Joe Hildebrand: ScoMo goes into the Spider-Verse

It’s fair to say Australian politics is a strange beast at the best of times - but we’ve found an excellent way of making sense of all the Canberra games.

For anyone who is confused about what is happening in Australian politics at the moment, don’t worry.

There is a handy educational video that perfectly explains everything and this week I was fortunate enough to watch it.

The name of this film is Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and it is the most instructional political documentary since Roland Emmerich’s 1996 historical masterpiece, Independence Day.

This electrifying election week has of course been driven by electric cars and a Chinese donation/citizen/luncheon scandal that I like to call “cash-for-canapes”. And on both of them our nation’s immediate-past-prime minister wasted no time laying in with both his RM Williams.

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In the old days former PMs used to wait for a dignified period before commenting on current political issues. The generally accepted formula was either two parliamentary terms or the release of their memoir, whichever came first.

However these days the appropriate time frame is approximately 3.5 days and so if anything Malcolm Turnbull is to be commended for waiting more than six whole months before weighing in on party matters. Nor let us not forget the noble silence he maintained throughout the Wentworth by-election – notwithstanding the fact that this was when his party actually wanted him to say something.

But that’s the funny thing about people and prime ministers: When you stab them in the back and screw them in the arse, they tend not to turn around and ask if there’s anything more they can do for you.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison is the latest in a long line of recent Australian leaders.

This is pretty basic human nature and something our current generation of politicians would no doubt realise if there were any humans walking among them.

And so we have four deposed PMs walking around still at the height of their political powers except three of them have swapped the leadership baton in their knapsack for a wrecking ball in their ballsack and all they want to do is swing it. No prizes for guessing what they have in common.

The difficulty is that much like vegans, internet porn and smashed avocado this is a problem mainstream society has never faced until now. Never before has Australia had to deal with a plethora of prime ministers in a country that couldn’t even deal with too many rabbits.

It’s not natural, it’s not rational and it doesn’t make sense, which is why only a multidimensional children’s cartoon can possible explain it. And so I present ScoMo-Man: Into the Prime Minister-Verse.

In the Australian version, just like the original, an unsuspecting hero gets powers he never dreamt of and has to figure out how to use them without destroying everything he holds dear. The only slight difference is that the new Spider-Man is young, black and funky and the new Prime Minister is old, white and dorky. And also not that unsuspecting.

Suddenly our new hero has his whole worldview questioned by strange beings with similar powers but who come from a different time or different universe. One of them is dark and angry, one of them is old and cynical and one of them is a little pig. At least the girl seems nice.

Spiderman and ScoMo: Who knew there could be a comparison until now?

In the Disney version all of these characters would have to work together to save the world but the great thing about this insane inter-dimensional animated fantasy is that it’s extremely realistic. The world only really needs one Spider-Man. The rest have to be sent back from whence they came because otherwise… Well, it doesn’t make sense.

Likewise Australia only needs one prime minister – and let’s face it, we don’t have to put up with them for very long. On current form we’re going to get a new one in a month.

As is a matter of perhaps the most repetitious public record of all time, I unequivocally despise the rolling of first term prime ministers that began with the knifing of Kevin Rudd and has been a bloodstain on the nightdress of every government ever since.

As a result I have had more sympathy than most for the zombies of Rudd, Abbott and Turnbull when they kept crawling out of their political graves.

And I have likewise been singularly unforgiving of Bill Shorten, a Victorian powerbroker who introduced the so-called “NSW disease” into Canberra, where it encountered less resistance than a dose of measles gets in a Byron Bay drumming circle.

Yet it remains an undeniable fact that Shorten is the only political leader of the past dozen years to survive even one term, let alone two. This might also seem ironic but in fact it is entirely consistent.

Remember this guy? Labor members Julian Hill and Graham Perrett hold up photos of former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull during Question Time. Picture: AAP

No less a political maestro than Niccolo Machiavelli said that a new leader must ruthlessly exterminate all his rivals as quickly as possible so he can then rule lengthily and benignly. The idea is that people will eventually forget all the bad stuff you did and only remember the good stuff you are doing – and thankfully the national press gallery has gone out of its way to prove it true.

This is a common misconception about poor old Nicky Mac: Just because he was a c*** doesn’t mean he was wrong.

The same compliment can be extended to Shorten, who is campaigning on a platform of leadership stability and – even more impressively – doing it with a straight face.

The real irony is that Bill initially didn’t want the position he enjoys today because he thought he’d screwed his party so badly he didn’t think they’d have a snowflake’s chance in hell of winning for a decade.

As it turns out, hell is definitely where we are at the moment but the snowflakes are doing quite well – and Bad Boy Bill is now the voice of peace, love and understanding.

Whatever. That’s cool man. The truth is it doesn’t matter who’s good or bad or right or wrong any more. ScoMo and BilSho and Malcolm and Kevin are all kicking an electoral corpse that is already dead, as is Tony Abbott – although at least he’s now restricting that activity to his own electorate.

Aussie politics is fun and games, for some...Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton during Question Time in the House of Representatives.

The problem is that we have a surplus of ex-prime ministers and it’s the only surplus we’ve seen for more than a decade. There simply should not be this many former PMs in the same dimension and it is disrupting the space-time continuum.

As a result, there is probably not a single voter in the land who genuinely loves or respects the current leader of either major party – at least none who isn’t on that leader’s payroll. Nor is there anyone who sees a positive cohesive vision emanating from either of them. Poll after poll shows that we hate the government and yet hate the opposition leader even more than a prime minister we’ve hardly met.

But that hardly matters either. Australia is so battle-weary from a decade of policy backflips and palace coups that we no longer seriously believe our lives will be significantly improved by either side.

Instead, like a white bourgeois version of a war-torn third-world country, we just want the killing to stop.

Joe Hildebrand co-hosts Studio 10, 8.30am weekdays, on Network Ten. Continue the conversation on Twitter @Joe_Hildebrand

Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: ScoMo goes into the Spider-Verse