THE FRONT DORE: Why it’s not surprising Australian voters don’t care about dull Albo or his opponent Dutton

Has politics always been this meaningless, so full of drongos and desperados, weighed down by dull-eyed dropkicks and drowning in the monosyllabic monotony?

So dull and so desperately boring has it all become, that we have grown accustomed to and accepting of this mediocrity.

It says everything about the state of politics that the only politicians worth watching on television these days are Joe Biden and Barnaby Joyce.

Joyce is predictably pragmatic and unpretentiously prosaic. He is as infuriating as he is enlightening, a bushy bullshit artist who can’t keep a straight face. Who knows what he’s going to say, and how he is going to say it, but you kinda can’t look away, even if it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Until this morning Biden was appointment viewing. Like Love Island UK, it is excruciatingly good TV, disgustingly voyeuristic and contagiously cringeworthy.

Australia’s political Laurel and Hardy of breakfast television reunited for a cameo last week. Joe Hockey and Kevin Rudd, the original Sunrise duo, the pair of misfits who used Seven’s top rating show to elevate Rudd’s political fortunes all the way to the Lodge and Hockey’s ambitions to somewhere in the vicinity. Both were once happily welcomed into Australian homes for breakfast because they were entertaining and real. Both of them were happy to rely on the missing sock of politics, their personalities, to win over fans, in the real world and in their party rooms. It worked. They lifted their own ratings, and they didn’t kill Mel and Kochie’s.

But their reunion tour on Sky News at the Republican National Conference in Milwaukee, where Donald Trump was resurrected from the burning embers of January 6 and hailed the saviour, revealed all we need to know about how Australian politics has descended into a grotesque bazaar of brazen grifters and emboldened grinders.

Joe Hockey, the millionaire former treasurer who hoped to be prime minister only to be cruelled, once by an ill-considered cigar and twice by Malcolm Turnbull, is doing a star turn as an expert on American politics while shilling for his consultancy business at the Republican convention.

Kevin Rudd, the current Australian Ambassador to the US, joined his old mate, the former very successful Donald-whispering ambassador to the US. They stood holding Sky News microphones, in front of Sky News cameras giving Rudd a chance to tidy up his reputation back home as a liability should Trump regain the presidency, having previously delighted in describing him, earnestly and judiciously, as “nuts”, a “traitor to the west” guilty of “rancid treachery”.

For 20 minutes these two chatted, Rudd as Hockey’s guest, live on the pay TV channel owned by Rupert Murdoch about old Trumpy, the bullet-proof born again, and how it would be just fine for Australia if he ends up back in the White House.

This was important for Rudd, knowing this was the most direct way he could resurrect his reputation back in Canberra as a useful envoy should the foreboding Trumpian era once again fall upon us.

So important that Rudd was happy to appear on a channel owned by a man he believes is dangerous and evil to re-invent his relationship with a man he believes is dangerous and evil.

Before taking up this post in DC, as a gift from his old pal Anthony Albanese, Rudd started a vociferous campaign against Murdoch, and Sky News, describing the media owner as a “cancer, an arrogant cancer on our democracy”.

He told Parliament, in a submission demanding legislative action to curb the power of Murdoch, that in order to “maximise his personal, business and ideological interests”, he was guilty of “demonising” and “undermining” government, and “most importantly” by “minimising corporate and personal tax”.

“Trump,” like Murdoch, he told senators, “achieved all three. It’s also Murdoch’s vision for Australia.”

He said Fox News in the US was a “legitimising echo chamber for this increasingly far-right extremist worldview”, the model, he declared for Sky News, which was “radicalising” politics in Australia.

Oh, how times change, hey.

A man could not get any more tragic, any more obnoxiously outrageous, shamelessly supine.

Rudd told Hockey he had become quite the diplomatic mentor to nervy ambassadors around Washington, worried about Trump.

“What I say to many ambassadors in Washington, is it’s really important to chill, just chill,” Rudd told Hockey.

“The simple reason is if President Trump is elected on 5th November we are not going over some chasm. For us in Australia and allies in the United States, this is a perfectly navigatable and manageable set of relationships for the next four years and everyone needs to have that just as a discipline in their mind,” he confided.

“If instead you think ‘my God this this is beyond the pale’ and reach for the smelling salts, well you know something — it’s going to cruel you from day one.

“It’s actually the wrong conclusion.

“I say a lot to the ‘Euros’ along these lines which is chill Bill.”

He’s different now, Rudd says of Trump. Rudd says he’s spent some time in small rooms with “Donald Jr” and texts JD. He’s mates with “Pompeo” and some other key Republican figures. Trump is disciplined now. Good people around him these days. Rudd as clear as ever: “What I think is different is the aggregation of individuals who would fill the key cabinet and advisory positions who now approach this with four years experience under their belt that therefore makes it a more determined policy push but also as you and I have both observed as politicians the bottom line is you see greater discipline in the Trump political campaign as well then you did back then.”

“For us in Australia though it doesn’t matter whether you vote Labor, vote Liberal, vote National back home, the really good thing about the United States is, brand Australia is in good working order … and therefore we (Read: me) are in a good position to work with whichever party is elected … “

It is no surprise that serious polls released today now show Australian voters couldn’t give two hoots about Prime Minister Albanese, or his opponent Peter Dutton. Neither is capturing the imaginations of anyone. Neither is inciting passion or inviting ambition.

We are stuck in an endless cycle, a meandering mess, of underwhelming political figures and polarising fortunes.

Ironically, Australians haven’t had anything to get worked up about, good or bad, since, well, Kevin 07. We’ve been in a slow spiral since his over-amped rise and untimely demise. Two decades later, Rudd’s still doing the same old bull schtick and getting away with it, and we are stuck in a political drudgery he helped create all those years ago.

Rudd nailed it himself, telling Hockey about the shifting fortunes and allegiances in public life: “As we say in politics, it’s a complex business.”