I’m with stupid

There’s always been a healthy level of stupid in Australian politics, but let’s face facts: the collective intelligence of the current parliament makes a group shout at Barnaby’s favourite pub look like a Mensa meeting. 

To be fair, the stupid didn’t start in May 2022 with the election of Ralph Babet, although certainly Pauline Hanson must have been relieved to relinquish her reigning senate title as Most Likely To Confuse Themselves With A Push-Pull Door. 

I know we shouldn’t endlessly bemoan every second day about the end of intelligence and rationality in politics, but these past few years, a lot of politicians talking about understanding Australians have turned out not to know a lot about understanding Australians.

Endless surveys have exposed an Australian electorate fed up with politicians refusing to listen to their needs (yes, we want intelligent leadership) and instead focusing on what brand of wine their favourite corporate lobbyist will cough up in their next “working” meeting or how many bloodied promises Labor’s toe-cutter, Don Farrell, can drag into a Cabinet meeting. Or, in the case of Simon Birmingham and Bill Shorten, what sort of well-paying, get-me-outta-here job can they line up for themselves while pretending to care about those pain-in-the-arse voters.

What we get instead in this 47^th Parliament, is an unbelievably stupid crop of politicians. Not so much a ship of fools, but a collection of liars and reprobates whose heads collectively whistle in the cross-winds. Unfortunately, our slow boat comes at a time when we face the most serious events humanity has ever faced.

The climate is collapsing, temperatures are climbing, the hell of an angry planet is unleashing its fury on us, and Albanese is dancing with his streamers around the stupid pole, playing politics with Tanya Plibersek’s Green’s deal just so he can diminish her standing in the party. He doesn’t even have the guts to take ownership of it, so instead he’s planting fake stories in The Saturday Paper, blaming the Muslim senator, a woman who left his party precisely because he was such an insipid little man riven by stupidity.

Then we have Peter Dutton, a man whose own wife was once compelled to wade into the national media to plead with the Australian public that her husband was “not a monster”, which was a waste of time given nobody had ever thought anything else of him. Peter spent most of this year telling Australians about his patently made-up-on-the-run nuclear fantasy that was so devoid of detail or logic it may as well have been written in Elvish. The Liberals had a plan, except they weren’t going to show you. They had figures, except they weren’t going to show you. They had data, except they weren’t going to show you, nyahnyah-nya-nyahnyah. They did however have a pretty AI rendered image from a European example of a small modular nuclear reactor that looked somehow like Peter had got hold of a Swiss chocolate wrapper and smoothed it out for his press conference. 

Australians were treated to a leader of the opposition promoting a fact free, plan free, evidence free, figures free, data free, delusion that was only given air time because Speersy loves a good valueless piece of fluff and content filler, and Dutton provides him with plenty. Confused and deluded, spare a thought for us, the voting public, because the stupid is now ever-present and permanent.

Take last month’s Senate censure motions, and god forbid that anyone did take them seriously. Censure motions in the Senate are a bit like sticking a note on the back of the person you hated most back in primary school, except our politicians pretend to vote on it to give it an air of civility instead of brawling in the dust at the back of the footy oval the way they’d really like to. 

Lidia Thorpe was first up to be voted off the island due to her lack-of-prior-approval truth telling in federal parliament where King Charlie, a man we didn’t vote for, sat with his former mistress pretending to be the ruler of all Australians. When a black woman with 40,000 years of Australia behind her shouted, “You are not my king,” she was dragged to the doors by pre-approved white blokes, probably for making the only intelligent comment anyone has made in Parliament House all year.

Lidia Thorpe’s sin was to not take kindly to Charles and the permanently woebegone Camilla sitting up on the stage with Albanese and his hangers on, looking down upon the peasants in some sort of tone-deaf display of superiority in a time when 40% of Australians are accessing Foodbanks to feed their families. 

That Albanese didn’t realise this wasn’t a great look isn’t especially surprising given the way he tanked the Voice referendum and almost anything else his passion fingers have touched since he came to power. What he should have done is pretend the whole affair never happened and move on, but never one to miss a chance to grovel to the Murdoch fed middle-Australia, the Albanese inner team happily sanctioned a censure motion against Lidia Thorpe, reinforcing the idea that everything  they touch turns to, if not quite shit, then papier mâché.

Ralph Babet was up next. He was censured by the Senate firing squad for a totally different reason to Thorpe, yet the Australian public were asked to believe his transgressions were on entirely the same level of equity as Senator Thorpe’s. Wet-wipe Ralph, the patron saint of the permanently bewildered and the only senator most likely to forget his way from his office door to the senate without a sat-nav in his hand, has always been a little bit desperate for someone, anyone, to pay attention to him. Certainly his previous career as an erstwhile “real estate agent” and purveyor of fake Hermes ashtrays didn’t give him the celebrity status he coveted, so he’s now tried his hand in the Australian Senate and yay verily there he now is, smearing his own shit on the walls.

We don’t need to highlight the predictability of what he did this time, a man who jumps on any controversy for his own publicity after taking orders from low-level US based MAGA pillocks, other than to say he used fulsome racial and homophobic slurs in social media posts after Trump’s win to crawl after the attention he hungers for but will never receive. Really, a few decent sessions in responsible self-flagellation would be far less costly.

Then we had Albanese ramming through the results of a Daily Telegraph opinion poll and attempting to sell it to Australians as an under-16 social media ban to “save the kids”. The legislation was so well thought out that one week before it hit parliament, it still hadn’t been written into draft bill form. One can only wonder at the midnight cutting and pasting jobs that went on at the Hill while Albanese worked out which other one of Dutton’s Jump-Sit-Roll-Over-Anthony commands he should acquiesce to next.

Australians have in front of them at the moment a stupid parliament filled by stupid politicians pushing ever more stupid ideas in a way that alienates the voting public from the people meant to represent them. The stupid, not so much burns as brands its way into our national psyche. Where are all the thinking politicians? When did they become walking sound-bites, dancing before their donors and the opinion poll Gods while ignoring the people who put them there? We are living in not so much the post-truth age, as the post-stupid age.

At the current rate, in 10 years-time the dominant form of politics will be the exchange of 20 word dumb tweets and the Prime Minister gurning on some Only-Fans celebrity account or worse, fawning over the latest billionaire to buy themselves a leader while Australians content themselves with watching home renovation shows and snorting strong medication. The saddest part of all is that our parliament ultimately reflects us. Currently, it is exactly who we are. Which only leaves us with one question – it can’t possibly get any worse, can it?