It was reminiscent of Gladys Knight & The Pips, of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and especially, in this Pauline Hanson/One Nation context, of Hootie and the Blowfish.

The use of a word that usually labels something so sweetly desirable (a cake made of fruit) to insult and mock does rather play with the mind. Hearing it on radio current affairs programs the innocent ears of naïve cake lovers at first prick up with pleasure.

There is something very similar going on in the US at the moment with the use of the word "snowflake" as an insult. Like "fruitcake" it is an infectious Americanism. When American slang sneezes Australian-English catches a slang cold and "snowflake" as an epithet will be with us any day now.

It is hard to imagine anything more pure and blameless than a true snowflake (we have all seen those vastly magnified pictures of them, each one daintily intricate and unique). But now an essay by Mark Peters in Boston Globe Ideas notices, "snowflake" is "the insult du jour used by conservatives to bully those oversensitive whiners, those rights-demanding liberals" who are horrified by everything done by President Trump.

"The origin of 'snowflake' as an insult" the Globe fancies "may be found in the 1999 movie Fight Club which included these lines: 'Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake.' Many current uses come with an adjective: You can be a 'special snowflake' or a 'sensitive snowflake'. The message remains the same: Sensitivity invites contempt. In the past year, this use of 'snowflake' morphed from a flurry into a blizzard."

Yes, sensitivity invites contempt and if some of us are bracing ourselves for a blizzard of "snowflake" insults it is because we are the sensitive Australians already used to being derided as "bleeding hearts". Just a few days ago and at a protest against our nation's treatment of asylum seekers I found myself part of a whole roomful (a whole snowdrift?) of human snowflakes.

The Americanism "fruitcake" comes from the expression "as nutty as a fruitcake" arising about 1910ish. Of course the ideal fruitcake contains nuts as well as fruits. By 1910ish the idea of being 'nuts' about something or someone (enthusiastic to the point of craziness, as one is when in love) was in widespread use. Such is the flexibility of our English language that "fruitcakes" was even used, from the 1930s, to label male homosexuals.

That regrettable, homophobic use of "fruitcake" is so out of use now that almost no one hearing the expression "Pauline Hanson and her fruitcakes" takes it to mean Pauline Hanson and her homosexuals. We know that a One Nation "fruitcake" is a nutcase, someone nutty enough to have some colourful and often deplorable beliefs. One Nation's Senator Malcolm Roberts is the quintessential One Nation fruitcake. He believes that climate change is a ruse conjured up by conspirators who include international bankers, NASA and perhaps the sinister and secretive World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts.

A New Zealand MP, furious at something Senator Roberts had said about New Zealand, snapped of Roberts that, "Probably the saddest thing about his entry into Australian politics, spending so much time in Canberra, is he has denied a village somewhere in Australia of its idiot. What he is saying is absolutely nuts."

We can scoff at the fruitcakes of politics but for those of us who think that one of the duties of politics it to entertain the fruitcake politician is of priceless importance. The earliest elected ACT Legislative Assemblies contained prize fruitcakes. Some of us miss them very much now that everyone elected to the Assembly is always so drearily average. To pursue the baking metaphor, we never ever elect entertaining fruitcakes to the Assembly but only ever the same old loaves of white and gluten-free bread.

But an electoral system that gives no representation to its society's eccentrics is democratically letting that society down. I propose a modest amendment to ACT electoral laws that will allow each our five electorates of Brindabella, Ginninderra, Kurrajong, Murrumbidgee and Yerrabi to each elect not only the five regulation white-bread bores (usually major-party hacks) but one fruitcake member.

Fruitcake candidates will need to be able to demonstrate some sincerely held eccentric beliefs. So for example the fruitcake field of candidates for Yerrabi might include candidates who believe they have been abducted by aliens (but returned safe and sound to Gungahlin after a little extra-terrestrial probing), who testify that they regularly swim with the mermaids of Yerrabi Pond, who believe that in past lives they have been Florence Nightingale and Sir Robert Menzies, and who swear (as Glasgow council candidate Gary Gray does) that they are in daily psychic touch with the assassinated President John Kennedy.

One meets people like these every day in Canberra (down the shops, at the tennis club, at meetings of those sensitive NIMBY snowflakes the Forrest Residents Group, everywhere). Their artificial exclusion from our legislature is a denial of our city's true fruitcakery.