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........

© The New Daily