If you are anything like me, you are probably feeling a bit anxious right now, because you know it is coming.
Not Easter, which doesn’t really come at a particular time these days and is more or less a permanent event, going by supermarket shelves, which seemed to keep Easter eggs on sale even when toilet paper disappeared as part of our standard response to natural disasters like Cyclone Alfred.
Keeping kids full of chocolate in the midst of a toilet paper shortage seems like a bad idea if you think about it; for obvious reasons you probably don’t want to though. In any event, the only way Easter ‘arrives’ these days is when children go through the sublime, uplifting religious experience that accompanies it: a sugar high that could kill a woolly mammoth.
So we are not anxious about Easter, since it is pretty much here year-round, just like Christmas, Halloween and the football season. No, I refer to an event even scarier than the prospect of sugar-saturated children roaming the streets and being unsure as to whether they should be singing Christmas carols, trick or treating or putting in their footy tips: the federal election.
Everyone is a bit anxious around elections these days, mostly because the Americans recently had one and the results were, shall we say, uneven. Indeed, we shall say uneven, because we do not want get Donald Trump upset enough to nuke us. Most US Presidents want to nuke somebody – what’s the point of having all those big toys if you can’t play with them? – but they usually have unfriendly nations (or in Reagan’s case, Martians) in mind.
Trump, however, seems to be trying to pick between Mexico, Canada, California and the United States Supreme Court. It would not pay to draw attention to ourselves at the moment, so I am sticking with the word ‘uneven’ to describe what has happened since the US election.
On the positive side, it is very clear President Trump does what he says he will do – for example, he promised to end the war in a day, and he did; it is just that no-one knew that the war he had in mind was the Cold War, and that he would end it by surrendering. Losing a war that the US actually won decades ago is pretty impressive by any standards.
He has also surrounded himself with some useful people. For example, recent press conferences have shown that Vice-President JD Vance is very useful to the President, because as long as JD is there, the President can be sure that at least one person will say something much stupider than anything he says; and going on his last presidency, that will be hugely valuable to Trump.
Thankfully, we have Ambassador Kevin Rudd on the ground in the US, working to smooth the relationship with his famous diplomatic skills – the same ones that compelled him, as Prime Minister, to describe our Chinese neighbours as people who enjoy romantic liaisons with rodents (this is another good way to get nuked). I don’t know about you, but I feel safer already!
So election are scary things, especially as this one has a pre-election budget. This is a chance for the government to show its economic strategy. Are they Keynesians? Chicago schoolers? Yellenists?
Somehow my invitation to the budget lockdown got lost in the mail, but based on my extensive study of the headlines of a few newspapers, I have concluded that the current government are devotees of Winfreyism (‘You get a handout! You get a handout! Everybody gets a handout!).
Of course, the real stress in the election campaign is that no politician ever tells you what they are going to do, or even manages to answer a question. Take this hypothetical press conference scenario:
Journalist: Is two plus two four?
Incumbent politician: What I can say is this: our government has, over the course of this term and in the fullness of time, based on a full analysis, placed such questions under active consideration and achieved sound results through adequate checks and balances as any responsible government would do, and we expect this to continue over the forward estimates; I don’t think I can put it any clearer than that.
Opposition politician: Let me just say this: under any government I lead, two plus two will be worth much more than it ever would under the current incompetent regime. Under my government I expect two plus two to be five, six, even seven due our ability to cut waste and deliver sound economic management.
Fringe candidate: Mathematics is simply imperialist rhetoric designed to keep the major parties in power and suppress the workers, all at the behest of the major supermarkets and the illuminati. If elected, we promise that the people, and the people alone, will decide what two plus two is.
Journalist: (heading towards the nearest pub) I’ll just put down ‘no comment’.
So the election campaign should be a heap of fun, and I hope we have a good clean match-up, I hope the candidates are wise and trustworthy, and most of all I hope that this column does not prompt people to stop me in the street to discuss these issues, as I think I have made it quite clear that I do not have a clue about them.
I am ending this one on a serious note, since I write this in the aftermath of Cyclone Alfred, the storm that shocked South-East Queenslanders with the knowledge that they, too, could be hit by cyclones.
While most of us were lucky to come through relatively unscathed, many people lost everything. Others were without power for weeks, and have been involved in massive clean-ups. Some will be dealing with the damage from Alfred for a long time – certainly well beyond the point at which the media have lost interest.
I know from the experiences of friends in North Queensland that even 15 or 20 centimetres of water through a house can render it uninhabitable for months; the cyclone was the beginning of a long road to recovery for many people.
If you know someone who was affected by this, check in with them – and keep doing so. They might need it long after the public rallying ends; it often subsides at the same rate as the flood waters.
If you are dealing with fellow practitioners who have been through a bad time, stay courteous and considerate; they have a lot on their plate. Keep an eye out for each other; you never know what the other person is going through. Let’s be the collegial profession we tell everyone we are.
© Shane Budden 2025
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