You only have to look around the place for five minutes to see that what’s needed in this country is a fair dinkum, old-fashioned military coup.
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If you’d watched Q&A last week you’d have become acquainted with One Nation’s senator-elect for Queensland Malcolm Roberts (or Mars Attacks! as I like to call him).
Mars Attacks! was the only person on the panel – and one of the few people left on Earth I’d say – who believes climate change isn’t being caused by man-made emissions, isn’t a big deal at all and is actually an evil hoax being perpetrated by international conspirators whose wish is to rule the planet.
Global warming is a "scam", he maintains, cunningly pulled off by a cabal of international scientists led by NASA, the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO, and orchestrated so that the United Nations can impose a global government and new world order through climate change policies.
It’s not a stretch to imagine Mars Attacks! wearing a tin-foil hat and worrying that Ban Ki-moon sits on a giant throne, stroking a white fluffy cat as he plots how he can seize all of Queensland for himself! Mwah-ha-ha-haaaa!
Fortunately, there were four other Q&A panellists on hand – including renowned physicist professor Brian Cox – to rebuke Mars Attacks!.
But the problem, as I see it, is not so much that he appears to truly believe this stuff, but that Mars Attacks! – a qualified engineer, a former coalface miner and current fruitcake - actually now occupies a seat in the Parliament of Australia.
The lunatics are taking ov ... never mind.
What's more, Mars Attacks! managed to become a cog in our legislative machine at Malcolm Turnbull's double dissolution election by convincing just 77 other Australians to give him their first preference personal vote. That’s 77 people - who may or may not own tin-foil hats.
It was an infinitesimal electoral victory that makes Ricky Muir look like Sir Robert Menzies.
Now I invite you to turn your mind to the past six or seven years of federal governance in Australia.
In 2007 we elected a Labor government led by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd – a man so detested by his own colleagues that I’m starting to think he was lucky that the knife that was plunged into his political torso in the dark of night in 2010 was a purely metaphorical one.
The way Wayne Swan, Simon Crean and Peter Garrett talk about him even today suggests they’d relish the chance to punch Rudd’s mouth loose. I can visualise Garrett holding him while Swan, Crean and Kristina Keneally take turns gangster-slapping some respect into him.
Then we got the Gillard years. Straight-jacketed by a hung parliament, Julia Gillard's time as PM was not only defined by PR shambles and grotesque political games (Peter Slipper for Speaker, anyone?) but the nastiest, cruellest, most personally aggressive, obstructionist, opportunistic and astronomically successful Opposition Leader in history: Tony Abbott.
So artful was Abbott, so willing to engage in political violence that he laid ruin to our first female PM to the point that the ALP brought back the bloodied but unbowed Rudd – only to see Labor bashed senseless by the Abbott-led Coalition in 2013. Of course history shows that as a Prime Minister Abbott was a turnip; a raw onion munching, wannabe-shirt-fronting, umm-ing and ahh-ing turnip who will largely be remembered for elevating the breaking of promises to a science and for reintroducing knights and dames, only to make the Queen’s husband a Sir of Australia.
The Libs punted Abbott to the backbench quicker than Labor sent Rudd to Timbuktu as Foreign Minister. That was last September, remember? When things were finally supposed to improve under the moderate, measured, mild-mannered Malcolm Turnbull?
Well they haven't. Take a good look around. Turnbull gave us the utterly unnecessary double dissolution election that almost saw his party forced into minority-mode itself. Worse, it delivered a Senate populated by Pauline Hanson (I honestly still can’t believe I’m typing that in 2016) and three more One Nation members including Mars Attacks!.
The next three years are shaping up like a nightmare from which the average Australian can never wake. The early signs are that the Turnbull government is ineffectual. Parliament hasn’t even resumed and they can’t seem to kick the simplest goals from right in front of the posts.
Make no mistake, at some time in the future Coalition plotters will draw their daggers and overthrow Prime Minister Turnbull. He will never enjoy the relative dignity of being voted out by the punters after 11 years in office like John Howard.
My point is that these leadership coups within the major parties have not worked; not for them and certainly not for the Australian public. And now we have to sit around powerlessly for another three years while these clowns mess the joint up some more. So ...
Just over yonder from Parliament House, at Yarralumla, sits Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove. Our most experienced and distinguished military commander, Sir Peter is a no-nonsense Vietnam veteran who came to public attention as the commander of INTERFET which oversaw East Timor's transition to independence.
I wonder how he feels about Australia's transition through six prime ministers in nine years and the bizarre electoral elevation of Mars Attacks!.
People of a certain age will remember the national outrage in 1975 when the then Governor-General Sir John Kerr intervened and sacked the government of Gough Whitlam. Well, I reckon things are different now and most Australians would welcome the intervention of Sir Peter Cosgrove & Co.
He could quickly install interim ministers to professionally manage our government departments and the economy until such time new elections can be held - with new rules that state parties have to stick with their chosen leader for their first term (let the voters decide if they get a second) and make it no longer possible to have the likes of Mars Attacks! elected with just 77 first preference personal votes.
Or Sir Peter could stay in power until the Global Government of the United Nations takes control of planet Earth.