Fake news can be so revelatory. "Millennial tells parent complaining about fuel prices to try cutting back on houses."
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And, "Nation grappling with skyrocketing cost of living glad to see national leaders focused on who is less woke".
Both of course, are satirical headlines taken from The Chaser's Twitter account a few days back.
Between them, however, lay an absence we can all feel. The space between the real economy and its rosier political construct, and between the big policy challenges such as climate, aged care, and the housing crisis, and the urgency they are not afforded in transformative policy.
While the real economy is characterised by increasingly insecure employment and a more-or-less permanent rental trap for many, the political exchange is marked by an unreal theatre featuring policy props instead of substance and paid actors, pseudo-representatives sticking to the script, telling us how good we have it.
This is an economy where more young people obtain university qualifications than ever before yet fewer can afford a mortgage.
Where debt and deficit was a disaster at a quarter of its current quantum, but is now unworthy of mild alarm.
And it is a political discourse in which a no-longer "future" climate crisis, and the outbreak of an actual ground war involving actual nuclear sabre-rattling, still sees our leaders prosecuting a tedious culture war.
As if this weren't enough, both major parties find themselves beholden to factional boneheads using the pressure point of an imminent election as extra leverage in squalid preselection power-plays.
In the case of the fatal heart attack of the Labor senator Kimberley Kitching, that extends to callously weaponising her death for sectional gain.
Helped along by the Coalition and more than a little credulous sensationalism by journalists.
But there is plenty of credulity to go around as we'll see when the federal budget is unveiled two days from now.
It will no doubt contain numerous bullish assertions about the future economy, some based on far less than the Chaser's headlines.
One definite starter is the obligatory claim - made in each of this government's previous budgets - that wages growth will outpace the cost-of-living.
Heroic perhaps given accelerating inflation.
There will be tax cuts (down the track) and one-off cash handouts for earners - presumably in exchange for ending the Low and Middle Income Tax Offset - ie a tax increase.
The government believes this cash-splash will get households through the current inflationary spike caused by the Ukraine invasion as well as see it through to an unlikely fourth term as well.
To do that it will want to get that dosh in peoples' hands within weeks - ie before they vote - as distinct from LMITO which would be payable at the end of the next financial year.
The handout will be willingly received by households but will it be persuasive? The government is not going to die wondering. Why would it?
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg well knows Margaret Thatcher's famous remark that socialist governments traditionally run out of other peoples' money.
So what do we call a trillion-plus dollar gross debt if not a whole motherlode of other people's money?
They might be just saying this but Labor hardheads think voters have already made up their minds about this government after three terms of drift, three PMs and no shortage of scandals.
But elections, as we found in 2019 are turbulent dynamic affairs and we are entering the period of the cycle where truth doesn't so much take a back seat to politics as give up and head to the beach - Waikiki springs to mind.
Or even the Solomon Islands, whose government may be on the cusp of signing a defence pact with Beijing.
Another bit of grist for the anxiety mill being steadily wound up such that Australia has even been prepared to take the lead on slapping trade sanctions on Beijing if it directly assists Putin. Australia.
Whose economy is most dependent on Chinese trade. Whose economy remained buoyant through the Asian Financial Crisis, the GFC, and the pandemic, because of well, one key thing really: China kept growing and taking Australian exports.
What all this talk of a Chinese base in the South Pacific gives the Coalition by way of vindicating its electorally enhanced China tub-thumping, it simultaneously takes away in terms of what it says about Australia's flagging standing in the South Pacific even after the "Step Up".
Remember that? The respectful re-engagement of Australia with its "Pacific family" as Scott Morrison likes to term it? Explicit among its chief aims is the strengthening of regional security partnerships and the building of climate and disaster resilience.
READ MORE KENNY:
The trouble is, that laudable aim has foundered on the submerged reef of rising sea levels - a first-order concern for low-lying Pacific nations, but something less pressing to Australia than its highly profitable coal and gas exports.
But of all the developments in the last week, the one that offers the truest view of the win-at-all-costs thinking inside the Liberal Party is the sudden unblocking of the Gillard-era refugee resettlement agreement with New Zealand.
Asylum-seeker cruelty - let's face it, a deliberate feature of the Pacific Solution - has become a clear negative with voters in the inner-cities in particular.
Right where the "teal" independents are challenging sitting Liberals, Frydenberg among them.
So, having greenwashed its way to a net-zero-2050 pledge without changing a single policy or interim target, refugees held in detention for nine years will suddenly be resettled in first-world New Zealand - an outcome Morrison previously ruled out claiming it would become a new pull factor.
Are you keeping up? Maybe it's safer to stick with more believable fake headlines: "Confused Peter Dutton announces space force to keep out illegal aliens".
- Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute.