Good answer. But it is, indeed, a question worth asking, merely now weeks from polling day.

Voters who traditionally support either of the major Parties face major problems this election.

PRESERVE

If you vote Liberal, there is a good chance you do so (at least partly) because you value individual freedom, and (perhaps) wish to preserve traditional values and institutions.

If you vote Labor, it is – or at least it used to be – because you wanted to support the working class.

Now we are faced with a Liberal Party that no longer even pretends to defend individual freedom or tradition, and a Labor Party that hates the working class and its assumed values.

Then, of course, there is the small matter that the major Parties agree on just about everything of any significance, whatever they might say about their “massive” differences.

This, in turn, raises the core question of any election. Is the election a contest between two Parties for your vote, and you vote for the better one, or, at least, for the less bad Party?

Or is the election a referendum on the government’s performance?

After all, the Liberals have been in office for nearly nine years. And nearly twelve years in the Premier State.

There is plenty of material upon which to reflect. The Liberals have, since 1944, rested upon the argument, “vote for us because the alternative is worse”.

How they have gotten away with this for so long is a bit of a mystery. But mostly, they do. Hence every Liberal from the Prime Minister down wants you to think of the election as a contest with an awful alternative, rather than as a referendum.

Hence The New Daily: “Prime Minister Scott Morrison has told Liberals in the key election State of Tasmania that any reservations about his leadership and character are of secondary importance to the goal of keeping Labor off the government benches.

“The government’s plans if re-elected are clear, Mr Morrison said while urging a Launceston campaign rally to vote for a strong economy and the government’s plans, rather than focus on elements of the government’s record.

“ ‘You may not like everything we’ve done, you may not like me that much, but that’s not the point,’ Mr Morrison said on Saturday.

“ ‘The point is you know what our plan is – now is not the time to take a risk on what you don’t know.”

BRAZEN

An astonishingly brazen and revealing message.

Let us set aside the flawed logic of assuming that the Liberals of the future will be better than the Liberals of the past – why would anyone assume that? – the patently absurd claim that we can know more of what a future Liberal Government might do than we would of Labor, and the non sequitur the assertion contains. Namely, how can you simultaneously claim that the other mob will be worse than us and claim also that we do not know what they will do?

This all raises another question again. At what point in a government’s history does one use one’s vote as a referendum on the government as well as a contest between two sides, both of whom we might well loathe?

How bad does a government have to get before you just chuck it out, and hang the consequences of doing that?

Perhaps anger might drive you. Or it might be a calm and rational deliberative decision.

The government might be utterly corrupt or scandal-ridden. Or it might have caused the deaths of numerous citizens. Or it might have deprived you of core rights and freedoms. Or engaged in an unjust war. Or destroyed the economy. Or bankrupted the Treasury. Or deceived the people over an important matter. Or diminished the democracy in which we live.

CONTEST

If a government has done any or all of these things, it might well be argued that the time has come to think referendum rather than contest. So far so good.

We can throw out bad governments without worrying about the alternative, if they are really that bad.

How well or badly has the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison Government done? Forgetting the prematurely cast-aside Abbott, and the necessarily cast-aside Turnbull, what do we make of ScoMo and his Government?

On reflection, you would need a book-length treatment to catalogue the disasters of the current federal government.

Whether you are a small or large “L” Liberal, or neither. Whether your criterion is general competence, or governing in the public interest, or safeguarding and promoting the Party’s core values, or avoiding public scandal, or managing crises well, or defending the nation as required. On no measure can the Government be given a pass mark.

Sorry, Mr Prime Minister, but whether we like you and whether we like what your government has done, very much is the point.

Just as citizens have a duty to disobey bad laws – just ask Martin Luther King Jr – voters have a duty to throw out reprehensible governments.

ScoMo’s is a government that has bankrupted the nation with a trillion-odd dollar debt, crushed the economy over a middling virus that harms the very few and which caused no emergency, lied about this, trashed the federation, sucked up to domestic dictators (Andrews, McGowan, the woman in Queensland whose spelling I can’t be bothered googling, and the almost equally unspellable former premier of NSW still under investigation for corruption).

Under Morrison’s watch, Australia joined North Korea and Cuba as the only other nation to stop its citizens from either returning to or leaving their own country.

UNPREPARED

His government told us simultaneously to prepare for war and that we are utterly unprepared for such a war, rorted grants schemes at will, shafted their own prime ministers rather than letting them face the voters, introduced a bill to deliver digital identity, thereby setting us on the road to totalitarianism, dropped the ball on religious freedom, failed miserably to protect freedom of speech (and of association, and of movement), forced churches to abandon their flocks during COVID, failed in the duty of care during and after natural disasters, crushed minor Parties in an attempt to put them out of business, slithered and prevaricated over vaccine mandates, and ignored aged care’s collapse.

Should I stop here, or keep going? Suffice it to say that there is overwhelming evidence that the Morrison Government has performed in such a way that there is every argument under the sun for any voter this month to view the election solely as a referendum on the government. The boxes are comfortably ticked.

But if you are still squeamish about punishing such a government with the ultimate penalty, there are other voting strategies that present themselves.

A novel one would be, with honourable exceptions you could count on one hand, to punish members rather than Parties, since they all fed us to the wolves over the virus.

Oppositions didn’t do their jobs. Often, they wanted even more fascist COVID measures.

So punish every sitting member of parliament. Don’t like the people in parliament? Get a new lot, and see how they go.

Another strategy is to punish particularly awful members, again, of whatever Party, according to your own set of criteria. This is the Australian Christian Lobby’s strategy, and, to some extent, One Nation’s.

Another strategy is to vote for a minor Party, preferably one that values freedom and cares about the working class, then give your lower preferences to whichever major Party you hate less.

Yes, there will still be a government run by a major Party, but if half the electorate abandons both majors with first preferences, this will send a very powerful message, that we hate them both and they must start all over again.

HUNG

If sufficient voters do this in enough seats, there might even be a hung parliament, a promising outcome (depending who is involved on the cross benches) despite the lies that pundits are currently telling about the “uncertainty” and “instability” that this is said to cause.

A resource for the disillusioned and those determined to put freedom Parties and truth-tellers first on their ballots can be found at the MajorsLast website – which crashed briefly with the rush of visitors to the site after it was mentioned on Sky News’ Outsiders program.

According to one of the administrators of the site: “Majorslast.com enables voters to find all registered Party candidates in their electorate and generate a ‘How to Vote’ card using a simple visual interface. But the card will always put the majors and The Green last. The HTV card can be printed off or photographed on a phone. Voters can then take the card to the voting booth on May 21.”