Ever since the election, every second Canberran one speaks to, here in the unAustralian bubble of this slightly-left-of-centre national capital, jokes ruefully about planning to flee to New Zealand to live.
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The same half-joking, half-earnest sentiment is percolating in my own hot, political bosom.
But I have been asking myself (for as I never tire of saying the unexamined life is not worth living) what it is that we, the fleemongers, dream of fleeing FROM? What is it about being governed by governments we didn't want and are horrified to see elected that some of us find so appalling?
Back to my treatise in a moment but first I report how dreams of New Zealand began to emerge as early as on election night at the soiree I attended. We had fancied we would be welcoming in a Shorten government and the elixir of change. But when the eerily detached ABC psephologist Antony Green began to unfold the election's horrible Scomoganza the NZ words began to crop up among us. One of our number recited (pretending to be paddling his kayak towards New Zealand and freedom as he spoke) his brilliant adaptation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?") to make it a declaration of love of Jacinda Ardern, lucky New Zealand's noble prime minister.
But, who are we, the New Zealand fantasists, those of us so aggrieved by the election result?
Who are we, the aggrieved? I diagnose that we tend to be folk who are not only left-tilted but who take an intense daily interest in our dear nation's socio-political state.
This fixation becomes painful for us, when, always following news and current affairs matters (my ideologically-distorted day begins with the very bad habit of tuning my devices to Radio National's current affairs orgy, ABC News Breakfast) we are constantly exposed to the voices and opinions of and news of the decisions of people we think are swine.
The ABC trills of News Breakfast that it is "the show informed Australians wake up to" on which we'll "hear interviews with the people who matter today". But this can be bruising and soul-shrivelling for those of us who are being kept "informed" by information (such as the day-to-day decisions of an awful government) that makes us writhe, and when "the people who matter today" are people we would never, even under extreme torture, have voted for.
So it comes to pass that Zed Seselja and his role model and political hero Peter Dutton are, somehow, people who matter today while we, those of us who passionately wanted another kind of Australia (one in which the Seseljas and Duttons wouldn't matter) don't matter at all.
To be governed by people you just can't stand (the plight of lots of us during what felt like the several million fossilising years of the Howardozoic Era) is to be serially disappointed. How ugly the latest news of the government's policy heartlessness towards struggling folk, its unChristian unkindnesses, its exuberant eagerness to join in the USA's latest spasms of messianic militarism. When you care about these things every news and current affairs program contains things that make you flinch and wince. Some items (for example, former PM Malcolm Turnbull's reflex, banal rejection of the Uluru Statement From The Heart and some of his ministers' willful distortions of what the statement meant) cause true dismay.
If we imagine all of political news and current affairs as a strung-out entertainment, as a play perhaps, then for bleeding-heart lefties (like your columnist) following a swinish government's doings is like following a Shakespeare play in which there are no goodies and in which every character is an Iago (the sinister embodiment of Evil in the Bard's Othello).
Of course the remedy for those of us tortured by daily news of the triumphs of vile "people who matter" is probably not to flee to New Zealand (even if that discerning and choosy nation would have bleeding-heart malcontents like us us). No, instead, perhaps we should try to flee from our lifestyle choice of following news and current affairs. We should try to give up, for our mind's sake, being "informed Australians" in the same way that for our bodily health's sake we should try to give up being smoking Australians.
For example, with enough willpower we might choose to begin our days not with ABC News Breakfast but with ABC radio's ABC Classic. Thus we would substitute listening to the soul-nourishing music of civilisation's Mozarts, Donizettis, Schuberts and Tchaikovskys for the soul-shrivelling habit of listening to the gibberings of Australia's Morrisons, Duttons, Seseljas and Tudges.
To set you a moral-political example, my several million readers, I began this very morning (I am at my loom weaving this column on a Wednesday) with my bad habit of listening to ABC's News Breakfast. There my knickers were quickly knotted (the sheepshanks! the Eskimo bowlines! the butterfly loops!) by an interview with climate change-denying Warren Entsch MP, the Morrison government's new Special Envoy for the Great Barrier Reef.
Angst-ravaged, I turned my wireless instead to ABC Classic. There the music of Claudio Monteverdi, Fanny Mendelssohn and Max Bruch unknotted my figurative knickers and ironed them back to a smooth, creaseless perfection.
As I write, still with ABC Classic, I am with Wagner's Valkyries as (in his pulse-quickening Ride of the Valkyries) in our horny helmets we magically ride helter-skelter away from the unmagical reality of Morrison's Australia.
