A lot of free speech is being exercised around our nation right now, and if there were a law against insulting and offending the political class, a lot of my mates and acquaintances would be in strife.
An electrician fixing a fried circuit at my house last weekend was in despair at what he considered was a political system that couldn't make a serious decision about anything at a time when the future felt perilous.
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"This country needs to know where it's going, and all we get are these buggers arguing the toss," he said. "I don't reckon we've ever seen it this bad. Don't any of them know how stupid they look to the rest of us?"
He was getting so worked up I became concerned he'd stick a screwdriver into the wrong socket and set his hair on fire, but he knew what he was doing, which is more than he'd say for Canberra's alleged decision-makers.
![The expectation that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull might make a significant difference is widely judged to be in ruins.](/web/20170402121620im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/j/p/m/8/i/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gv9vpy.png/1491073666902.jpg)
Another acquaintance, a tradie too, could barely believe the nation was tempting electricity-grid failure without having undertaken careful planning for what might happen when one of the biggest power plants closed. A sudden recycled plan to supercharge the old Snowy scheme and urgent talks about gas, of which Australia drilled massive amounts before selling it all overseas, seemed to him gobsmacking.
He was angered too that the nation's big-city housing market had rushed beyond the dreams of Australian children. "Nothing but a Ponzi scheme," he said. Everyone knew it would crash, but it had been allowed to run out of control without political leaders grasping the regulating levers.
Saturday night I attended a dinner at the country school I left almost 50 years ago and found myself surrounded by old friends and vaguely familiar faces. They wore a collective expression that suggested "you poor sap" when they learnt I was still flying regularly to Canberra to try to write amusingly about federal politics.
"I can't think of a joke that would do it justice," declared a former classmate who'd done well in business. "I can't find it in me to bother laughing at any of them."
All around, people nodded in agreement.
It's hardly unusual for the citizenry to criticise politicians – it's been a national sport ever since the diggers of Ballarat built a stockade at Eureka when the stuffed shirts of colonial authorities tried to stiff them with taxation without representation via a miners' licence.
Even the revolt at Eureka, however, had the half-worthy result that within two years, all men in Victoria gained the right to vote (though no women).
If my limited anecdotal poll and sniffing the air is any reasonable guide, plenty of Australians today have given up on the hope the nation's political system can meet their basic expectations.
And there it is. That word: expectation.
After the long disappointment and tumult of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years, there was clearly an expectation that the political world should settle down with a change of government.
But the Abbott period turned out to be another disappointment, with Prince Philip's Australian knighthood symbolising how drastically Abbott had lost touch with ordinary voters.
Malcolm Turnbull surfed in on a new wave of popular hope, burdened with the weight of years of frustrated expectation.
But after waiting too long to hold an ill-judged election campaign and barely limping home with more fractious crossbenchers in the Senate than ever, the expectation that Turnbull might make a significant difference is widely judged to be in ruins.
Even the servants of government have proved incapable: Australians found they couldn't get themselves counted in a compulsory census, and clients of Centrelink were brought to nervous breakdown by an automated system that denied them their humanity.
With an opposition contented to deny the government its economic and industrial agenda whenever it was politically opportune and the Senate often enough even happier to put a spoke in the wheels, the government has turned on itself over conflicting ideology – a sure sign that its members are losing the plot.
The voting public has long made clear it couldn't give a fig about ideology, whatever the warriors of the left and the right within the political class and the media might imagine.
Most people of my acquaintance insist they just want the nation managed competently without being told what they should think or how they should live.
Nevertheless, Turnbull allowed himself to be bullied by ideological colleagues into wasting much breath on 18C when there was no hope of actually changing anything, and against his own instincts he has held out against allowing the Parliament to decide quickly and cleanly, without the waste of hundreds of millions of dollars on a plebiscite, who can marry whom.
And now he heads towards a budget – the real business of managing – with not enough of his agenda settled and the expectation of a deficit next year of $36.5 billion or so.
Most of us can't imagine the reality of such a figure. For reference, if you counted a dollar a second, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it would take you a bit over 1157 years to get to $36.5 billion.
It's probably easier these days to visualise something like that, however, than to imagine what a sensible political system might look like.