While the fabric of Australia is tearing itself to bits, the national conversation remains preoccupied with the Prime Minister’s melon fascination.

Albanese’s irksome attempt at inter-generational relevance elevated his vulgar comments about the Japanese Prime Minister to headline status. What swiftly became known as #MelonGate took precedence over serious topics. That is the nature of humanity, I’m afraid. We’ll gossip while the bombs fall.

Apparently, the melon story has developed further with older clips of Albanese surfacing where he makes similarly poor-taste commentary. This saga needs to end.

I’m not saying Albo’s a fruit loop, or a fruit cake – just that his crass and tiresome housing commission humour has come off like a culturally inappropriate cameo in a world that’s moved on.

I’m not offended by his melon gestures – I’m offended by his off-leash Treasurer mauling taxpayers with politely named reforms that claw around in the grit and fluff between the seams of our pockets. I’m offended by the Prime Minister’s machete-surrender-bin-esque ‘gun buyback’ scheme and the ‘Royal Commission into Everything Except Islamic Terror’ which will rid us of precisely zero zealots. And I’m offended by Acknowledgement of Country performances morphing into a vicious and totalitarian religious mantra that must be respected, recited, and reverently clicked through on pain of reputational death.

What offends me most is that it’s very likely our democracy will be voted into destruction by a generation of indoctrinated kids who think freedom is fascism and communism is a comfy ‘Netflix & Chill’ lifestyle. The sort of children who are lured from school and out onto the streets to cry about the weather, or Palestine, or Pauline. Children who quite literally cannot define the cause that has brought them to the point of chanting for political violence and the incarceration of other Australians who vote differently to them.

They hate because they are instructed to, not because they have arrived at an intellectual position or suffer from any sort of genuine oppression.

How fine is the line between calling for violence and the cheers of children just like them in the crowd of Mao’s cultural revolution? This is true indoctrination. A mind cannot be deradicalised if there is no argument to reason with or contradict. It is anger with a slogan. A sheen of dew on a mental desert, thick enough to create the mirage of a political movement and nothing more.

They are guarded by adult activist handlers, fresh from a university system that operates as an arrivals lounge for Labor’s backdoor migration-to-voting-booth Big Australia. These creatures herd the children into the camera lens and away from the mics. No questions. Just photos of mass-produced signs branded with Marxist fists.

It’s one thing to have a cultural revolution that destroys a civilisation – it’s quite another to have the ‘end times’ cheered on by people who’d gleefully take candy from a stranger. It’s an embarrassing way for the West to die. The demise of something so grand should take effort, not ignorance. Every time I think of it … I can hear and see Albanese’s melon routine on repeat. His pasty hands curving in the air. His weird little cackle. I’m certain this is the source of my splitting headache.

While the readers of this article swim around in the open waters of digital liberty, MSM maintains influence on the general voting public. They hold a magnifying glass to the scratches damaging the veneer of One Nation while carefully framing photographs to hide the four-way collision between Labor, Greens, Liberals, and Nationals. Their mangled parties and list of victims are conspicuous by omission.

Mastheads are quite happy to talk about Melons and Ministers so long as it keeps the conversation away from the trillion-dollar debt milestone crossed last week.

Albanese’s buffoonery acts as padding.

If the observations of this article are correct, even directionally, there are perhaps two election cycles remaining before the children with an unsavoury view of democracy hold the balance of power. They will be the king makers when Big Australia crosses the threshold of sheer imported numbers.

And what sort of Parliament will that be?

One, we may assume, where the melon jokes give way to the usual grim demeanour of self-righteous collectivism.

And on the other side, conservatives have become so frightened of slander that the Opposition refuses to play rough with the most dangerous ideological movement we have seen in over a hundred years. If the Coalition attempts to re-define the next election as an economic battle rather than a passionate defence of the nation’s soul, not only will they lose, they will lose forever.

One Nation’s presence was meant to shake the Coalition into action. Last night, in Secret Harbour, they won again. Even Pauline Hanson seems surprised to find herself leading a potential replacement party on the right, such was the weakness of the Blue Ribbon defence.

Where does this leave us? Who knows… But someone needs to eat all the melons before they fall victim to another political stunt.

Alexandra Marshall is an independent writer. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.