The recent ballot taken as a result of a challenge to the leadership by the previous PM has turned out exactly as predicted. There was not a single opinion by anyone that was dissenting anywhere. Yet, the media went, just as predictable berserk. Headlines in Newspapers were screaming to the extent, that many elderly pedestrians fainted, some called for ambulances.

On TV, even the dulling powder puffs on the journo- cum- shock –jock’s faces were foregone adding greatly to the excitement not seen since the days of Princess Mary and Kylie Minogue. The sheen on their brilliantly lit faces was unequalled except perhaps during the interviews of those large mining magnates in Western Australia. The sheen on opulent faces is always in direct proportion to the billions in bulbous bullion ingots they have stashed away in secret Perth Bunkers. Come to think of it, so are their bodies, in size I mean, perhaps in sheen as well. I haven’t studied Palmer’s or Gina’s sheen below their collars.

We seem to have entered an era of instant politics that in the same vein respond to instant polls. We have just about got over that vile drink ‘euphemistically’ named Instant COFFEE. Instant, perhaps, but coffee, no way? There is now Instant cheese and it comes in a tube. Polls now come as regular as errant shopping trolleys discarded along nature strips. What do you think ‘nature strips’ are for, you old fogey fools? This is our world now, it’s our time, they are our nature strips, piss off, move over you pathetic grump.

Just fifty metres from our Woolies store in Bowral someone, very gifted, had lifted a trolley high up and managed, through herculean efforts, to impale it on one of those no-parking signs with the open ended flap of the trolley being used allowing the sign to enter it and the trolley to be dragged down the bottom on the nature strip with the traffic sign triumphantly sticking up in the middle of the trolley. Now, there is a creative boy about somewhere. I can’t imagine a lady pensioner doing that.

What goes on in the mind of someone walking past a trolley, abandoned in a nature strip? What mind would come up with the idea of going through the effort of wrestling it over and onto a traffic sign? In Singapore or Malaysia they would give him 120 lashes, his bum stripped bloody raw, but never a shopping trolley in danger again from him. Here, probably a reward for community services rendered. A Freudian trained psychiatrist would probably see a serial rapist in the making, ramming things all the way somewhere. He seems destined to become a rugby player instead.

Serves the trolley right. Why is it that the Aldi and European methods of an ordered trolley regime with small deposits on trolleys has not been made nationwide compulsory? It works well. Here though, there are rewards offered and helicopters are hovering above, trying to trace lost trolleys. It seems a strange and costly way to check up on trolleys.

Anyway, it’s not any stranger than the panic driven hysteria over the latest political stoush. Where was the calm and considerate looking back by the challenger? How could an experienced and ex PM not see, that the challenge would end in defeat. Did he not count those in caucus that would not support him?

Are they all driven by face-book emotions? Is the media ramping up politicians into a frenzy of self adoring that hides all logic and reason, a kind of endless tweeting ‘ The Emperor’s new clothes’ beautification? Are all politicians in the grip of a Stockholm syndrome whereby the enslavement to the captive image has become an insurmountable reality? Do they all look in the mirror and see a beautiful and glorious Tiberius Claudius Caesar with an admiring media all hooked on an intravenously administered Instant News hook up? It’s all now panic, hyped up internet face-book twittering raging media and political turmoil maelstrom.

Where has the calm gone, the looking back and taking time?