One wondered how Chardonnay inner-city socialists of Canberra and elsewhere down South would react if a conservative, working-class, heavily-tattooed, Queensland-based convoy of missionaries came to us.

If only one would do that! How stimulating it would be for us, in sleek Canberra, to have blue-collar missionaries come and hold up a mirror to us.

They might lecture us sleek heathens about how we should be ashamed of ourselves to live bourgeois lives paid for (by the government's over-employment and over-payment of too many people to be do-nothing public servants) from the public purse.

These blue-collar missionaries might, if they are articulate enough, say that we have no right to condemn them for mining our nation's coal when we, to employ and pay so many public servants and to make opulent Canberra a stately pleasure dome bristling with amenities, so deeply mine the nation's fiscal resources.

It would be good for Canberra and Canberrans, by words for smugness, to be goaded and prodded like this. And yet I think a similar thing might be better achieved by imitating those enlightened cities that hire a respected Thinker-In-Residence.

He or she would come and live among us for a year (perhaps lodged somewhere in struggling Tuggeranong rather than in somewhere unrepresentatively bourgeois, like Yarralumla) and cast a dispassionate eye over Canberra and Canberrans before telling us some considered home truths.

He or she might be sought in cerebral Finland, famous now as a society that does so many socially progressive things with such flair.

But I have been pushing this idea for decades now, with cowardy custard ACT governments too afraid of what political hay the anti-intellectual Liberal opposition (and its bean-counting stool pigeons who write most of the letters to the editor) would make of the dollar cost of hiring a Thinker.

Meanwhile, how Canberran it is of us to lecture that unemployed and underemployed Queenslanders should forego near-future jobs, soon, but should instead look (making ends meet on the warm inner glow this altruism imparts) to the longer term good of the planet and of a sweet little finch. In the longer term, as Keynes famously observed, we are all dead.

And what if, in some future Canberra depressed by public service shrinkages and other downturns and with unemployment tearing the city's social fabric, rich seams of something highly mineable are found in the Australian Capital Territory? What if suburbs like Yarralumla are found to be sitting atop rich deposits of platinum and nickel and even (gasp!) rhodium? What if, then, some obliging Indian billionaire industrialist (someone like the engaging Mr Gautam Adani, chairman and founder of the Adani Group) offers to mine whatever it is, thereby creating jobs galore? What a test this would be of our city's character.

In a recent, unforgettable post-election column I compared the Australian people's irrational fears (stoked by an artful Liberal Party) of a monstrous Bill Shorten government with the fears Pooh and Piglet have, in A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh books, of an imagined monster, the non-existent Heffalump.

On reflection this was unfair; unfair to relatively rational and clear-thinking Pooh and Piglet. There was a degree of common sense about their anxiety.

But no, the scare mongered among Australian voters at this election was much more like the fear of savage, man-eating zombie beavers lurking in our favourite swimming places encouraged in the 2015 horror/comedy feature movie Zombeavers.

That trashy classic is showing now on SBS On Demand and I have just surprised myself by watching some of it.

"Ian, why are you watching this?" my horrified intellect demanded to know.

"I'm not sure," my inner-bogan mused, "but I think it may be because I've been consuming so much fine but demanding Shakespearean literature lately and so much fine classical music that I've developed a craving for just a little frivolous US movie tripe to balance things up."

"Well you can watch it on your own!" my snobbish intellect seethed, leaving my office (in which I sat before my PC's nice big screen) in a huff and with a slamming of the door.

But it was not just that Zombeavers (in which some sex-crazed US teenagers go to a lakeside retreat for a weekend's skinny-dipping debauchery and, plausibly, fall prey to giant beavers turned into furious man-eaters by a chemical spill) is so refreshingly awful.

No, it was also that the political scientist in me began to see an eerie resemblance between the film's creative directions and the creative directions so recently taken by the Liberal Party in its attack ads aimed at Bill Shorten.

I am almost prepared to stake my august journalistic reputation on an allegation that Liberal Party strategists saw Zombeavers and, creatively influenced by it, by its effectiveness (in leaving simple people forever terrified of things, beavers, hitherto thought sweet and harmless) imitated it so as to make actually cuddly and innocuous Labor seem terrifying to the simple minded.

In Zombeavers the crazed semiaquatic rodents not only tear limbs off swimmers but come ashore to rampage through homes, rather as Liberal attack ads characterised Labor as a party that would kick in pensioners' doors and loot the nest eggs they, the trembling oldies, had secreted under their beds.

I have alerted the films' makers, Armory Films, to the brazen way in which the Liberal Party has stolen and used Armorys' intellectual property.