The Coalition would have combined that with just enough sensible reform to keep both its base and its Leftist focus groups onside come the next election.

In other words, long-term, robust conservative policies would have been as likely as Albo’s newfound Catholicism preventing him from marching in the next Mardi Gras.

CATASTROPHE

Thank goodness that instead we are staring down three years of unmitigated catastrophe at the hands of the most incompetent, nastiest bunch of politicians Australia has seen.

Our contempt for them need not be moderated. Nor will we need to stifle our amusement as they impose arguably the worst agenda of any Australian government in history.

Conservatives who are lamenting that Labor’s divisive, illogical, unpatriotic and economy-destroying performance has been rewarded with another term are forgetting how much fun it is to be in opposition.

We are the pirates, the rebels, the discerning minority who warned during this campaign that Labor would destroy the country. And now they will.

It’s time to break out the popcorn and await vindication.

I say this with enormous sympathy for those who cannot avoid being victimised by this government.

I’ve met farmers, for example, whose properties, which have been in the family for six generations, who will be driven to bankruptcy and suicide, when Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s high-voltage wires are forcibly suspended above their crops.

I won’t bore you with the details, but these wires, delivering electricity from remote windmills and solar operations to the cities, will make the farms unviable and impossible to sell, which is stage one of Bowen’s long-term plan.

Stage two is to pick up the land for a song and carpet them with solar panels. Farming is so last century, don’t you know.

Similarly, small business operators who survive on narrow margins, and people with large mortgages and small children will, if they are smart enough to have seen through Labor’s counterproductive, inflation-driving promises of “free” handouts, will be trembling tonight. I feel for them.

MANDATE

Back in January, I compared Donald Trump, who was about to be inaugurated on a mandate of action and optimism, with Albo, who was preparing to embark on a campaign to be re-elected knowing that most of his supporters hate the place, and think its history consists of nothing but theft and genocide.

He knows his only chance in the forthcoming election is if enough voters share his dreary vision of multicultural dystopia, net-zero deindustrialisation, Soviet-style censorship and bloated bureaucracy.

Nothing that happened during the campaign disabused me of this succinct observation.

Albo knew his only chance was not to appeal to patriotism or a sense of mutual responsibility between State and citizen; rather, it was to give away as much money as he could in the key electorates and demographics.

Great democratic victories are based on a broad vision that brings people together; Albo won it by promising to pay our doctors’ fees.

Some of Labor’s key demographics make astroturf look like the croquet garden at Windsor Castle.

Labor has for decades been flooding the nation with low-skill workers who are dumb and nihilistic enough to vote for the Party that obsequiously buys their affection, and Albo’s government has put the strategy on steroids.

The flip side of this arrangement for the MPs is that they need to wear strange costumes every time Ramadan, Diwali, Chinese New Year and the ancient Feast of the Non-Binary Mountain Goat rolls around.

Let them. They know they look ridiculous.

We will retain our own culture, thanks very much, in which the only early-morning call to prayer is for the Dawn Service on April 25, and the only traditional greeting is a heartfelt “g’day” followed by “have a good one”.

Either deliberately or through its monumental incompetence, Labor is going to impose enormous suffering on Australians.

Conservative commentators won’t be exempt. We’ve already seen in Britain and Germany what happens to people who upset the Leftist agenda.

Tommy Robinson and Lucy Connolly are the most famous, but in fact Pommy plods are arresting 30 people a day for wrong-speak.

It will happen here too when the government reintroduces the Misinformation and Disinformation Bill, which empowers apparatchiks to define the truth.