The Nationals have re-tooled

Having a bloviating prosperity cultist who consults eagle paintings for career advice and a habitually pickled pest in the top two positions in the country is quite the achievement even for a nation that has sleepwalked through eight years of the Lying Nasty Party’s belligerent kakocracy.

Deputy PM Mickey McWhatsisname rose from obscurity to become one of the most unrecognised names in politics. He’s a man so soporific that migrating birds fall from the sky whenever he speaks. He has the substance of a chalk outline and is now reluctantly returning to his previous role as idiot at large – monitoring exploding cow pats and burning effigies of inner-city, latte-sipping greenie-lefties. Barking Barmy Joyce has resumed the position of leading the ignorance pride parade that is the National Party, the fossil fuel-obsessed creationists who don’t believe in fossils.

Barmy lost some skin (and some teeth) when, while maintaining his focus on the bush, his girlfriend’s IUD blew up in his face. But you can’t keep a cheap drunk down. While he still thinks Wi-Fi is the plural of wife and that gay marriage will damage our cattle exports he’s back, promising that his rortin’ rootin’ days are behind him, updating his register of extra-marital interests and announcing his newly discovered humility via text ($600k expense claim pending).

Barmy is no outlier in the Nats. Despite qualms about his hands-on style from the wimmin in the Party one of Barmy’s most enthusiastic supporters and a representative sample of the lead paint lickers is Matt Coalface Canavan of the Man-Coal Love Association. For Matty every paddock, every orchard, every vineyard and every endangered habitat is a coal mine awaiting a government subsidy. Matty’s future-focused business acumen – along the lines of a Canavan Saddlery and VCR Rentals franchise, is built on the concept of maximising tax payer inputs to dud investments for familial benefit in the Angus Squizzy Taylor tradition. But I am sure Matty’s support has nothing to do with his brother’s investment in a busted-arse coal mine.

Joyce and Scooter Morrison should be quite a team despite the fact they despise each other.

Joyce the great testiculator waving his arms about and talking bollocks, his puce-faced ranting complementing FauxMo’s end-times dogma – the apoplectic and the apocalyptic working together for a shared vision of Australia as a scarred landscape of massive holes in the ground, dry rivers, poisoned acquifers, collapsed eco-systems and dead coral reefs but on the plus side a healthy stream of donations from the eco-vandals of the mining lobby.

Barmy himself may well say “I’m no Albert Weinstein“, confusing the iconic genius with the Hollywood sexual predator and zimmer frame test pilot, thereby both proving the point and rekindling memories of his past proclivities. He’s declared that after three years in back-bench penury he’s a changed man who does not intend to rejoin his fellow Pepé Le Pew Club members Porter, Tudge and Lamming trawling Canberra’s nightspots looking for knee tremblers behind the coat racks. His new crusade is to fuck the country not his staff.