Out of the Political Grave

Well, ladies and gentlemen and others who need not be ignored, the good news is that the Dear Departed Leader has emerged from the entombing cobweb cocoon of hemi-demi-semi-retirement (i.e. the twilight of the political gods, not to untowardly and unduly blaspheme, you understand, I trust), Kim Beazley has emerged, I say, to vouchsafe upon our as-yet-unwitting world the inestimable pearls of his undubitable hard-won wisdom, to wit, his much-anticipated and much-analysed oracular and orotund pronouncements pertinant to, and reflective of, the upcoming Federal Election in our wide, brown, but nonetheless generally pleasant land, viz. Australia, an election, one must acknowledge upfront and cleanbreastedly but with heavy heart and heavy chest-heaving, the which Mr Kim Christian Beazley, Esquire, will regrettably but undeniably not be contesting in his erstwhile manifestation as the highly esteemed - and highly missed, needless to add, but add it I unswervingly will - loyal leader of her Majesty's steadfast Australian opposition, to wit, the Australian Labor Party. But to come to the nub, the kernel of the chestnut currently in question: the Great Man has enunciated an earth-shaking dictum that has percolated through the caffeine-addicted netherworld of what passes for journalistic praxis in this afflicted desmesne; namely, that the upcoming, aforementioned electoral and gladiatorial contest will be none other than the proverbial 'make-or-break' Armageddon of the Antipodean political landscape, and, to express it in blunt and concise fashion, will spell the veritable end for one or other of our major political actors, i.e., either the Australian Labor Party will cease to exist due to the decimation of its Trades Union base under the swingeing assault of the Orwellian misnamed, so-called 'WorkChoices' package, or - in stark contradistinction - the Liberal Party (with whom we of course taxonomically bundle their hapless, hopeless, hackneyed, hasbeen, hayseed lackeys, the ingloriously misnamed National Party, who comprise but a pimply rump of the once-significant Country Party of Black Jack McEwen et alia, of whom the much-vaunted and much-vented Barnaby Joyce constitutes but the final, flickering flare of a fast extinguishing ember), the Liberal Party - to return to my theme - whose continued existence is posed point blank - at the point of a veritable electoral revolver, no less - by its consistent and consecutive defeats at the hands of various assembled State-level Labor administrations, and whose inevitable and unregrettable demise would be obviously accomplished by its defeat in the aforementioned Federal poll. To sum up: the upcoming Commonwealth election will indubitably result in our nation becoming effectively a one-party state, with the ineluctable extinction of one or other of the major competing parties for the aforementioned diverse reasons. We, the general public, seated round our TV dinners, can only be transfixed by this burst of politically analytical brilliance and await - with breath bated or otherwise - the unavoidable transmogrification of our political life. One can only hope that Kim will continue to share such scintillating insights, with those of us that are willing to listen, in the extraordinary times that clearly lie ahead.