Albo, you’re delulu and I have no solulu

Aaaah, another federal budget week, and this one arriving mere minutes out from a general election. Minutes, I tell you.

As such, government ministers were out in force yesterday, matching barbershop top hats and canes and thousand-watt smiles at the ready, to sell their glorious message of eternal prosperity and tax cuts for all and then, well, then someone’s drunk uncle wandered into question time and performed the chicken dance. And after that one of the other wedding guests started cackling like a middle-aged bird with a bellyful of hash cookies. OK, fine, it wasn’t someone’s drunk uncle, it was Anthony Albanese. And he didn’t so much perform the chicken dance as accuse the federal opposition of being “delulu with no solulu”.

Now, while those of us not fluent in Instagram influencer psychobabble might’ve been forgiven for clicking our tongues sympathetically and suggesting a topical cream, “delulu with no solulu” apparently translates to “delusional with no solution” or, as I like to think of it, the state I find myself in at dinner each night when I’m trying to feed my kids anything that didn’t start its life in a packet.

This tragic act of self-fantasy leads us, inevitably, back to our esteemed prime minister’s decision to slap on a do-rag and come over all peace, love and, well, delulu with no solulu. I assume he practised the line in front of a mirror before he delivered it, and saw, in his reflection, a pink-haired, sultry-eyed, microphone-wielding K-pop enthusiast (the musical genre that gave rise to the words “solulu” and “delulu” in the first instance).

The reality was what the rest of us got: a besuited, bespectacled, middle-aged politician who was forced by convention to stand at a lectern and set fire to his street cred by bookending “delulu with no solulu” with the phrase “Mr Speaker”. What a buzzkill.

For one delicious moment though, he was genuinely a right-on party guy. A man for our times. The life of the (Labor) party, simultaneously fluent in talk tactics and TikTok. Unfortunately, though, amid all the ballyhoo, Albanese’s sudden urge to take to his personality with a chisel, a circular saw and a selection of staple guns underscored one inescapable reality. There’s a federal election in the offing, which means he and the rest of his political contemporaries will be forced to shoehorn themselves awkwardly into various personas as they attempt to demonstrate their everyman qualities.

Today an Insta influencer, tomorrow a policy wonk. Easy-peasy, as they say in childcare centres, which happens to be another language our guy is happily conversant in.

On paper it’s fine, but the campaign trail reality often has a more than passing whiff of eau de delulu with no solulu as a result. To wit: here’s the grab of our elected representatives at the fruit markets at 4am, wearing a stupid vest, eating an onion and shooting the breeze with the high-vis set about the relative merits of William Bartletts versus Packham pears.

Then it’s off to the studios of Jibber-Jabber FM, where the morning hosts, Spanky and Shmucko, will ask one or two questions about tax reform that they don’t understand the answers to, before pivoting seamlessly to a quiz designed to elicit the political hopeful du jour’s guilty secret: until a six-year-old relative enlightened him recently, he thought Pink Pony Club by Chappell Roan was a new flavour of bubble tea.

No matter! Let’s kiss some babies, shall we? Luckily there’s also time to engage some amateur cricketers in the park, where the candidate in question will bowl the first ball so wide that shoppers in Woolies Launceston felt it glance past their heads, and the second ball so badly that it ricocheted and broke his glasses. Whoops.

After that. it’s time for some more high-vis action, aka standing uselessly in the middle of Some Factory That Produces Heavy Stuff, wearing a hard hat and earmuffs so none of the natives is able to engage him in a conversation that will expose his other guilty secret: he has no idea what these girder thingamies are used for.

The only part of the day that will have the remotest ring of authenticity about it will come when he is confronted with footage of some previously-unheard-of, loose-cannon local candidate who, despite unbackable odds, is contesting the far-flung seat of As If, apparently with the blessing of party HQ. Unfortunately, the knuckle-skull in question has since decided to out himself online as the loving life partner of a pygmy goat, and to run on a platform of having never read a single one of his policies.

In the face of such outrageous intransigence, our shape-shifting political leader will return to the action-taking, weirdo-expelling, scowl-in-a-suit cardboard cutout we know and love. Delulu with no solulu, you say? Please. It seems you’ve got him mixed up with someone else.

Michelle Cazzulino is a Sydney writer.