Federal election: Instability's hardly normal, Gerry, but it's not entirely bad

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A billion dollars doesn't make you smart. It just makes you rich. You can still be a bozo.

Steve Jobs had a famously short temper for dealing with them. He met bozos everywhere in business, many of them infesting his beloved Apple when he returned from exile.

Gerry Harvey's reported statement that this country needs a dictator is the sort of thing a world-class bozo would say. It's also the sort of thing your average mouth-breathing idiot down the pub would say before he was halfway into his first schooner, but the huge numbers of mouth-breathing idiots who'd agree with Harvey doesn't make his idea right. Just dangerous.

There's a lot of dangerous stupidity floating around this week, most of it masquerading as trenchant electoral analysis. If you had to reduce it to essences you'd be hard-pressed to go past one guest commentator who told the ABC that the Australian people voted for instability, "and they're going to get it in spades".

Nobody but an anarchist actually votes for instability, and real anarchists don't vote. Everybody who made their mark on Saturday, or in the weeks leading up to the ballot, had their own reasons for the choices they made.

They might have been good or bad reasons, based on research and hard, empirical data, or on witless emotional investments.

But just as everyone is the hero of their own story, their votes are generally cast in the hope of bringing forward their own version of a better world.

Yes, even those people who voted for Pauline Hanson. Their idealised Australia might be a grim and frightening place to most of us, but to them it recalls a simpler, less-conflicted time.

Of course, times never were simpler or less conflicted, but that's not what matters. Political myths draw power from their promise, not from any connection to hard reality. To a small percentage of the population, Hanson is not a thin-lipped punisher and reflexive, self-seeking bigot. She is a deliverer from everyone who has ever denounced them as punishers and bigots just because they remember a time when a white man knew his place – on top and in charge.

There is an echo of that desperate search for certainty in Gerry Harvey's thought balloon. How much easier would life be if everyone just did as they were told. As long as Gerry, or Pauline or even you, gentle reader, was the one doing the telling. Not the one being told.

For sure, there has never been a more exciting time to have a newspaper column. Thanks Malcolm. Instability is good for our business, if not for Gerry's. 

But to borrow from Alan Jones, it's nothing to wet the bed over.

Instability often translates to the inability of powerful interests to get their own way. Gerry, for instance, would like Canberra to make life difficult for his overseas competitors, which means making life difficult for anybody who'd prefer to buy goods and services online because they can almost always be had cheaper from those competitors when the Aussie dollar gets up above 80 cents.

That scenario is much more likely to play out when a government with solid majorities in both houses can offer "stability" to business. Likewise, a stable government with a neutered opposition has little incentive to repair the damage done to the public treasury by large corporations that refuse to even contemplate paying their fair share of tax – especially not if those corporations are also large donors to the governing party.

A little bit of instability, a good measure of uncertainty for the rich and the powerful is not entirely a bad thing, even when it brings with it the necessity of dealing with the likes of Hanson.