The vagaries of print publication are such that this week’s issue’s deadline occurs before we know the results of what is arguably the most important election in any of our lifetimes. If Kamala wins you can expect at least another 20 million illegal alien immigrants to come into the US between now and 2028 and as many of them to be given citizenship and voting rights as the Democrats can engineer, along with the same number from Joe Biden’s four years. You will be looking at the Californication of the US. Wokery on steroids. As much speech suppression as possible (so basically trying to copy Keir Starmer and the UK Labour approach). Big government, big spending Keynesianism. The half-vindication of a legacy media that has thrown even the fig leaves of balance and impartiality out the window to try to stop ‘Bad Man Orange’ from getting over the line. And an engineered electorate with so many newly brought-in voters that it will vote Dem far into the future.

Remember, too, that the Dems have massively outspent the Republicans – in September alone it was by a ratio of about three to one. They have had the legacy ‘mainstream’ media totally on their side – one study showed Kamala getting positive coverage on the non-Fox terrestrial TV networks of CBS, NBC and ABC at a rate of almost 100 per cent of the time while Trump’s was over 90 per cent negative.

Plus, the Democrats have been endorsed by myriad Hollywood celebrities with basically no one from Tinsel Town openly supporting Trump (thereby making the McCarthy-era demands for monolithic orthodoxy against communists seem like a time of flourishing diversity of opinion in the entertainment world compared to today). Oh, and they have the current Biden administration doing everything it can – lawfare included – to attack Team Trump.

And still, I write this column optimistic that Trump will overcome this and win. Readers will know if I’ve been right or wrong in offering up that hostage-to-fortune prognostication when they read this column. Well, readers will probably know who’s won the US election. Given the Third World voting practices of some US states – Maricopa County in Arizona is saying right now that it could take up to 10 days to count the two million votes there which is laughable (Taiwan counts multiples of that in three hours, as do the Brits and Canadians) and hard to read as anything other than easing the path to skullduggery. The same goes for Pennsylvania and some other US state practices. So it may be that a week from now we still haven’t got a final decision on the US election. But that’s not my bet, as readers know. Much as with our own Voice vote last year, where the entirety of the ‘great and the good’ corporates, media types, lawyerly caste, sporting administrators, churches, etc, lined up together on one side and still lost decisively, I think that will happen in the US and Trump will win clearly. He’ll win and the Republicans will take the Senate and House as well.

Now just as reflecting on the US election is hardly a source of laughter and mirth, the Albanese government’s hamstrung and predictably arse-covering Covid-19 enquiry wasn’t funny, just infuriating. There is nothing one can add to what our editor laid out in his devastating main editorial of last week’s Speccie. No concern for freedom. No scepticism. A willingness to transfer huge amounts of money from the poor to the rich and from the young to the old. Not a single politician or public health type who took a pay cut or had any skin in the game while seemingly flipping coins over which small business owners’ or vaccine sceptics’ lives they’d ruin. All that rammed down our throats and we get this pathetic, tunnel-vision report that recognises a total collapse in public confidence in government, the bureaucracy and the elites more generally – but seems mystified as to why that might be. And thinks the solution is more government, more control, more public health types with more power – the exact people who got near-on everything wrong.   All this did was make me incandescent with anger – just as I was day after day for the near-on two years of lockdown thuggery.

So hardly a source of mirth and laughter there either. Where to look? Where to look? While pondering that question, I thought I might phone up the CEO of Qantas to ask if there were any chance my wife and I might get free upgrades from economy to first class this coming Christmas season on our flights to Canada and Britain. You know? Nothing in exchange. No unspoken reciprocity down the road. Just one caring national airline carrier helping out one of its customers out of the goodness of its heart.

Alas, and I know that this will surprise readers, but I had no success. One reason was that I was unable to find a phone number for Qantas that would allow me to speak to an actual human being. Eventually I got tired of pressing a revolving series of numbers on my phone and yelling answers to a computer voice on the other end of the line. Albo, can you get someone in your office to send me the number I need to call to get these totally unsolicited upgrades?

But look, I am a trained lawyer and I did crack a smile at the Bill Clintonesque wording of the denials of impropriety from our Prime Minister. Readers will recall Clinton’s ‘I did not have sex with that woman’ denial that hinged on the Jesuitical (perhaps the wrong adjective, but what the hell) distinction between Ms Lewinsky having sex with him and Big Bill (I speculate) having sex with her. This level of sophistical attention to grammar and the ambiguities of language keeps all of us on our toes. Mr Albanese is adamant he never personally contacted former Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce to ask for free flight upgrades. Someone with the lawyerly craft skills of Bill Clinton would want to ask a few follow-up queries. Did someone else do the asking for you? Was someone other than Mr Joyce contacted? A go-between, perhaps? Are we being misdirected by seeking an actual, explicit request rather than just some wink-wink, nudge-nudge throwaway line about how ‘you know Alan, I’m flying off to Hawaii in a few weeks with the whole Albo family and besides the fact that my kid can’t get into the Chairman’s lounge I do find cattle class pretty uncomfortable. Oh look, gotta go. What were the exact dates you ask?’ Or more generally, a question to our PM about why he thinks it is that he and his family scored all these Qantas upgrades when virtually no non-politicians ever get them? And whether his naivete extends to the belief that nothing was expected in return – just a desire to help out a kid from a single mom, public housing background?

Yes, pondering the plight of Mr. Albanese and his newfound attention to the finer points of grammar and sentence construction certainly does bring a smile to the face. I’m really hoping that next week’s US election does too.