Mainstream Australian politics at the moment, resembles, well, I can’t decide on the metaphor — either the middle act of The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant or Looney Tunes “Wabbit Season! Duck Season!” (no, I’m not going to link because you’ll just go and watch it straight away). Every day brings a new headline saying that one party and one party only is weak and discredited — but the party changes with each headline.

Labor, the party that, in or out of power, has dominated Australian politics for a century, is rejoicing over cracking a 37% primary vote — “we did it! High five!” — but only because the Coalition has suddenly crashed from a 40%-plus primary to 34%, as One Nation has surged to a stable 10% national primary.

That is obviously worse news for the Coalition because, as the name suggests, they’re not one party but two. As far as I can tell, the current polls don’t disaggregate to see which of the two parties the bulk of that 10% is coming from, and it presumably swings from seat to seat, in a fashion capable of annihilating MPs from both parties. The reactionariat is marking their rise as the new “third force” in Australian politics, “eclipsing the Greens!”, according to Graham Richardson. Well, no, they’re both on 10%. But the Greens are rock solid, have state members, local council members, and stable institutional structures, and One Nation is a party reverse-engineered from the latest version of Senate voting.

Still and all, mainstream Australian politics is in a state of slow-motion collapse. The loathing for the people on both sides is immense: for Turnbull as the guy who took a lot of people for a ride, and for Shorten as being the guy whose sole achievement appears to be that he had a bus (“an empty bus pulled up, and Bill Shorten got out … with the entire shadow cabinet following him down the steps”). Though it is collapsing slower than elsewhere, it would be collapsing faster, had not the major parties engineered the triple lock — compulsory voting and exhaustive lower-house preferences in the 1910s and ’20s, public funding of parties by received vote later on — that has protected them against split and recombination ever since.

[Rundle: not even penalty rates cut will drive voters back into Labor’s arms]

The “triple lock” has given Australia a false sense that it has a stable political culture; in reality it has nothing more than a stable institutional system. But though the system has protected itself for decades, it only did so when there was a real right-left politics, when those two terms described opposing forces with completely different ideas about how to run the world. Once that was over, the machine reversed.

The institutional stability attracted not people who wanted to wield power to make change, but student political hacks, who had made an accurate assessment of their limited abilities, and were attracted to a caste-like system, with sinecures and oodles of gumment free money and bludge jobs on financial sector boards at the other end. A political version of Gresham’s Law — “bad money drives out good” — takes over and works in combination with the Peter Principle.* The recruits are poor, and they quickly take on roles beyond their abilities, thus encouraging even less competent people to dare to imagine that a career as a professional politician might be for them.

This is why you get what you didn’t used to see from mainstream ministries and shadow ministries: stunning incompetence, combined with an absolute lack of purpose. Ministers who can’t get through a simple interview, departments that appear to be run by nobody, a party like Labor that has now gone 21 years without redefining an idea of social democracy (save for the Rudd period, the rule-proving exception, where the parasite took over the host’s brain and began to operate its limbs like a toy).

That is why Australian politics has been weak at the centre since the departure of John Howard. Howard, Keating, Hawke, and everyone before them had had their politics formed in the Cold War (or, in Hawke’s case, at the every beginning of it — Ol’ Silver really is an antique these days), and something was at stake. They’d also been formed in an era less dominated by abstract media — their selfhoods were formed in more bounded face-to-face communities, and were thus stable and bounded in their turn.

[The world is upside down, and traditional parties don’t know how to right it]

Those that came after were born into a different era, when selfhood has to be made and remade incessantly, amid a media flux. And, well, you can see the result: Latham, Rudd, Abbott, Turnbull. These are all men making themselves up, on the go, moving forward while driving in reverse, while they regard themselves in the rear-view mirror. Gillard is the exception, in part because women — witness Theresa May and Angela Merkel and, God help us, Marine Le Pen — are genuinely far less subject to that sort of narcissism.** That sort.

Tragedy, then tragedy-as-farce, then farce-as-commedia–dell–arte-done-by-a-Warracknabeal-based-troupe-funded-by-Rural-Affairs-to-stop-kids-cutting-themselves. That’s Oz politics at the moment. Abbott’s launch last-week of a Connor Court book with the Dumb-and-Dumber title Making Australia Right — replete with crazed, resentful, shit cartoon on the cover — may as well have been done in falling-down-pants and enormous shoes. The ridiculous idea of these men — the so-called Deplorables — that they can revive populism from inside a major party, and represent themselves as the scourge of t.e.h elitez, is a joy to behold.

So why hasn’t mainstream politics been knocked for six decisively — aside from the capacity for the smooth institutional reproduction of the system? The answer is that it has a triple weakness, the hard right having now spent 20 years, off and on, in its current iteration, failing to get its own clown act together. This is due to much-discussed reasons — the lack of a real conservative movement, or of an entire subculture, headed by a Fox News type element — which could serve as an incubator*** for halfway effective leaders. Also of course, the textbook subversion of them run by Abbott (with old Cold Warrior Peter Coleman acting as consigliere), which ended with Hanson and her unnamed official in prison****. Which was, of course, the making of her once again. One Nation are far from hopeless — Hanson appears to have honed her media skills, and, if the appointment of James Ashby is any indication, failed to hone any others.

But someone is coming, woman or man, who will finally pull the Australian hard right into shape. I would say they’re two years away at most. They’ll be someone with political nous, organisational skill, sufficient rationality to take advice and hire good people — but also have a genuine outsider quality. They’ll either work with Pauline, if she can be worked with, or, if they have sufficient charisma of their own, push her aside with a “thank you for your service”. When that happens — and I think the trajectory of global economies, class and politics means that it cannot not happen — One Nation, or its successor, will streak past the Greens, gut the Nationals, and eat into the Liberals’ primary, no matter how far to the right they go. This will happen.

Or it may not. Duck Season! Wabbit Theathon!

*in large organisations, everyone rises to a level above their abilities, their level of incompetence; once there, they move up no higher, but prove impossible to remove. Gradually, like a pyramid scheme, from the top down, the entire managerial body of the organisation becomes filled with people who are incompetent at their given job.

**Hillary didn’t get the benefit of that; part of her problem was that she never put a stop to the cult of personality strategy that grew around her. She was married to the greatest political narcissist of modern times; one suspects it may have rubbed off in the Oval Office, which is, after all, what Bill Clinton was known for.

***don’t make me reference Trotsky’s observation that the British Fabian Society were like pigeon chicks too weak to break out of their own shell, ’cause I will if I have to.

****could have been worse; at least it wasn’t a death squad, and a shallow grave.