Voters run scared from the Heffalump, writes Ian Warden

It is that the way in which so many Australians came to believe in and to be spine-chilled by the Coalition's fictitious trumped-up spectre of a Labor "retirees' tax" is eerily reminiscent of Chapter Five of Milne's children's book Winnie The Pooh.

In that chapter, Piglet Meets A Heffalump, Pooh and Piglet become convinced that there is suddenly a huge, fierce, scary, elephant-sized brute, a Heffalump, at large in their hitherto idyllic Hundred Acre Wood.

There is no Heffalump. But for Pooh and Piglet (and especially for terrified little Piglet, who imagines he may be just the thing a fierce Heffalump loves to eat), the balances of their tiny minds disturbed, the Heffalump is absolutely real.

Piglet eventually sees something he imagines is a Heffalump (we find out later it's only Pooh with his head stuck in a honey jar) and he runs away, crying, and (inarticulate with terror) screaming "Help! Help! A horrible Heffalump! A horrible Hoffalump! A Hellible Horralump!"

There was no Heffalump in the Hundred Acre Wood just as there was no retirees' tax in Labor's plans. Both were fictions. One was made up by an altruistic storyteller of tales for children (the beloved A.A. Milne). The other was made up by cunning deceitmongers (Scott Morrison and his strategists).

Milne's harmless fiction only, temporarily, put the wind up one little pig.

By contrast the Liberal's cunning, nation-bruising, power-seeking invention seems to have put the wind up teeming tens of thousands of Piglet-brained voters.

Tuesday's Canberra Times story Massive swings against Labor in franking credit seats reports, of the nation's easily-alarmed enfranchised grey piglets, that "Labor was hit with swings of up to 15 per cent against it in polling booths where people aged over 60 made up more than 15 per cent of the voters, new figures show, revealing the impact of the party's controversial franking credit platform."

I find it is as hard to think like a Liberal as it is to think like a bat or a weasel (or a goldfish, of which more in a moment, below). But, finding myself a Liberal elected to parliament because enough deluded, bedwetting elderly Piglets in my constituency were scared into voting for me by my party's made-up tax-threat Heffalump, I doubt that my conscience would ever allow me a good night's sleep.

Driving home in solemn misery after Saturday night's election party an unusually large, full, sympathetic democracy moon loomed in the skies. It seemed to escort us all the way from the grieving inner-North to our home in the nonplussed inner-South.

At the party and as the horror result unfolded there was much rueful discussion of moving to enlightened New Zealand rather than go on living in Liberal-blighted Australia.

But New Zealand won't be far enough away. The media news will still reach us of Scomo's pentecostal miracles, of Tony Abbott's glittering rewards for being a backward brute (surely the plush ambassadorship of his choice), of potato-hearted Peter Dutton's rise and rise to heights of political majesty.

No, I will go instead to the welcoming, hospitable moon. I interpret its compassionate election-night behaviour as its asylum-offering invitation to us.

My inspiration in this is that inspirational TV advertisement for Nasonex Nasal Spray. In it you see hayfever-tortured earthlings (yet to hear of Nasonex's miracle spray) queuing to get aboard a rocket, the Hayfever Escape Shuttle, to whisk them away from unbearable Earth to a bearable somewhere else in our solar system.

"No pollen! No pets! No hayfever!" a snuffling sufferer in the Shuttle queue rejoices, dreaming of his dream destination out there in the Galaxy.

"No Liberals! No Queenslanders! No Clive Palmers!" I'll rejoice as my queue gambols towards the Morrison's Australia Escape Shuttle!

So, what is it like to be a goldfish? Here I am echoing philosopher Thomas Nagel's famous essay What is It Like To Be A Bat?

We may be getting a glimpse of what it is like to be a goldfish whenever we watch the Eurovision Song Contest.

Goldfish are famous for having memories only three seconds long and watching last weekend's Eurovision Grand Final I noticed, again, (for I have always been strangely, tragically attracted to Eurovision) how not one of the 26 songs lingered in the memory, after its last warble, for more than about three seconds.

Eurovision's songwriters are all so talentless that nothing about their songs, the banal words and the tuneless tunes, ever has enough character to lodge the froth-and-bubble ditty in the memory.

As it happens I have a very retentive memory for substantial music (for example I remember well every noble Anglican hymn I've ever heard), but every frothy and bubbly Eurovision song somehow goes in one ear and straight out the other.

This experience enables one to put oneself in a goldfish's forgetful boots. And perhaps it is because so many Australian voters tune in to their inner goldfish during election times that socio-political facts and truths have no impact on them.