Then, they bury important issues. They reduce policy debate to the lowest common denominator.

In doing so, they actually bring the major Parties even closer to one another than they normally are.

GOAT TRACK

And the legacy media steers the conversation ever towards the UniParty. The two majors simply play endless “look over there”.

This election cycle is proving to be a Bruce Highway of a campaign, with likely very dreary outcomes.

Travelling thousands of miles down the Queensland coast on the Bruce “Highway” is never pleasurable.

The road is a goat track on a good day. Governments charged with its upkeep have long promised better times, but never deliver. There are few votes up that way, certainly not for Labor governments.

My most recent trip on this road was burdened by personal loss. Not only that, there were the recent Queensland floods.

They rendered this trip an exercise in deep pot-hole dodging and substantial wheel damage. Worse still, Australia is currently in the throes of an election campaign.

This meant thousands of beaming politician-faces on corflute boards lining the highway all the way back to civilisation, south of the Tweed.

As with the highway, the best descriptors of this election campaign include words like long and tedious, dismal, full of holes, dodgy, endlessly disappointing and with no happy ending within reach.

The current election is being fought between the Labor Government led by Anthony Albanese and the Liberal-National Coalition led by Peter Dutton. Not household names, internationally.

On reflection, Oz elections are much worse than simply meaningless. They are occasions of electoral sin.

The May 3, 2025, election is a shameless auction, even worse than most.

It has the usual ingredients. Non-problems consuming attention and dollars.

Meanwhile, real problems are being parked – like the deep household recession, the ghastly fruits of mass immigration, the crashing of our energy economy, fiscal incontinence on a grand scale, rampant, largely unchecked anti-Semitism, ongoing attacks on free speech, endless wokism and Aboriginal “welcomes-to-country”.

Promises will be broken at will, “as circumstances change”. Inevitable, unmandated actions will be forthcoming down the road. More rule by the unelected bureaucrats of the managerial class.

One of Australia’s most prominent and sensible economists, Judith Sloan, has described 2025 as “the worst election in history”.

The sooner May 3 arrives the better, because at least then the politicians will have run out of time to dream up hairbrained expensive proposals.

It is impossible to disagree. There aren’t even compelling, larger-than-life leaders to excite us, even to distract us, this time around.

No Trump down under, of course. No Orban. No Milei. No Meloni. No Elon. No Farage, even (with all his now manifest shortcomings). No need to “make Australia great again”.

We are fine, apparently. But we aren’t!

Professor David Flint in The Spectator argues that we are crying out for new leadership: “Not since the fall of Singapore has there been such apprehension about the future of Australia.”

True enough, at least among the awake, if not among the rest.

Yet, here we are. We are at the precipice, but clueless as to how to get politicians to change direction, to step us back from the abyss.

Hell, most of the establishment political class is engineering our trip to the abyss. The insouciance among the lap-top class is incredible. A business-as-usual election in apocalyptic times.

Elections in Australia long since ceased to be real policy contests between seriously different major Parties keen to please their bases.

The demise of proper elections that provide true accountability is as much a threat to democracy as recent events in France, Germany and Romania (for example).

The cynicism runs deep here, yet Australians with the inclination and nous to build alternate, winning coalitions of alt-Parties with a sense of what we-the-people want from government seem totally unable to do so.

SPLINTERED

The splintered alt-Right is more splintered than ever, with yet new micro-Parties emerging.

They have names like the Libertarian Party, Family First, the Family Party – yes, there are even two “family” Parties – People First, One Nation (think Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts), and – yes, this is true – Trumpet of Patriots.

Ironically, this last lot are the closest thing we have to an unapologetic MAGA Party. It is now led by the quirky, outsider, billionaire miner, Clive Palmer, an absolute COVID hero to boot.

The million strong convoy to Canberra of 2021 at the height of the jab-dictatorship has dissipated, gone without trace. There are a few remnants. Not that visible, though. Or loud. Or united. Or impactful.

They are destined to remain very, very micro, alas. The most that can be hoped for is a few right-thinking senators who might provide the odd brake on major Party agendas.

Notwithstanding the seeming Reform UK implosion, Aussies can only look on with envy at the Brits’ ability to form a single alt-Party with a focus on the big issues that resonate with the 80 per cent of the people who hate the current direction of national travel.

As it now stands here, the polls are favouring the incumbent Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, and his hard-Left government.

The “Albo” (as he is known, typically without affection) administration has proven to be that increasingly common combination of clueless and dangerous.

The Liberal-National Coalition opposition led by ex-copper Peter Dutton, which has offered some glimmers of hope for better policy outcomes, still has not earned the trust of the millions of Australians who still remember the plandemic and its awful deeds.

Dutton had surged in the polls but now seems becalmed halfway through the campaign. The earlier likelihood of a one-term government – a rarity in Canberra – has faded.

What the “club sensible” centre of the electorate fears more than anything else is the return of Albanese but with minority government status.

Because of the concentration of progressive greenies in inner-urban electorates, The Greens and the mostly rich, woke, climate obsessed women who are known as “the Teals”, are able to win a goodly number of seats.

BOTHERER

The thought of this lot – think of a bunch of female, climate-botherer Keir Starmers – bargaining with Labor for their preferred “vision” and shopping list of demonic actions is beyond disastrous.

When you see disgusting election adverts from groups like “Farmers for Climate Action”, you know you are in big strife.

The old debate on the right will, no doubt, occur again.

Don’t talk about the UniParty. The two Parties are distinct. Albanese must be got rid of, for he is dangerous. Forgive the Libs. We know they are weak and will go to water – again – come the fresh whiff of ministerial leather.

We know this much:-

• They will never leave the Paris Agreement.
• They remain committed to net-zero (with a twist of nuclear promised).
• They will never apologise for their freedom-crushing COVID policies, or for trashing the economy with a trillion-dollar plandemic spend.
• They won’t ever get rid of subsidised child care.
• They won’t defang the ABC, up there with the BBC in its abominable ways.
• They will continue to allow the flying of three flags (Australian, Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander) everywhere you look.
• They won’t abolish the office of the eSafety Commissioner.
• They won’t reverse, Trump-like, all the woke gibberish.

This is merely a brief summary, not meant to be comprehensive.

Ah, they say. They will cut immigration! By a little. Maybe.

It was a Liberal Prime Minister (John Howard), after all, who initially went big on immigration, in the early 2000s.

The Libs started the immigrant-led Ponzi economy. With all its entirely predictable fruits. Like foreign enclaves and no-go areas.