Everything the Albanese government does now is affected by one consideration: the election must be held before they are exposed as the worst government in the history of Australia.

While a standard House and half-Senate election could be held as early as 3 August  and as late as 17 May next year, as I suggested in a recent column, there will be a temptation to hold the election this year, especially if there is a Royal Visit in October.

This is the first and weakest of three reasons for an early election.

The second reason is the polling.

While the LNP primary vote has for some time surpassed Labor’s, what is more important is the 2PP, Two Party Preferred, in favour of Labor. This is holding, except for one or perhaps two pollsters.

Involving preferences, this is not as reliable as polling on primary votes.

Either the sample is too small and the margin of error has increased, or the pollsters are relying on what happened in the last election.

Subject to the next reason for going early, on present polling it seems likely that Labor would lose its majority but still be able to form a minority government.

This will be a nuisance. But Labor will probably have few problems in the House and none in the Senate until mid-2025, when any new state senators take their seats. While territory senators take theirs immediately, I expect no party change there and with Senator Pocock probably returned by the left-wing ACT.

The third reason for an early election is that there is no guarantee that most (but not all) of the mainstream media will remain if not next-to-comatose, like blancmange when it comes to Albanese’s depredations.

This cannot go on forever.

Someone or something will change this.

This recalls the abdication of Edward VIII when the media formed a united front to keep even the existence of the crisis from the British people, that is until the Bishop of Bradford inadvertently revealed it.

At some stage, the media will become similarly obliged to reveal that this is the worst government in our history.

Not only is it incompetent, but its behaviour is also seen as unacceptable in our ancient democracy and worse, its activities are seriously damaging the Australian nation.

This goes against the expectations of the people as to what government is about.

On this, it would be difficult to improve on Bolingbroke’s 18th-century definition of  ‘constitution’.

In modern English, this is exquisitely simple: the constitution is that assembly of laws, customs and institutions by which the people have agreed to be governed.

For most people, it is a set of ground rules under which the government operates.

This is not necessarily what a minuscule group of black-robed lawyers think.

Rather, the people’s expectation of the principles of good government resembles more the governance of great sporting matches.

When I was young, the elites would condescendingly compare sports-obsessed Australians with Europeans who were seen as inherently too sophisticated for something so mundane as Australians’ fascination with sport. Years later, it became clear that Australians were actually in advance of Europeans who today seem even more obsessed with sport.

Knowing ancient Greece, should we be surprised?

The governance of cricket is especially seen as being all about sportsmanship and fair play. Hence the phrase, ‘It’s not cricket’. This expression is used frequently to describe things seen as unfair, or even dishonest.

This explains much of what guides Australians, including when they vote.

For an incumbent government it is not only on their competence and what they have done but also whether they behave as Australians expect politicians to behave.

And not only in relation to travel.

That Australian character explains the overwhelming feeling in the Voice referendum against the Albanese government’s proposal to lock racism into the constitution.

The problem, as in so many other areas, is the people cannot be fully informed on everything which touches the nation, including cases where the mainstream media try to inform us rather than keep us in the dark.

Australians are, overwhelmingly, including those who rejected the Voice, genuinely  sympathetic to the Aboriginal people. This is despite the fact that most are uninformed about the fact that remote segregation was imposed by white ideologues and that this is the root cause of today’s problems, not yesterday’s essentially benign colonialism.

In a fully informed debate on the increasing wave of officially condoned antisemitism, I have no doubt that Australians would see this as unacceptable.

The key to understanding complex issues, as our referendums fortunately require, is detail and time to consider.

That is why rushed opinion polls cannot be trusted, nor campaigns with minimal information and considerable disinformation .

And although little reported in much of the mainstream media, most Australians would be appalled by the secrecy forced on anyone about proposed legislation, the failure to give reasonable notice to parliament of proposed ‘emergency’ legislation, abandoning the defence of the realm, gagging Parliament on online identity legislation, recourse to vast off-budget funding, planning damage to religious schools, the seizure of a far better performing Catholic hospital to ensure abortion is offered there, an educational system producing increasing illiteracy and innumeracy, the deliberate destruction of women’s sports, the abuse of children confused by fashionable dogma on gender fluidity, replacing cheap and reliable electricity with expensive and increasingly unreliable energy and with out-of-control  immigration, ensuring the dream of home ownership is beyond an increasing number of Australians.

Such governmental arrogance, such incompetence and such serious damage are what is expected in a banana republic, not in one of the world’s oldest continuing democracies.

Yet all this and more is treated so gently by so many in the media. So far.

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