Send in the Clowns: Send in the Clowns Lyrics and Youtube – It’s hard to believe that, three months ago, Australian national politics was (primarily) a contest between two broadly normal political parties. The government was running well ahead, but open to criticism for having talked a lot and done relatively little. The opposition was excessively keen on the maxim ‘the first duty of an opposition is to oppose’, and the alternative policies it proposed were neither as detailed as they might be, nor entirely consistent, but that has always been true of oppositions.

Although a change of government in 2010 looked unlikely, there was nothing to suggest that such an event would be a disaster if it happened.

That could not be said today. The government is much the same as before, but the opposition has become a clown show, happy to do or say whatever comes to mind, either to chase votes, secure the support of its base or simply to muddy the waters enough that they have a chance to win in the resulting confusion.

Relay for Life Chairperson Traci Froelich said this year Relay will focus on family fun with a theme of a three-ring circus while raising money to fight cancer. She lost a close friend to cancer, but her grandmother’s recent diagnosis of cancer made the battle even more personal, she said.

“I’ve always been involved with Relay because I believe in it, but it became a lot more personal,” Froelich said. “No one should be without hope. We just need to join together and do our parts so this disease can be gone.”

Barnaby Joyce has copped a bit of flak for this, most notably for the fiasco at the Press Club. But Abbott himself is just as guilty as witness his claim that NZ, which didn’t have much of a stimulus package, is doing as well, economically, as Australia. This is obviously false, but that didn’t stop Abbott making the claim or getting, broadly speaking, a free pass on it.

So far, the clown show has been at least a partial success in political terms. This is not all that surprising – at any time, much of the public is disengaged from politics and welcomes a bit of entertainment. And, with this level of disengagement, it takes a long time for the fact that a political party has taken leave of its senses to percolate through the public consciousness, as witness the recent successes of the US Republicans, despite their catastrophic mismanagement in office. So, there is no guarantee that this clown show will lose the next election. But, with luck, the long term good sense of the Australian public will come into play before then.