No, twice as horrifying and irritating have been the men and women in the street.

They have been endlessly consulted in so many of those "vox pop" interviews that look to capture the (imaginary) innate wisdom of the lumpenproletariat. Alas, in recent days, almost everyone I've heard vox popped has emerged as a muddle-headed ignoramus.

One was reminded by every spasm of these vox pop interviews of Winston Churchill's famous insight that "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter".

Though invariably didactic (as if sure he or she knew what he or she was gibbering about) those vox popped in recent days were invariably blind to the beauty, the complexity, the poetry, the difficulty of politics, of governing in a democracy. If you challenged the same man or woman in the street to give you an opinion about astrophysics, invertebrate palaeontology or about the Revenge Tragedies of Shakespeare he or she would cheerfully own up with a giggle to blissful ignorance of these things. But Australian politics, its machineries and its styles, is every bit as complex as those subjects and requires some study if one it to natter sensibly on the subject.

But where these vox popped could mispronounce a politician's name or get a political fact wrong, they did. One man, to his credit disliking Peter Dutton, accused that "he [Dutton] has no apathy for ordinary people". He may have meant "empathy".

Perhaps, though, he was accidentally right, since one of the worries about Dutton is that he shows too much embittered righteous zeal (for example against black African migrants in Melbourne). The occasional show of apathy might soften his chilly, steely, potatoey image.

One theme to emerge from the vox pops is that the popped are peeved and peevish about Australia having had such a miscellany of prime ministers in recent years. Commentators diagnose "voter fatigue" in Australian citizens who, unlike the lucky citizens of dictatorships and tyrannies, have to interrupt their lives for up to 10 minutes at a time, perhaps (horror!) two or three times every three years or so, to go out and fill in a ballot paper.

Thou poor little First World vox-popped snowflakes! How one feels for you, having to suffer these irritating, democratic, party political practices rippling the surfaces of the millponds of your lives. How irksome for you the intellectual demands of every 18 months or so having to learn another PM name.

Oh for the politically uneventful bliss of paradises like Azerbaijan, of Tajikistan, of desirable Belarus, where the same potentates have been cemented in power since 2003, 1994 and 1994 respectively. How enviably stable the world's dictatorships! How baffling for their cheerful peoples the democratic poetry and music performed in the Australian federal parliament in recent days.

Although I am often out in the street myself I have somehow never yet been polled and probed on Australian politics. But when and if I am approached I will have to offer an alternative voice, alternative to the baaing of most flocks of my fellow Australians.

I will say that prime ministerships that come and go in the twinkling of an eye keep Australian public life throbbing and effervescing. I will say that these changes of cast help keep politics the theatrical entertainment it is meant to be in a properly functioning democracy.

And how preferable, I'll tell my interviewer, the scintillation of the comings and goings of about several PMs in the last 11 years to the monotony of the 1000 years (unreliable Wikipedia says it was only 11 years, but that can’t be right) of no PM but the monotonously awful John Howard.

Perhaps it’s just working-class, wage-slave me but I seldom hear passing mention of "legal costs" (lawyers' fees) in a news story without thinking that those costs are easily the most newsworthy thing about the story.

Most recently news reports of Liberal MLA Jeremy Hanson's settling of his defamation case with former CFMEU boss Dean Hall contained mention of Mr Hall's "$280,000 legal bill". Mention of this mind-boggling figure leapt out of the story and seemed to me the truly remarkable thing about that story. It easily eclipsing everything else in the yarn, a dull tale of dull Mr Hanson having said something untrue about Mr Hall.

Two hundred and eighty thousand! Who can believe it? Say it loud and there’s music playing (something angry and threatening by AC/DC at their heavy metal worst). Say it soft and it’s almost like the low growling of man-eating werewolves.

Lawyers' bills, often breathtaking in their shameless rapacity, are sometimes reminiscent in their breathtaking numbers of those impossible-to-comprehend statistics of astronomy. The discovery of Mr Hall's lawyers' calculations of fees of $280,000 seems astounding. They astound and enthral in the same way as the recently reported news that astronomers of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York have discovered four young stars 300,000 light years away.

Both calculations, one in dollars the other in galactic distances, seem out of this world.