The 2017 Australian parliamentary eligibility crisis is a piece of shit and so is your face.

Politicians are corrupt as fuck. They’re entitled, free-loading and self-serving elitists whose apocalyptically pathetic attempts at projecting authentic human emotion only adds traction to the idea that those that seek power are least suited to wield it. They’re either sociopath’s incapable of basic empathy or a withered husk of what was once an actual person whose sense of right and wrong has been infected and corrupted through the continuous action of cashing in their values in return for a perceived gain, or what middle-aged middle-managers condescendingly call “compromise”. Politicians rot from the inside out, with corruption and politics going hand in hand and any politician who isn’t corrupt hasn’t been a politician for long; it’s not a matter of integrity, it’s only a matter of time.

Australian politics is at this moment in time particularly irritating. I suppose being Australian that would be expected, after all, familiarity breeds contempt and about one year ago I simply stopped giving a shit about Australian politics altogether. I moved on as it were, now I spend my time on the dunny reading about Hillary being guilty of everything she accused Trump of and the latest in the Catalonian independence saga (aka the most interesting, least covered story of 2017). From Britain to Gambia to the Czech Republic, shit is going down yo! The establishment is under siege, people are pissed off and left, right, or centre it doesn’t matter, the previous categories of personal political inclination that were supposed to be mutually exclusive have had their boundaries warped, distorted and fused together along the worn and vaguely familiar battle lines of state authority vs individual agency.

Libertarians are now the radical right, centrists are now conservative and anyone to the right of the alt left is a Nazi while Godwin rolls over in his grave. Like the eternally suffering Australian farmer, people around the world have been scanning the horizon for some sweet relief from the infertile climate. Something. ANYTHING. Just to catch their breath and provide shade from the harshness of the rays of political indifference emanating their way from those that think they are in charge. They stared into the desert of inaction, flowing dunes of corruption, vegetated with lies and the desert stared back, unblinking. Until recently, until now, there’s something coming and you can smell it in the air, a petrichor of revolution with more than a whiff of rage signalling the ferocity of the oncoming storm being blown towards the barren landscape by the winds of change.

But not here. Not in Australia. But that’s nothing new. We’ve always been disconnected from the rest of the world, geographically, economically, socially, politically, with change coming slowly if it comes at all. We’re basically the small country town of the west with our steadfast dedication to some permutation or reincarnation of just two political parties since federation. Since 1901, 116 years ago, Australia has had either some predecessor or variant of the Coalition or Labor party in power and since 1909 has had a two-party system because two of the three parties merged. If you don’t like one party well no problem buddy! Just vote for the other guy! Simple. Oh, what’s that? You don’t like this one either? Well no problem, just vote the other guy back in! That’s the great thing about democracy, you get a choice, or rather, the illusion of choice.

It’s a grievous truth which robs you of your innocence for which exists very little if any objective proof (as if pure objectivity occurred in the first place). As such it’s easy to discard, ignorance is bliss after all and the mind can remain ignorant forever if it chooses to, especially as uncovering acceptable evidence requires something most people simply don’t have: time. Ergo, forget actions, if you want conclusive proof that politicians are incapable of care for the general population then remember that they’re human, a walking, talking prime ape. They aren’t robots, they can’t have unlimited wells of sympathy, it’s finite, like yours, or like mine. How many people in your life do you know and care for? Friends? Family? No one? 10? 100? 250? Doesn’t matter, whatever the answer you or Dunbar come up with the result is the same; it’s finite. At some stage, you, me, and everyone else just don’t give a fuck, and for a very long time, no one gave a fuck that they didn’t give a fuck.

We didn’t care about how the politicians passed laws to track everything we do online, or how the RBA was caught bribing international officials before the government suppressed it or how the former head the national party is now chairman of the same company drug testing welfare recipients. But what do we do we apparently care about? Whether some polly didn’t take “reasonable steps” to “renounce” their citizenship in a country which they didn’t know about in the first place? It’s an embarrassing storm in a teacup that’s been blown completely out of proportion. Still, it doesn’t matter, in the end when Australia finally catches up with the rest of the world, as we’ve done so many times before, the manufactured minutia masquerading as a political crisis will cower before the once-in-a-century tempest breaking over yonder horizon.