of those electorates, posed for a photo on the sand at Bondi promising never to allow an exploration rig to spoil the vista from the world-famous beach, despite the exploration area being so far over the horizon, and therefore so irrelevant, that he may as well have been promising to keep swimmers safe by banning ice-skaters.

There are six electorates adjacent to PEP-11, of which the Liberal Party held three going into the 2022 election, including Sharma’s.

Despite desperately trying to portray themselves as equally superstitious and catastrophist as their Labor and Independent rivals, they lost all of them.

You can understand Husic’s confidence, then. It worked last time. Why not now?

Enter, the vibe shift. Husic assumes the same feel-good dogma about retaining the natural beauty of the ocean will still fly while half the nation is desperate for relief from the economic and financial burdens of a virtue-signalling resource and industry policy.

And nothing would relieve that burden more than a harmless, privately financed invisible gas rig off Newcastle.