Informed by impeccable sources that the federal election would be held on 12 April, I booked a holiday to Italy, departing on the 14th. Then Cyclone Alfred swung in toward southern Queensland and the election was delayed. Damn it! The tickets were non-refundable but – thank Buddha! – my presence is no longer required on the campaign planes and buses. A nod from the boss, and away I slunk.

So it is that, for the first time in decades, I am consuming this election like most voters – intermittently through media, social and otherwise, and only when I can’t avoid it.

From this distance it is even clearer what was obvious at home. This is the most dismal election in decades. Far better to televise the papal conclave. At least dramatists have seen potential in that.

Only one line stays in my mind. Peter Dutton telling Anthony Albanese that he couldn’t lie straight in bed. It sticks because it is true. Throughout this campaign, the prime minister has held up a Medicare card, telling the good voters that under Labor they will need only the green card, not their credit card, to see a doctor. And every single Australian already knows that is not true.

But Dutton’s offerings, once stretched across the Sealy Posturepedic, are no less bent. A nuclear policy whose costings demand mass shrinkage in industrial energy use; a defence spend that will........

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