Remember the pious hand-wringing a few years back as Liberals and their media friends warned that electing community independents meant the end of the two-party system and of order itself?

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Conferences were held, editorials published - anything to alert voters to the recklessness with which they were flirting.

Of course, this was always code for fears of a more sectional nature - the historic fracture between a Liberal Party sliding rightwards and therefore away from its most affluent and educated base.

Which made it even more puzzling that the party then did so little to reclaim its city supporters, openly disparaging their EVs and wine bars.

Strangely, that pearl-clutching over the two-party order is nowhere to be heard in relation to One Nation's rise even though, objectively, Pauline Hanson poses a more structural and open challenge to Australian political norms.

Instead, senior Liberals - including Angus Taylor - plan to swap preferences with the wreckers. Others in his party room would go further. They propose a non-compete pact, the effect of which would stop Coalition and One Nation candidates running against each other.

Perhaps they should get a room?

One wonders when sleepy mainstream Liberals will wake up to their real opponent. The teals only wanted their inner-city seats. Hanson's outfit is after their soul.

The atmosphere of tripartite volatility fuelling One Nation's rise has implications for Albanese Labor, to which I will turn shortly.

But let's stay with the Libs a bit longer because here is a party which is squandering its primacy within our electoral duopoly as carelessly as it waved off its once treasured blue-ribbon base.

Under Peter Dutton, surrendering the cities was always a high-risk strategy. Under Taylor it is several orders of magnitude crazier because the rural-regional base........

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