Nevil Shute’s classic apocalyptic 1957 novel about the end of the world, On the Beach, was set, as such horror stories should be, in Melbourne.

Let’s be absolutely clear about this, even without a potential nuclear holocaust in the Northern Hemisphere, Victoria remains a failed, lifeless state without hope or future.

While dictator Dan steers the ship of state towards Pyrrhic victory as Premier for Life, it is still the perfect setting to sit out the end of the world.

Shute, a pilot and aeronautical engineer, served in two wars and was director of the doomed British R100 hydrogen blimp program.

In 1948, he flew a 130 HP six-cylinder Percival Proctor monoplane which ran on a cup of fuel to a gallon of luck, from the UK to Australia, where even Melbourne seemed jollier than post-war British austerity with its punitive taxation and high-spending socialism.

Shute’s heroes tended to mirror himself as aspirational middle-class solicitors, doctors, accountants, bank managers, and engineers, mostly university graduates, Menzies ‘forgotten people’.

On the Beach’s plot is complex, involving the Soviets, Nato, and some otherwise inconsequential players who are nonetheless nuclear powers.

Following the second world war, culminating in a nuclear holocaust in the Northern Hemisphere, a deadly radioactive cloud, gradually poisons all life as it sinks south.

The bombs had been infused with cobalt to increase their residual lethality.

Cobalt, much loved of the battery power brigade, remains a rare mineral mined then, as is now, by child slave labour in the Congo.

A few hardy souls travel to Melbourne where they are given suicide pills and lethal injections to end their miserable lives when and if the moment is right.

Strangely (given the theme), it is not about leadership, save for the skipper of the last surviving US navy nuclear submarine USS Scorpion now under Australian command.

The US skipper’s Australian girlfriend finds solace in drink, while the Australian liaison officer’s wife is suffering from holocaust denial as the boat is set to investigate a mysterious Morse code signal seemingly emanating from the US West Coast.

The submarine’s crew discovers life extinct in northern Australia, and in all ports north to Alaska where the rush is done.

The mysterious signal turns out to be a window sash swinging in the wind, erratically hitting a Morse key in an abandoned Navy radio facility.

Intermittent power is coming from a failing automated hydro-power generator.

The submarine returns via a derelict Pearl Harbour to Melbourne where everyone takes their pills and dies happily ever after.

Given contemporary events in the Northern Hemisphere, there are many obvious comparisons with Shute’s apocalyptic world vision, including descent to a ‘carbon free’ world as power and other necessities disappear, a point through which we may all soon descend if the Greens, Teals, and other assorted climate-hysteria fascists have their way.

That is if the Teals can collectively agree if the world Iranian sturgeon shortage means caviar washed down with champagne can be technically classed as vegetarian.

As Andrews relentlessly pursues his ‘progressive’ vision, removing rivals such as the former Chinese president at a People’s Congress, thinking Victorians (if there are any left), are be overwhelmed by impending doom.

Menzies ‘forgotten people’ are now pawns in Andrew’s solidification of power as their Liberal party grows irrelevantly senile and conflicted.

Andrews has been conducting a ruthless, relentless war in which power from conventional sources has been portrayed as the end of civilisation.

His inscrutable grip on political power seems unassailable as directionless Liberals skulk away from inevitable electoral annihilation.

Let’s be absolutely clear about this, Andrews is master of the game, the duplicity, the questionable application of government money to fund supporters, the detached elimination of party rebels, impervious to any opinion but his own.

Resistance is futile.

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