Gerard Henderson, and the glorious uncertainty confronting commentariat commentators ...

Circle the wagons, the Injuns are coming and they're bringing change.

Drygulch Tony, you handle the right, Bushwhacker Julia, you take the baseball bat and herd them lefties, and Gerundive Gerard, you handle the press.

Explain to them how everything's spiffing, except for the ABC, and everything's for the best in a two party system, never mind that there's three if you think the Nationals are a party, and never mind that there have been other parties, like Democrats and the DLP and Christians and Marxists, because truth to tell they're all dropkicks and not even worth corralling ...

Desiccated gerund Gerard, you might call your piece Beware risks of change when political system is working well, and blather on about safe pairs of hands, in the cricketing way of a cricket tragic addicted to the wonders of John Howard ....

How strange it is that the calls for greater accountability of elected politicians have been accompanied by scant attention in the media about what is on the agenda of the rural independent MPs and their supporters.

Um, actually thanks to the fulsome - in all senses of the word - attention of the media, it's possible to have quite a good understanding of what's on the agenda of all the independents, including the rural ones, and if you can stand the show pony strutting of that strangely hatted bob cat Bob Katter, you can spend an extended time with him on Q & A, thanks to the ABC's notion of catch up TV. But do go on:

This follows a parliamentary term in which the policies and practices of Labor and the Coalition were held to account, while the Greens leader Bob Brown got by with soft questions from interviewers, especially on the ABC.

Uh huh. After a term in which the commentariat columnists flecked and frothed about how Labor was bringing the country to its knees, somehow they and the Coalition were held to account. By an electorate which voted for the Greens to control the Senate and by voting in a bunch of independents, who curiously and fortuitously control the balance in the lower house.

Silly people. Didn't they understand that being held to account is strictly the business of commentariat commentators, who ask all the hard questions, and thereby provide the balance to the soft questions asked by those cardigan wearing interviewers on the ABC. (How they just dote on Bob and give him a soft time ...)

There's nothing like a cosy duopoly to keep people contented and happy. Not quite as solitary as a monopoly, not quite as perverse as an oligoply, let's hear it for duopoly:

The Australian political system is both responsive and transparent, which explains why over 80 per cent of electors still give their primary vote to one of the two major parties. This suggests the status quo does not need dramatic change which could be counterproductive.

Indeed. But is a closely hung parliament, in upper and lower houses, likely to produce dramatic change, or is this, in the usual Henderson way, a straw dog, or a piñata in need of a good verbal thrashing?

Happily it's the latter, and a few remarks by Ted Mack - on the ABC, lordy how Henderson loves to listen to the ABC - and Cheryl Kernot, that have set Henderson off. Never mind that Mack is best remembered for getting rid of rubbish bins in the streets of North Sydney, and with 90% of the vote counted, Kernot scored a massive .09% or splendid 3,657 votes in her bid for a NSW Senate seat. These are the kinds of straw dogs which inspire drooling and whacking sticks:

Someone who arrived in Australia from overseas in the past couple of months, and who followed the thoughts of Mack and Kernot, could be forgiven for assuming Australia is a dysfunctional democracy and close to a failed state.

Actually someone who arrived in Australia from overseas in the past couple of months, and who read the thoughts of Gerard Henderson, Janet Albrechtsen, Andrew Bolt, Piers Akerman, Miranda Devine, and a half dozen other commentariat commentators could be forgiven for assuming Australia is a failed state, and a completely dysfunctional democracy.

Actually, to be fair to Henderson, he's more of a sniper, a taker of easy shots and deliverer of nippy asides, and acerbic sour little flourishes, rather than the kind of scatter gun broadside type, personified by the likes of the Devine and Akker Dakker.

Death by a thousand cuts as week by week in his columns he charts how Labor has run, is running, or will run the country off the rails, usually aided and abetted by a skewed lesson in history ...

Well would all these commentariat commentators be correct in their assumption that the Labor party had driven, was driving, and would if given the reins to the chariot, continue to drive the country into the ground? Lordy no:

The facts indicate otherwise. Australia has had perhaps the strongest economy in the Western world for over a decade. Corruption at the federal level, involving politicians and senior public servants, is non-existent. The nation has a relatively low level of ethnic motivated crime and a relatively high level of inter-marriage between ethnic groups. In short, Australia is a prosperous, efficient, law-abiding and tolerant country.

Yes, take that you whingers whining about pink batts and school halls. Take that you no hopers in NSW moping about and complaining about the NSW Labor government. Everything's for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Then it's on to the usual Henderson column fodder filler, with Harold Holt getting rid of the White Australia policy, and even Gough Whitlam - the man singlehandedly responsible for the total ruination of the country for ever and ever and everer - getting an honourable mention.

Then it's noble John Howard helping Malcolm Fraser to start deregulating the economy, and Hawke and Keating carrying it through, and all of it a marvel and a wonder of that totally wondrous thing, the two party system, as efficient and as benevolent as a communist regime swapping leaders and styles every ten years or so.

Oh happy nirvana, oh bliss and joy, and even the trains in NSW run on time.

Oops let's not get totally carried away. Sorry the 5.10 to nowhere is running a half hour late.

As for minor matters like parliamentary reform, and seeing the Canberra boofheads behave in a more polite and civilised way?

Out in the electorate, few care all that much if the prime minister has just delivered a 12 minute answer to a Dorothy Dix question or if the opposition leader has described a minister as a fool or fraud. Such behaviour may well get a run in the evening news bulletins and it may be less than edifying. As the saying goes, such is life.

Indeed. As Ned Kelly was wont to say, in the manner of Joseph Furphy, such is life, and now as the independents hold the balance of power, such indeed is life.

In Henderson's nicely ordered world, the independents belong in the Senate, while the house of reps gets on with the duopoly: The likes of Gillard and Abbott are more accountable than their counterparts in Britain and the United States.

Well yes indeed, and who could doubt, that when compared to the likes of the UK and the United States, that cultural leanings of Australia for make benefit glorious nation in world affairs.

But that's also why the ABC asking soft, civilised questions, and the independents frolicking in the lower house do not presage the end of either the two party system, or the democratic workings of parliament, or reflect a failure of the popular vote.

Australia can tolerate a little eccentricity and a little glorious uncertainty, and the more it torments political commentators, and Liberal barrackers in particular, the more glorious is the uncertainty.

Why it seems even in cricket the game beloved of John Howard (who shamefully only scored two mentions in Henderson's trawl through history), it's the glorious uncertainty that constitutes its chief appeal.

Funny, I would have thought it was more to do with match fixing and corruption and drugs and bunny girls and making out like bandits, but not so according to Rowland Ryder waxing lyrical in Wisden under the header The glorious uncertainty:

Among the myriad delights of cricket, not least is the glorious uncertainty of the game. Nothing is certain in cricket except its uncertainty. It is not likely that a batsman will hit every ball of an over for six; that a last wicket stand will add three hundred runs to the score; that a wicket-keeper will take off his pads and do the hat trick: none of these things are anything more than remotely possible, yet all of them have happened; and improbable events, their duration in time varying from a split second to a long drawn out week, interesting, exhilarating, something unbearably exciting, are happening every year that cricket is played.

Yep, amongst the myriad delights of politics is not least the glorious uncertainty of the game, and here's betting that whoever gets up, the rogues and charlatans on the other side, will do their level best to induce a sense of instability, impending disaster, and catatonic failure in the government and everything it does, as practised by that master of nattering negativity Tony Abbott, who remarkably failed utterly throughout the last year to channel Gerard Henderson's notion that everything is for the best in the best of duopolistic worlds.

Even more remarkable, up until this day, Henderson himself in his scribbles had failed to channel Henderson ... since only today, with the independents nigh and in need of corralling has he discovered that things aren't so bad after all, even under Labor.

Could that be the best indicator of the glorious uncertainty principle? Or simple-minded contrariness where contradiction is a way of life?

Whatever, here at the pond, we're extremely worried about the capacity of dull tram track commentators being able to cope with the uncertainty likely to unfold in the next year, and so offer up these thoughts in favour of the glorious principle of uncertainty:

Without the element of uncertainty, the bringing off of even, the greatest business triumph would be dull, routine, and eminently unsatisfying.
J. Paul Getty
Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.
Karl Von Clausewitz
The future is uncertain... but this uncertainty is at the very heart of human creativity.
Ilya Prigogine
Knowledge would be fatal, it is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things beautiful.
Oscar Wilde
Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing, through the overtaking and possessing of a wish discovers the folly of the chase.
William Congreve
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
Erich Fromm

Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality ... When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others.
Bertrand Russell