What to say about the past week other than it is further evidence of how lost Australia’s leadership remains? Or, at the very least, how completely disconnected it is from the nation and the world as it actually is.

On the one hand, we had whatever it is you want to call the Nationals. David Littleproud, maybe the only Nationals leader to be more unpopular in the regions than his own party room, pulled the pin after a pretty substandard innings, even by the subterranean standards Nationals leaders have set themselves in recent times.

This sent the Nationals turning to Barnaby Joyce’s protege, Matt Canavan, a man the party room rejected as leader just under a year ago, and whose hodge podge of ideologies confuses even his own colleagues.

Plans have long been afoot for Canavan to step into Michelle Landry’s seat of Capricornia, if she follows through with her plans to retire at the next election. But despite the gallery seeing him as a ballast against One Nation in Nationals seats, the LNP is not so sure.

Canavan is a fossil-fuel industry-loving economist who loves to cosplay at being a miner, but he’s never been overly successful at the face-to-face relations required of local MPs. The Senate has suited him, and his preferred way of playing politics, which has mostly been party shenanigans and media wrangling.

Even as leader, Capricornia is not a sure bet for Canavan and, at the current polling, the LNP winning two Senate seats in Queensland is also in doubt.

Joyce has scored an early victory in finally taking down Littleproud; the Nationals’ dire polling in Farrer, Sussan Ley’s former electorate, contributed to his decision to step down.

The Nationals don’t know how to combat One Nation in this climate, because the people attracted to the far-right populist project have scattered ideologies the Nationals can’t match. Have more babies for Australia and make more Australian jokes is not going to cut it in this economic climate.

And if Canavan wants to follow the nationalistic route of Australia becoming a closed workshop, then he’ll also have to start supporting things One Nation voters say they want, like taxing gas companies to pay for more Australian things. This goes against his core instincts as a neoliberal economist, a fossil-fuel cheerleader and the leader of a party hoping to bring back “money mummy” Gina Rinehart’s donation dollars.

The Nationals are becoming extinct not because the times have changed their electorates, but because the party refuses to change with the times. They, and the Coalition at large, are still at odds with the necessary energy transition, which European leaders now see as a national security issue. The major party slavish devotion to fossil fuels in this country means they still can’t unhook themselves, even as it becomes an actual sovereignty issue.

It does, however, mean the focus has been on oil and energy prices, and not Australia’s aimless slide into apathetic ambiguity by supporting the US/Israel bombing of Iran, Lebanon and the ongoing killing of civilians in Gaza and broader Palestine.

It is possible to want the liberation of Iranian citizens and not support the bombing and slaughter of those citizens, as well as wanting to have trust in your government that it understands the aims of the war it has decided to support, and that international law is being upheld.

Multiple investigations say it was the US that bombed this school in Tehran. Photo: AAP

US-made bombs killed at least 168 children after their school was struck by Tomahawk missiles. Multiple independent investigations have found America to be responsible.

President Donald Trump has tried his usual deflection and claimed, without evidence, that Iran probably had America’s missiles and had mistakenly targeted the school itself. Meanwhile, his administration released a meme gamifying America’s deadly actions in Iran, where at least 1800 people have been killed, including 1276 civilians; of those, at least 200 were children.

The Albanese government has hitched itself, seemingly unquestionably, to a US cabinet that treats the horrors of war like 14-year-olds playing Fortnite. It remains in support of Israel, which on Friday dropped charges against five IDF soldiers who were filmed raping a Palestinian prisoner, sodomising him with a knife. The IDF’s former top legal officer had previously been charged for leaking footage of the abuse.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, already facing war crimes allegations, welcomed the decision to drop charges against the accused rapists, calling them “heroic warriors”. These are the leaders we are standing with.

Having supported and contributed to destablisation in the Arab world, the Albanese government – with the support of the Coalition – then rushed through legislation to block people in countries where issues (like, for example, the US and Israel bombing their country in an action supported by Australia) might make it unsafe or impossible to return home from applying for visas.

So we are now contributing to the reasons people are unsafe and then blocking them from reaching a safe haven.

This is obviously not happening in a vacuum. And it’s not just Palestine where we have largely stood meekly by and taken pats on the head for having a good, supportive little government.

Two months ago, Trump authorised the unilateral abduction of Venezuela’s president. He has ordered a near total embargo on Cuba, banning oil from reaching the island, to force a political crisis, threatening tariffs on any Latin American government that attempts to break the blockade and the seizure of ships with oil shipments. He has threatened to take Greenland by force. He has approved the extrajudicial murders of people on boats just on the accusation they are drug runners. He berated the UK for not jumping to support his latest illegal bombing of an Arab state, threatened Spain with a trade embargo after its leadership called the Tehran bombings “unjustified and dangerous”.

Who knows what he will do tomorrow, or has done in the day since this column was written? But we are with him, because that’s what Australia’s leadership knows what to do. To stick with old ways of politics – be that pretending that babies and jokes and an end to political correctness, and that coal and gas are forever, or that the US is always right, even when it’s not, no matter how much the world has changed.

The disconnect between what is and how this country’s political leaders respond has never seemed wider. Or to matter more.

Amy Remeikis is a contributing editor for The New Daily and chief political analyst for The Australia Institute

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