"Can the [Canberra] Liberals win the election?" a wistful heading in last Saturday's Canberra Times asked us, plaintively, trying (surely in vain) to generate some suspense.
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The studious feature piece beneath the heading went on to conclude, after picking the cluey minds of some experts, that no, the unappealing Canberra Liberals are highly unlikely to whoosh into government at October's ACT elections.
The Canberra Liberals' ineffectiveness is in large part their own fault. Lacklustre, they lack ideas and character and have never, not even now with an election pending, been galvanised into announcing a single policy that grabs the attention, that in any way thrills and delights and has us dreaming of wonders they might work in government.
But in their defence, what a struggle the Canberra Liberals have to persuade comfortable, prosperous, EV-driving, well-nourished, contentedly-grazing Canberrans of the need for any change. Why would one vote to upturn paradise? Sleek, change-averse Canberrans here in this sumptuous First World bubble have been electing Labor and Labor-Greens governments continuously since the olden days of 2001 and show no political volatility whatsoever.
![The cheating-writhing in football is so commonplace now that one half suspects that teams have a Writhing Coach. Picture Shutterstock The cheating-writhing in football is so commonplace now that one half suspects that teams have a Writhing Coach. Picture Shutterstock](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/Z4Q6sUEHdcmw72MBPYgZkU/760df8f7-37d4-44f8-8a77-b575e9f6c5cf.jpg/r0_51_1000_613_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
How the Canberra Liberals must envy the loathsome Nigel Farage the embittered volatility of a constituency like his Clacton! At last week's UK general election, the hate-mongering Farage at last, after decades of trying and failing, found an electorate, Clacton, sufficiently embittered and volatile to want someone as reptilian as him to be its member of parliament.
The seething, resentful people of Clacton, a mouldering Essex seaside resort last year voted to be Britain's Worst Seaside Town, turned against the major parties. They chose instead the shameless Farage (a bosom friend of Donald Trump) of Farage's nasty UK Reform party.
Clacton is suffering, unemployment is high, hardships abound, Clacton's folk are angry and Farage, an accomplished hate-monger, has stoked the locals' angers and disillusionments in racist anti-refugee, anti-immigration ways.
And so the noxious weed of the shameless Nigel Farage flourishes in the neglected garden of Clacton.
And yet, dear reader, do you secretly join me in owning up to how, bored by the stagnant inevitability of ACT politics and its election results, you feel some Clacton-envy bubbling in your bosom?
I closely followed goings-on in Clacton in the English media as election day loomed, envying the way the agitated town was gripped by pro-Farage and anti-Farage fevers.
That our ACT election will come and go without Canberrans feeling feverish seems a shame since free elections are a grand democratic achievement of our species that ought to send thrills rippling through us all. For shame, Canberra!
READ MORE IAN WARDEN:
Speaking of shamelessness (as we just were in connection with Farage), in recent days I have marvelled at Donald Trump's ability to lie without blushing (unless he is blushing, the pinkness of it masked by the thickly applied layers of his fake tangerine tan).
And at the very same time I have been seething at the best football (soccer) players in the world so deceitfully, shamelessly pretending (rolling and writhing theatrically) to have been crippled for life by opponents' tackles.
A lifelong devotee of the Beautiful Game, in recent weeks I have been glued, by paid subscription, to the matches of the UEFA Euro 24 international tournament in Germany.
The football has been beautiful, when it has flowed, but I have been wondering what the great pro-sport philosophers, sitting beside me on my couch to watch UEFA Euro 24, would think of all the theatrical fakery-cheating that goes on.
In Plato's The Republic, Josh McLoughlin reminds us in a new online essay, Sport Is More Than Just A Game, Plato writes that sports "arouse the spirited parts of a person" and are recommended "for the befit of the soul".
And, McLoughlin continues, "Competitive sport for Aristotle [Plato's pupil] is a measure of moral worth as much as of prowess and skill, a cultivation of merit in mind, heart and body."
How aghast Plato and Aristotle beside me (and my dog) on the couch watching UEFA Euro 24 would be at the immoralities of an activity (sport) they imagined as a fountain of morals.
How my distinguished guests would be appalled by the way cheating players, trying to fool referees into punishing opponents' imagined fouls, hit the turf, crying out and then making up to seven rolls of pretend agony.
Then the footballer-actor is moments later up on his feet, miraculously no longer a cripple but once again as nimble as a gazelle, no tint of shame decorating the shameless deceiver's cheek. For shame!
The cheating-writhing in football is so commonplace now that one half suspects that teams have a Writhing Coach (perhaps someone with a theatre background) who teaches players to best act as if they have been maimed. Certainly, as theatre, some writhings are much more dramatically impressive than others just as in stagings of Shakespeare's tragedies some actors are better than others at portraying agonising deaths.
But perhaps beautifully acted writhings should become a valid part of the overall entertainment of the beautiful game. Perhaps it is time to begin to actually reward them, perhaps with some kind of Soccer Oscars.
In my mind's eye I see an appropriate, golden Oscar statuette of a fallen, squirming figure, his golden face etched in agony, his golden hands clasping a golden leg he is pretending has been broken in five places.
- Ian Warden is a regular contributor.