And both selected leaders who have as much chance of beating Labor in 2028 as Abbie Chatfield has of co-authoring a book about the joys of feminism with Clementine Ford.

If the Liberals and Nationals were only slightly more incompetent you might be inclined to think they would even mess this up and somehow accidentally win the next election.

SADLY

But, alas, that would be to the benefit of the Coalition’s long-suffering conservative base, a group of people who sadly can’t even rely on the vicissitudes of politics any more.

The narrowness of the vote in the Liberals — 29 to Sussan Ley (apparently her numerologist added the extra S for good luck) and 25 to Angu Taylor (who doesn’t believe in that numerology bullshit) – pretty much guarantees the rancour will continue for the foreseeable future.

The vote for Matt Canavan’s challenge to David Littleproud in the Nationals was not published, so few people outside the Party room know how close it was.

But the key point is that it was a stark choice between Canavan’s muscular conservatism and Littleproud’s muscular timidity – and the Nationals chose the latter.

Expect both Parties to haemorrhage more rank-and-file members between now and 2028, at which point they will probably haemorrhage sitting members too.

All this is happening while over on the main stage the worst Australian government in living memory is throwing out the chainsaws that characterised its first term and climbing into the cabins of cranes bearing giant wrecking balls.

Labor is salivating over its dream second-term agenda: open borders, extortionate taxation, censorship, net-zero deindustrialisation, schools preaching indoctrination and, if all goes to plan, sending Aussie kids off to die in Ukraine.

The only thing that can stop Labor now is a new grass-roots movement that either unites or taps into the Parties that loosely come under the “freedom movement” banner: One Nation, Gerard Rennick’s People First, Clive Palmer’s Trumpets, Heart, Family First and the Libertarians.

They will need three things. First, a leader. Rennick is the most obvious choice for mine but — and I’m sure he won’t mind me saying this — he needs to learn to chill out a bit if he’s going to lead his or any Party into serious contention.

His credentials as a patriot, policy analyst and pragmatist are beyond dispute but there is a huge section of the Australian electorate who cast their compulsory vote based on which leader was funnier as a guest on Kyle and Jackie O’s radio show.

And they’re not the only fickle voters. There are other groups whose grasp of English is so loose that Rennick, who has one of the broadest Aussie accents in parliament, may as well be speaking Hindi.

FAVOURITE

Actually, scratch that. Anybody who speaks Hindi would probably be a short-odds favourite to be PM by 2028.

The second thing this new conservative movement needs is money.

Ten million would probably cover it to get started. You need enough to establish a head office and staff it with kids who can flood social media with satirical videos about planting giant windmills in Teal electorates; NDIS clients training for the 2028 Summer Olympics in LA; and the latest updates from the ABC’s in-house pronoun style guide.

This will lead to the third element: awakening a grass-roots army of people who don’t normally identify as political.

This has happened before. Gough Whitlam’s “It’s Time” campaign in 1972 made politics cool. (It even had a brilliant gospel-style theme song that featured the line “It’s time for freedom”, which says all you need to know about how much Labor has changed since then.)

Sure, Whitlam’s campaign was emotional, which ended in disaster because all he was really arguing was that change was overdue.

This time, though, it’s different – change is underdue, if that’s a word. There is simply no time to waste to stop Labor destroying the Australia we, including Whitlam’s generation, once knew and loved.

There is nothing uncool about wanting our country back, especially while we remain the majority.