Kerry Chikarovski and Bruce Hawker appeared on Sky News Australia earlier this month, moonlighting as the Ghost of Christmas Past and the Spirit of Campaigns Forgotten. Studio lights softened, tinsel reflected, two veterans of the political wars summoned once more to explain why Barnaby Joyce leaving the Nationals was – in Kerry’s words – ‘pretty disappointing’. Barnaby, she suggested, should retire from parliament altogether. Good for everyone, she said.

A seasonal blessing, or a gentle shove towards the exit? Hard to tell. But the holly was sharp.

It was a curious sermon, because Kerry Chikarovski – fundamentally decent, undeniably likeable – once learned the hard way that power evaporates like mist. She lost the Liberal leadership by a single vote in 2002 – narrowly, painfully, and permanently. Not to a Titan, not even to a Billy Snedden raised from the grave – but to John Brogden, the man who later called Helena Carr a mail-order bride. One stupid line, one shameful moment, and the story wrote itself. Yet that was the man who replaced her – proof that in Liberal politics God does not always send angels; sometimes He sends a lesson.

And before that? The 1999 NSW state election, where she faced Bob Carr – philosopher-king of Labor sanctimony – and came away empty-handed. Carr, who could not quite manage a cabinet of durable integrity, who now lectures America like a disappointed godparent while sleeping beneath the defence shield America pays for. The man who sees Washington as a dying empire even as China eyes the Pacific like a developer eyeing vacant water views.

So when Kerry scolds Barnaby for breaking ranks – for stepping off the team bus –one feels a tremor of irony. Politics is not catechism. Parties splinter; leaders fall; heretics occasionally become prophets. Barnaby Joyce committing apostasy is hardly the collapse of Christendom – it is simply Canberra doing Christmas theatre.

And then – there was Bruce.

Bruce Hawker sat beside her like a man distilled from the late-1980s – a political operative from an era of Al Grassby fashion advice, deregulation and the holy sacrament of newspaper ink. Not a reader of books, perhaps, but a devourer of broadsheets: the sort who’s inhaled every front page since Hawke dumped on Hayden. Bruce could list factional knifings like family birthdays – but might confuse Tocqueville with a Tasmanian cheese.

Hawker is a cultural artefact – not an insult, a category. The 1980s produced many like him: men who cross-fertilised progressive virtue with comfortable wealth, as though Peter Carey’s Bliss had stepped off the page and bought the hundredth investment property. Aperol Spritz in one hand, conscience in the other. Newspapers consumed like communion wafers. Ideas optional.

You cannot resent him – he’s too familiar. Too Australian.

The typewriter man. The walking clipping file. The headline whisperer.

Kerry beside Bruce looked like two seasonal spirits summoned to warn of the future by showing the past. Not wicked. Not foolish. Just softened by years of panel shows – softened, too, by listening to Jane Caro explain, ad infinitum, the political value of literature as presented in Macquarie University’s New Historicism -101 circa-1976.

And yet – I like them both. Genuinely. The country was shaped, once, by people like them – moderates, consensus-builders, decent institutional mammals. They were good at the game when the game was slow, when the ABC set the metronome of public virtue and the Sydney Morning Herald still controlled the weather.

But times changed. Australia roughened. China rose. Energy markets bucked like brumbies. Voters crushed politicians like cans in a refund depot. And the kind of politics Kerry and Bruce represent – reasonable, urbane, quarter-inch deep but respectable – began to feel like an exhibit rather than a force.

So when they sit on Sky lamenting Barnaby Joyce like the guests at a Christmas party they were once invited to, one can only think: they mean well; they were good once. But good once does not mean good forever.

And yet – satire should land like a stocking peg, not a cleaver. If Kerry and Bruce can read this, smirk, and mutter fair hit, then Merry Christmas to them – to Barnaby – and to the ghosts of leadership past, while the future waits off-stage with sharper teeth and fewer manners.

In the spirit of the Nativity – if God can arrive as infant and be worshipped by shepherds – perhaps we, too, might show generosity when we survey Labor’s intellectual cupboard. It is not cruelty to observe sparsity; merely inventory.

Paul Keating left school at 15 and spent forty years convincing Australia that he reads widely. Kevin Rudd has read everything but may have digested little. Jim Chalmers speaks like a PhD candidate without knowing what he wants to research. Penny Wong wins on clarity, not depth – ideology at 4K resolution, philosophy at standard definition. Which leaves the finalists: Craig Emerson and Tanya Plibersek – the last two contestants standing on Labor’s intellectual stage, one solid, one curated, both notable because the shelf behind them is empty.

Emerson, to his credit, still passes the Turing test for thought (which is ‘if a person can behave as if  they were thinking in all relevant ways, then we should treat them as thinking’). He speaks in sentences with subordinate clauses, understands an economy as more than a press release, and can read a graph without ministerial oxygen. He isn’t Berlin or Polanyi – but compared to the modern Labor cohort, he is John Stuart Mill with a Medicare card. Emerson is not profound – but he is reflective. In a Labor swamp that treats reading like a hobby for retirees, reflection practically guarantees you a reputation as a Renaissance man. If Labor has a mind left, he may be it – not a lighthouse, but the last working bulb.

Tanya Plibersek is the other plausible nominee – though plausibility is relative. Polished, articulate, never without the approved view, she is intelligent in the curated sense – her library full of Alain de Botton. Yes, it’s philosophical but no, you don’t need to think too hard. You sense she reads, but does she wrestle? Capable, poised, communicatively flawless – but not the kind of intellect that rearranges a nation.

As disconcerting as it would be to have either Craig or Tanya running the country, they might just be believed when they say that they actually know Marcus Clarke is not a cricketer.