The trick to writing a weekly opinion piece is finding a good topic each week. That sounds easier than it is, though usually something pops up or occurs to me and I’m good to go. As of two days before this week’s deadline I had pretty much decided to write about the woeful state of the Liberal party across all of Australia. Cowardly. Unprincipled. Spendthrift. In thrall to climate-alarmist posturing under which we Australians will sacrifice our economy in exchange for exactly zero difference in what the world’s temperature would otherwise be. Oh, and an outfit captured by the lefty, woke ‘moderates’ who deserve to lose across the board. Just look at all the pathetic state Liberal party operations, and even the federal team. The column would more or less write itself I figured. Instead, Terry Barnes wrote it on Flat White before I could. I can’t disagree with a word he said.

Next, I reckoned I might write about how out of touch the political class – especially on the right side of politics – is with its core voters. Take net zero. In both the UK and here the Tories and Libs, respectively, introduced a net-zero target without prior electoral consent. You didn’t even see it mooted as a possibility in party manifestos. Now if you do polling that asks people to virtue-signal you get a high percentage saying they’re really concerned about climate change. But put a dollar figure on that commitment and it craters down to laughably low amounts. That makes Switzerland interesting because that country has massively more direct democracy (i.e., binding referenda initiated by voters) than anywhere else. The Swiss are able to constrain and discipline their political class more than anywhere else. Last year the voters there forced a referendum on a proposed new climate carbon tax law related to a net-zero type of emissions target. Almost all the political parties supported the law.  The Swiss voters, on learning about the actual costs during the course of the referendum debate, rejected it. They voted ‘no’. Want to know why Switzerland is the wealthiest country going that seamlessly blends together four official languages and a stark religious divide? Because of real, actual federalism and because of direct ‘we voters get to over-ride our politicians’ democracy. This got me thinking about how the Libs had won three federal elections on the trot opposing net-zero type fantasies and then, out of the blue and on their own initiative, Morrison and Frydenberg opted to throw away the best point of political differentiation they had left to catch a virtue-signalling flight to Glasgow.

But of course the political caste here in Oz (unlike in Canada or the US) does at least have to put proposed constitutional changes to us voters. Were it just up to the politicians, Australia would already be a republic.  Heck, Malcolm Turnbull might even be our new president. Or Lidia Thorpe. And we would most definitely have an entrenched ‘Voice’ as part of our constitutional architecture. Luckily, the politicians cannot avoid asking us about the Voice. My bet has long been that this race-based, extra-say-just-for-some Voice proposal will lose. Sure, we dissenters would be called bigots and racists and told we’re on the wrong side of history. Nevertheless, it will lose – especially since Mr Albanese deems it unnecessary to give us voters any real details. ‘Trust us politicians and the whole activist caste’ is his plea.  After how the politicians handled Covid, I think you’d have to be brain-addled to buy what Albo is selling. On the other hand, I still regularly see people driving alone in their cars with a mask on. So my bet is certainly not a sure thing. Still, a big ‘no’ vote would go a long way to redeeming the typical Australian voter.

And then just the day before I was to sit down and write this column the Biden administration opts, for the first time ever, to raid the home of a former president (and the likely candidate from the other party at the next election), purportedly to seize classified documents. Now before you jump to the conclusion this is banana republic stuff, remember the following. The magistrate who granted the warrant – a blank cheque, seize-any-document-Trump-ever-saw-in-his-four-year-presidency warrant – was an Obama-donating one who has said incredibly anti-Trump stuff on Twitter in the past. The Attorney General overseeing this is the man whom the Republicans blocked from going on to the Supreme Court. He also has a trail of extremely anti-Trump past tweets (and his claim that he authorised the raid without telling President Joe is ludicrous). He hasn’t recused himself though Trump’s AG did during the Russia collusion scam. Trump’s lawyers were not allowed to go into the rooms being searched. The FBI waited over eighteen months to do this, just over three months before the mid-terms. The DoJ now utters some vague claims about how the search related to crucial national security documents. Really? So why wait over a year to get them back? And why obtain the warrant on a Friday but not execute the search for three days? (Crucial national security justifications should be made of sterner stuff.) This had ‘fishing expedition’ written all over it.

Many past presidents took all sorts of documents with them when they left office. No raid. Nothing. Because all past presidents (who don’t pack their own boxes when leaving, do they?) have the power to declassify whatever they want; they take them for their presidential libraries and no one bats an eyelid, classified or not. Till now. Then there’s Hillary Clinton who sets up a secret private server (that is patently illegal) and destroys myriad subpoenaed emails and phones. And she was never president so had no power to declassify any documents. For her, no raids. No charges. Likewise, the FBI has sat on clear Hunter Biden laptop evidence of myriad criminal behaviours (mysterious foreign income, crack cocaine use, fraudulently registered firearm, etc, some indicating his dad may have been involved). No raids. No charges. Heck, Hunter even boarded Air Force One while the Trump raid was happening to holiday with his old man. Heart-warming stuff. Oh, and the FBI was in up to its neck in the Russia collusion scam and the FISA court lies. Former FBI director McCabe admitted to lying and signing off on fraudulent FISA court applications, zero legal consequences. The FBI director before him, James Comey, leaked confidential FBI documents to the media, nada. A former CIA director Michael Hayden last week seemed to endorse the idea Trump deserves to be executed (the same Mr Hayden who last year made a plea for more civility in US public life) and nada. For Democrats there are no raids of anyone. No consequences for anything. But there are military-style raids on Trump, on his former economic advisor Navarro, on his one-time lawyer Rudy Giuliani, on his ally Roger Stone.

So, actually, I stand corrected. This absolutely is banana republic stuff. It stinks so much even the Never Trump writers on the Oz might see the problem. What’s good for the goose and all that. Okay, maybe that’s a wish too far.