INGRID DOULTON | Lady Writer | Contact
With nothing else to talk about when it comes to domestic politics, the Australian media is continuing the run-the-clock coverage of the political aspirations of a minor party with three sitting MPs across both state and federal politics.
While international political news continues to grow increasingly more alarming, with endless wars and major economic upheaval, Australia's domestic landscape is just a boring hamster wheel of fluctuating interest rates and short-lived culture wars.
The current flavour of the month appears to be immigration, in accordance with the same algorithmic social media trends currently ransacking European elections.
However, mandatory (and preferential) voting - the Australian electoral system is protected from both far-left and far-right populism.
The only historical anomaly to this rule is Queensland, where a decentralised population oscillates between electing eleven One Nation MPs in 1998, before ushering through a record-breaking amount of Federal Greens MPs and senators in 2022.
However, this excitement cannot be recreated south of the Tweed River, with the possible exception to Barnaby Joyce's NSW border seat of New England - who just love him.
Everywhere else, Australia's elections are decided by female voters who do not adhere to media sensationalism or the voting patterns of their husbands.
And as one of the most highly educated female populations on the planet, this particular cohort aren't that interested in electing anyone who thinks childcare is a left-wing handout, and that abortion is for immoral floozies.
It appears that the Albanese government has no problem promising to protect access to these service for Australian women. Their only possible opponent, One Nation, has vowed to scrap and restrict both for reasons that cannot be identified.
And with 18 months left before the next election, Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce can only disgust this deciding voter block even further.
The closest the media got to undermining the Prime Minister's standing with this demographic was during the never-ending 'melongate' scandal - which, after 16 weeks as the most reported on story in Australian politics, finally came to a close late last month.
With a 94-seat majority and a terminally dysfunctional Liberal Opposition, the Federal Labor government is so safe that their critics in the conservative media have had resorted to blasting the 'government spending' that Australians enthusiastically voted for.
