Oh dear. Here we go again.

When Julia Gillard ascended to the prime ministership with that striking combination of statesmanlike grace and savagely bestial avarice, we had all expected something different. She’s new, we thought, she’s fresh. She wears strangely fascinating pantsuits and an innovative, outside-the-box hairdo. She has breasts etc. Surely, we thought, a new kind of leadership is upon us, a more thoughtful, creative kind, the kind of leadership that says, old ideas are old, and new ideas are new, and one is better than the other: let’s put on our thinking caps and figure out which.

But apparently such a leadership is not upon us at all. Apparently, the leadership we are now lumbered with is less the kind that uses the power of ideas to bring about strange and wonderful changes in our society than the kind that just sits around scratching itself and occasionally updating the budget. Where we had hoped for a government that would soar like a glorious bird of paradise, we get one that remains earthbound, wheezing and waddling like an elderly dodo, shuffling about in the dirt until finally its dull wits and slothfulness catch up with it and it is mercifully eaten by a hungry pig or Liberal.

This is the revelation that smacked me wetly in the face when I heard our so-called Prime Minister claim that Australia had to “move forward”, and I promptly threw up all over my children.

“Move forward”, Ms Gillard? Is that the best you can do to come up with a vision for our country? Forward motion? Spare me. What is the point of changing prime ministers if all they do is tell us to move forward? We’ve been moving forward for years, and it hasn’t got us anywhere.

The Howard years? Nothing but moving forward. Hawke? Constant advancing. Chifley? Couldn’t go five minutes without proceeding to the front. And yet, despite having moved forward for 109 years since Federation, still we find ourselves getting into the same old messes: government debt, insecure borders, Peter Garrett. When will we learn?

The real problem, of course, is not that Gillard is being wilfully unoriginal. She simply doesn’t know any better. As she said herself, she believes Australia’s future is “a choice about whether we move forward or back”. But this, I’m afraid, is a classic example of what professional logicians such as myself call “the false dilemma”.

Why must we move forward or back? Obviously those are not the only directions that exist. For one thing, we could move sideways. In many ways, this would be to our advantage: instead of blundering mindlessly forward, or stepping timorously back, we would leap nimbly from side to side, skipping lightly from right foot to left, baffling our enemies, who would be unable to draw a bead on us. I think you can see the benefits: let’s see Frank Bainimarama expel a diplomat who keeps leaping out of his eyeline! He wouldn’t stand a chance. We would be the most agile, elusive country going around, the Great Southern Ninja of the G20.

And sideways isn’t even the end of it. We could move up. Or down! We could be Australia, The Tunnelling Nation. That’s what you call carving out a niche, and it’s exactly the kind of progressive thinking we expect from our first ovarian PM. Sadly though, exactly the kind of progressive thinking we’re not getting.

No, this country won’t be ducking to the left, or weaving to the right, or burrowing straight down, or leaping without warning up above its own head, any time soon. We’re stuck moving forward, because, apparently, it’s either that or move back.

And come to that, even if it IS such a choice – what’s wrong with moving back anyway? Back isn’t such a bad direction, is it? Perhaps the reason why the Labor government found itself running into the catalogue of catastrophes that led to Kevin Rudd’s tragic metamorphosis from the popular phenomenon of ’07  to the nightmare-haunting living corpse of ’10 was the erstwhile PM’s refusal to countenance the potential pluses of backward momentum.

Don’t we all feel like moving back once in a while? To a happier and simpler mode of being? To a world that was less frighteningly complex, without queue-jumping boat people to shatter our idylls, or fluid sexualities to furrow our brows? Wouldn’t we feel an enormous sense of relief if a politician, just for once, said, “The future is scary. Let’s go back a bit and have a lie-down”?

Couldn’t Gillard have done that? Couldn’t she have admitted that every time we look back, we see how much better it is back there, and promised to devote her energies to reversing the good ship Australia’s engines?

Unfortunately, it seems not. Our course is set. The die is cast. We shall continue moving forward, no matter what nasty surprises lurk in our path. There may be economic ruin. There may be uncontrollable population growth. There may be Barnaby Joyce. And when those chickens come home to roost, remember who insisted on this. Remember who refused to countenance a backward step, a sideways shimmy, or a diagonally up and to the left hop. Remember who promised so much, but delivered only progress.

It’s time for us, as a mature, free-thinking nation, to look to the future and have the guts to say: let’s run as far in the opposite direction as we possibly can.