We have devalued the word "riveting" by overuse and yet I was truly riveted to my couch (like one steel plate of the Titanic bolted to another) by Tuesday's televised Question Time in the House of Representatives.
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And of this entertainment's many rivets the strongest were the government's mock-rage references to sweet little New Zealand as a fiendish foe.
"Can you believe your ears?" I asked the cat, Roger. She had ensconced herself in my comfortable lap, sensing I wasn't going anywhere while there was this free-to-air theatre to be enjoyed.
Roger (she is named after Roger Federer because like him she moves with a cat-like grace) twitched her velvety ears. Her ears were saying that, no, it was astonishing to hear the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister hiss about New Zealand being a "foreign power" with a "foreign government". In order to have New Zealand fit with their, the government's, now famous arguments of Labor's conspiracy and treason (in outing Barnaby Joyce as a Kiwi), the government had to make our sisterly New Zealand sound as dangerous and rogueish as North Korea.
But in one sober passage of this QT the PM touched on the essence of the whole section 44 imbroglio. He said that in these matters of "allegiance and loyalty" surely no one doubted Joyce's sincere Australianness. No, of course not. Barnaby Joyce is as Australian as an average outback termite mound, as an averagely awful Slim Dusty song.
And so, what are we to do about section 44? It has become a kind of Kraken, a giant, multiple-tentacled sea monster lurking in the waters of Australian public life. Deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce has become (at the time of writing) the latest, juiciest victim of this OzKraken.
One day when all of this turbulence pauses we are going to have to hunt down and exterminate the OzKraken, by abolishing or amending section 44.
But with what will we replace it? Section 44 was designed to be a blunt and primitive tool to test people's true allegiance to Australia. But it is an inappropriate tool for use in 2017 in this nation of migrants. Surely even those of us rather enjoying Joyce's discomfort (in Tuesday's Question Time he seemed a broken-hearted clown and Roger the cat's eloquent ears twitched with sympathy for him) can feel some of his pain in his having his allegiance ridiculed. His only sin is having a father born in New Zealand.
My parents were Britons but today like so many migrants I truly, deeply, madly love my chosen nation, Australia.
This kind of love and allegiance is so abundant in good people's hearts and minds that you'd think modern science could find an easy way of infallibly detecting and showing it. For example scholarly "brain activation" studies that collect "brain activation data" are commonplace now. I've just been reading of a beauty that watched the "emotion-related limbic and paralimbic regions" of the brain to look for "the neural basis for the impact of music". Come on, modern science! Let's have a simple tell-tale test that reveal's a person's neural sense of the impacts of patriotism.
Such a test would gather oodles of data from me. For I have an inner patriotometer that reacts, its needle flickering, when my beloved country disappoints me. It is a good test of a migrant's sometimes confused patriotic affections for him or her to notice what causes the greater pain – Australia's gaucheries or the gaucheries of the land left behind. When the sins of Australia began to cause me more pain than the sins of Britain I knew that I had sent down loyal roots into Australian soil.
The needle of my inner patriotometer has done some frenzied paralimbic flickering in recent days.
It flickered quite a lot when, at last weekend's National Indigenous Music Awards the country and western singer Troy Cassar-Daley won Album of the Year. He won in spite of the fact that he sings everything on that album (songs about Australia) in a ridiculous fake American voice quite different from his conversational voice. Lots of Australian country singers do this. For shame! To sing about our beloved Australia in a fake, foreign, Nashville voice seems a kind of cultural treason.
And how my patriotometer's needle was agitated this week by our PM's "all the way with Donald J" promise. The PM gushed that in military matters, "We stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States [because our two nations] are 'joined at the hip'."
Australia, when will this lickspittle poodleism (that saw us share the USA's madness in Vietnam and Iraq), this low national self-esteem, ever end? When will we be a real and independent nation with our own character? When will we have a leader with enough self-esteem not to need to crave the approval of any US president, let alone the present unhinged, wig-wearing one?
Meanwhile, new brain activation data has just been gathered in Canberra (where the deputy PM is so unpopular for wanting to relocate us to his country and western hometown of Tamworth). That data shows so many Canberrans so unfeeling as to be basking (even when they don't know what schadenfreude is) in the schadenfreude of what has befallen Barnaby Joyce.
