Such confusion is a function of the combination of the compulsory preferential system of voting with which we are gifted in Australia, and the sad state of the moribund, legacy major Parties.

Oh, then there is the massive own goal of the burgeoning, Right-of-centre Parties which have managed to avoid the collaboration needed to be high-impact.

DISILLUSIONED

Unless you count some minor gestures of mutual goodwill and the suggestion of preference deals.  (At last count, there are at least half a dozen new ones, in addition to existing deplorables Parties like One Nation, all competing for the disillusioned conservative vote).

It will take more than the preference whisperer on one of his better days to achieve the miracle of a sensible, non-ideological government that actually says what it means, means what it says, keeps its word, avoids lying and eschews propaganda paid for by us.

The hope that the United Australia Party or the Liberal Democrats (or whatever they will be allowed to call themselves) might be able to win enough seats to hold the balance of power in the House of Representatives and so dictate government policy is but a pipe dream.

Three years ago, I ventured a re-hash of the1970s tweedledum-tweedledee argument of Bob Catley and Bruce McFarlane that it didn’t much matter who won the 2019 federal election.

For this, I was castigated with the line, “faced with two such bad choices, normally I vote informal but this time is different; Shorten is dangerous”.

In other words, reward incompetents who take us all for mugs, visit disasters upon the nation, fall asleep at the wheel and ignore our core priorities at best, and ditch them at worst.

By the way, the mantra that the other mob is worse than us has been, by and large, the Coalition’s pitch since 1944.

My view in 2019 was, and remains, that Shorten wasn’t that dangerous, that the Canberra policy deals are now mainly done in the Senate (God help us, you might think), and that the Liberal-led Coalition is so bad, so Leftist, so green, so globalist, and so embarrassingly incompetent, that the other mob could not be possibly any worse.

And one has a duty to punish awful governments. Period.

I’m sorry, but incompetence and “less worse” should never be rewarded with further time in office.

Three other arguments support this view. 

First, as the late Andrew Breitbart famously essayed, culture is upstream from politics, and so the real strategising and hand-to-hand combat needs to take place there, not in the lobbies of Canberra.

The ideologues who perpetrated and assisted in the long march through the institutions haven’t bothered too much with parliamentary politics and elections. They know where the real action is.

WOKE

Nor have the supranational institutions that now govern so much of what happens politically (even locally), nor the globally integrated woke corporates that own the planet’s resources and that have signed up for the whole “new normal” agenda. Indeed, they drive it.

And they drive it in cahoots with big government, through the sinister globalist cronyism euphemistically described in hushed tones by its adherents as “public-private partnerships”.

Wasting one’s energy handing out how-to-vote cards at polling booths is literally just that. A waste of time. 

Second, both government and opposition now share every core value, it seems.

Certainly, enough of them agree on the issues that matter most to the conservatives, outsiders and deplorables.

Just look at any recent “conscience” vote in any Australian parliament – there is no major political Party that corporately defends non-negotiable conservative values.

Think marriage, religious freedoms, abortion, euthanasia, the family.

Take away the Party affiliations after the names and try and see if you can predict voting patterns according to the MP’s Party and its philosophy. No, you cannot.

Seventeen of the 19 NSW Nationals voted to support infanticide on demand in 2019.

The arguments the majors now use are largely over competence in delivering the shared (green, nanny State, big-government, socially liberal, loose money, globalist) agenda.

And they also share careerism, factionalism and an aversion to genuine public service in equal measure. 

Third, it is hard to imagine anything more a future government could do to further wreck the joint.

Economically, socially and environmentally, we are cooked already.

DOOM

The awful stuff is already baked into the polity, and we are now a train rolling along already laid tracks, towards inevitable doom.

In particular, what more could be taken from us by way of our rights and freedoms that hasn’t been already ripped from us since March 2020?

Some still have faith in the legacy Parties and a belief that electoral processes can still deliver good government.

These are the “normies”, as James Delingpole terms them.

Their continued faith in the system as it now operates could perhaps be considered endearing and naïve but utterly misplaced.

They want to believe that there are good people in the major Parties, that we need more good people in politics and that achieving this is the only way out of the mess.

To which I say, where the hell are these “good people”? What are their names? The really good people, such as they are, are either leaving or have been forced out by careerists and factional thugs.

Or they are simply disillusioned. These are the only politicians who have stood up for we-the-people these past two years, against the COVID tyranny.

You can count them on one, or at most, two hands. And the best people are decidedly not in the major Parties.

The few remaining “good” people that are there, in senior positions of legacy parties – Dominic Perrottet is routinely said to be one – are so bullied and snookered by their Party machines as to be irrelevant.

They are forever on the back foot, forced to apologise for their Parties’ manifest misdeeds and to defend incompetent governance and much worse.

In the NSW Premier’s case, he routinely sides with his Leftist and authoritarian buddies.

Of course, to those who still value the existing two-Party system and spend their lives down in the electoral weeds, we should add the tribal Liberals (and Nats) who keep the faith, come what may, and despite their Party representatives having rolled over on just about everything the Party faithful once cherished.

Even after the Turnbull coup and the shocking defenestration of the last Liberal leader worthy of the name.  Seven years ago.

DILEMMA

The last federal elction was, of course, BC (before COVID), and the coming of totalitarianism to our fair land.

COVID “management”, broadly agreed by all the main Parties, has turbo-charged the conservative/outsider’s dilemma.

They all wanted to subjugate us beyond anything ever previously countenanced. Oppositions, not worthy of the name, merely mee-too’d their way through the non-crisis that “was” COVID.

(Yes, “was”. Past tense. Thinking people have, indeed, moved on from the virus).

The disillusion of 2019 has given way, at least for the 20-30 per cent of the electorate who didn’t sup the COVID Kool-Aid, to the embedded anger of those for whom forgiveness is no longer a thing.

And now, we have had the floods. Yes, in the end, ScoMo did make it into Lismore, but not with much intent, empathy or game-changing interventions.

The utter disillusion felt by battered and worn-down businesses, citizens and communities, locked up against our wills for two years and impoverished economically, socially and culturally, portends a massive push-back against incumbents.

Yes, I know that electors in Queensland and WA rewarded their COVID State overlords with thumping majorities. There are reasons for that. Now is different.

The whole world has, in effect admitted that it was all for nothing. That, as Alex Berenson says, “virus gonna virus” and King Canutes are not required.

That the prices we paid for clueless, venal and mostly corrupt governments wanting to muscle up against a now endemic, middling virus with a puny, almost invisible lethality were way too high.

The ignominy of politicians now descending into politicised blame games over the rubble of despair in the Northern Rivers, South-East Queensland and beyond, must surely be the last straw.

We have reached the place where “the other mob are worse” should no longer cut it, and where the need to punish our fascist overlords must outweigh the likely pain of the alternative.

As every outsider now knows, and far more will when the COVID pennies finally start to drop, the world is not run by popularly elected “leaders” who govern in our interests, but by global players with agendas that are, contrary to the familiar cry of the Great Reset denier, clear, palpable, alarming and in plain sight.

THOUGHT-CRIME

Such an agenda includes, but is not confined to, digital identity, ongoing, ubiquitous vaccinations for all, relentless surveillance, censorship of thought-crime, the end to nation-States and to liberal democracy, hyper-regulation, universal basic incomes, global socialism, net-zero everything and re-packaged eugenics.

The American playwright CJ Hopkins calls this cartel “GloboCap”.

And yes, this includes, indeed it features, Communist China. The late Angelo Codevilla simply called it (in 2010) “the ruling class”.

 The political scientist Samuel P Huntington referred to its exemplars collectively as “Davos Man”, the globally connected, anti-patriot oligarch who does deals, subverts governments that it doesn’t already control, bullies the sock puppets that are elected governments, and condemns us all to vassal status.