Which politicians would last the longest if left alone in the wilderness?

And what if, your columnist muses, Australian political contests, elections, were decided using some variation of the quite brilliant survival-of-the-fittest competition formula that makes Alone Australia such a runaway must-watch success?

Mere voting, the way in which we decide elections now, is quite noble and dignified in its way. But (yawn) it bores most of the people most of the time, while the best reality TV contests are gripping in the extreme.

As I write, the original Alone Australia cast of 10 survivalists marooned alone in God-forsaken places in New Zealand's bleak, wet, vermin-infested South Island has been whittled down to just four.

They have been alone now, variously suffering before our very eyes (their miseries including starvation, batterings by ferocious weather and the tortures of loneliness) for an eerily biblical 40 days.

More of this, my latest and best intellectual contribution to democratic theory, in a moment.

But first the reflection that the allure of Alone Australia may not be a healthy thing. Perhaps it should be banned.

What if its core attraction is the way it enables us, warm and plump at home in the company of our loved ones and with our buckets of Chicken McNuggets on our laps, to thoroughly, cruelly enjoy watching the sufferings of others?

What if what is exciting us here is a close cousin of what excited debauched Romans who sat in the posh seats of the Coliseum to watch humans and wild animals fighting and mauling one another to death?

In my forensic self-honesty I admit to some shame in the pleasure Alone Australia gives me. What does it say of an audience (and Alone Australia is by far SBS's most-watched show) that it cannot tear itself away from the spectacle of people starving, despairing, weeping, failing?

There is a kind of misery porn about the series' attractiveness.

Titillating excitements of the last episode shewn (episode eight, I am scribbling this on a Tuesday) included watching starving contestant Andreas trying, failing (and deeply despairing at his failure) to catch a mouse or a rat to eat.

MORE GREAT READS:

And in a way, continuing my admission that some of the appeal of Alone Australia is appealing to our worst sides, restriction of the contestants to "qualified survivalists" feels disappointingly limiting.

It would be more debauchingly entertaining if contestants plonked down in the wilderness were famously useless and/or widely despised sorts of people (Young Liberals, say, poets, NIMBYs, narcissistic newspaper columnists who only ever write about themselves, parking inspectors, etc. etc.) bound to fail and whose torments and failures would give widespread delight.

But I digress.

Of course a problem with deciding the next federal election by subjecting Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton to exactly the sorts of endurance tests contestants face on Alone Australia is that Peter Dutton would begin with unfair advantages.

Albo is sensitive and vulnerable while Dutton is a rough, shallow, ruthless, manly, hunting and gathering man who would probably thrive in a wilderness. While Albo would quickly starve, one can imagine Dutton, an instinctive hunter, stealthily stalking and then remorselessly killing things to eat (koalas, say, gang-gang cockatoos, sweet little pygmy possums) with his bare hands.

It is less obvious how ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr and Canberra Liberals' leader Elizabeth Lee would do against one another. What if this October's ACT election was decided by putting each of them alone in spots in forbidding Namadgi National Park to find which of them could endure the longest?

But in any case it is the principle behind the genius of Alone Australia, the test of the ability to survive deprivations, rather than its method (putting people in terrible wild places) that so appeals and that has one dreaming of how that principle might be applied to elections. Different deprivations searchingly test different people in different ways.

One of the appeals of Alone Australia (this time appealing to our better sides) is the way it gets us thinking of what sorts of deprivations we could or couldn't possibly endure.

For some of us merely being alone (a pivotal factor of the Alone Australia equation) holds no fears whatsoever. I agree with the philosopher Sartre that "hell is other people". I can imagine a show Lots Of Company Australia in which aloneness-loving contestants like me compete to see which of us can survive the longest in homes teeming with people, perhaps bogans, NIMBYs, Liberal voters, etc. who make our flesh creep.

No, to be successfully applied to parliamentary elections the Australian Electoral Commission would need to find, with the expert help of clinical psychologists, those things that competing contestants like Albanese and Dutton are most vulnerable to deprivation from.

Then, each man being deprived of that entity (Dutton's dependency may take a little finding but for example Albo seems unusually emotionally attached to what scoffing press gallery journalist's always call "Albo's f---ing dog" and he might struggle to be separated from it), the nation, looking on, waits to see which man can endure the longest.

Meanwhile, thinking readers, ask yourselves what is the deprivation that would most test your powers of endurance? And as you do it, thank Alone Australia for prompting this character-building self-enquiry in the spirit of Socrates (and this columnist agrees with him) who insisted that the unexamined life is not worth living.