Labor leader Anthony Albanese (Image: AAP/Bianca De Marchi)

The return of Barnaby Joyce to the front line is a measure of the distinctiveness of Australian politics. Not in his ability to come back from scandal. Boris Johnston and Donald Trump are proof you can get away with anything and prosper.

No, it’s in the nickname. Whatever their excesses I can’t see the British or American polities calmly accepting the return of a man known as “the Beetrooter” — or given Joyce’s run-in with the COVID cops, the “unmasked Beetrooter”.

It’s another example of the paradox of Australian iconoclasm. Oh, look at us, we go, no hoity-toity airs and graces we. No, we’ll call ’em how they are… as we re-elect them time after time. What does it mean when a root vegetable rises again? That’s kinda what they’re meant to do, right? I see in my mind’s eye a whole tableau of the rolling away of the rock, done with primary produce, the Beetrooter risen again, Mary and co. as zucchini, Pilate as a prize-winning pumpkin etc, etc.

But of course the greatest obstacle to the success of anything involving Barnaby is that it involves Barnaby. The haha honourable member gains populist support because he says what he thinks and what he thinks is like an Hieronymous Bosch picture. He’s a rural Catholic from an area in central south Queensland which for decades was a centre of the League of Rights, secessionism, rural anti-Semitism, the works. That’s how, when he was haha shadow finance minister, he came out with all that stuff about the US defaulting, the sins of debt etc. Because that’s what you want in a finance minister — someone who talks about usury.

So there’s nothing remarkable about him talking of “burning flesh”, with regard to the COVID impact on Melbourne, because in his mind we are the damned of hell. (Barnaby once found Canberra to be too much of a megalopolis; when first elected, he mused aloud as to whether senators could vote online, from home, so they could be with their families. Funny old world.)

Was this deranged comment — I presume it refers to the cremation of those who died during the 2020 outbreak — a planned outrage, a flare shot into the sky such as could be seen in rural Queensland, to leave no doubt that Barnaby was back? Or was it case of Barnaby believing his own publicity and playing to his image?

Barnaby is always out there because — at least on the evidence of his books, interviews, comments etc — he’s a needy, wheedling, whining mess; a spluttering burko always on the boil, red as the heating ring beneath it. And, Barnaby, ring, joke requires some assembly. Listen to his taped comments to a pub full of farmers in the Riverina about gaming the Murray-Darling system in their interest. It’s sycophantic, the nerdy, neckless country accountant the shade of a safety lamp trying to impress these sons of the soil.

But the Coalition believes they can probably get away with this, because Labor is unwilling to really slam home the obvious point: that Joyce’s sick remark, with some vague fascistic evocation — strength through Joyce — is just hate, actual hate, directed at an entire section of the Australian population.

What would it be for Labor to say to the suburbs, not, as spokesperson Andrew Giles said, it was “disgusting” and unbecoming of the office of blah-blah, but, look, they hate you! They hold you in contempt! And they want us to subsidise them! This is the Coalition for you! That would set off a bit of panic in marginal Liberal seats…

This is the fundamental asymmetry of our politics today. The Coalition has more chance of getting away with a contradictory populism, playing to anti-system and anti-elite sentiments from within power, because Labor cannot fully play to its strength, which would be as the party of rational modernity — of making a future Australia — against the ragtag of obsessions, bids, spin and pandering that now constitute the Coalition program.

In this alternative scenario, Labor would make the case that the Coalition aren’t fit for purpose, and do so by joining up the bits and showing that each is an expression of all.

That is, that the failed vaccine rollout is like the gas-fired power station mess, is like the Australians stranded overseas mess, is like the Biloela family mess, is like the car park rorts, is like ARENA money for fossil fuels. It’s that this government is criminally, stupid, incompetent, lazy and dishonest, and shouldn’t be anywhere near power. Labor is doing that to a degree, in a piecemeal way. What’s stopping them from really hammering it home?

The city-country split is. Labor is still hanging back from a full-frontal assault from some of the hopes and dreams that part of rural Australia is clinging to, and that the Coalition is willing to play up shamelessly. By doing so, they are limiting their capacity to attack, in the cities, the weakness and dereliction of the Liberal Party in their fostering of the worst of the National Party. If they were willing to do this, it’s arguable, they could easily roll over enough suburban seats to win government.

This they will not do. Yet the electoral maths suggests it. The ten most marginal Coalition seats are mostly suburban-urban — as are three or four ultra-marginals Labor has to defend against the Coalition, so that it doesn’t make gains, but get fought to a loss. Freed of the need to tiptoe softly-softly around rural and regional hurt feelings, Labor could let rip in Chisholm, in Boothby, in Swan — and it needs to do be able to do so to hold seats like Macquarie and Lilley.

But in really doing so effectively, it’s going to have to target the geographical specificity of pork-barreling and inefficiency, and make it somewhat about the city-country divide. It has to make the true enemy not Barnaby, but Matt Canavan, and the true scandal that he wants special treatment for his own, while people in the city are doing it just as tough, if not harder.

Labor also has to face the hard truth that their path to government in a narrow election, means having the Coalition pulled below both majority and plurality by the election of Greens and independents, in places like Higgins and Wentworth, and that it needs to assist them in doing so with a full-frontal assault on the Coalition.

They may not like it, and the party’s right would rather lose an election than do it, but, well, take a look at the pendulum. Barring a surging victory, they ain’t going to do it any other way. And surging victories, much less landslides, ain’t coming anytime soon. How long does the Labor Right think it can stand being out of power, before the whole show starts to come apart?

How do they get away with resurrecting the Beetrooter, when he is willing to tell a whole city of his fellow citizens that he’ll hold a barbie while they burn? Because all these things are atomised and isolated, and so objecting to them sounds like lamely petitioning the power that is. Making the case for an alternative means identifying them as manifestations of a common condition, and then making the case against it.

Labor not only has to convince people not to vote Liberal; it has to persuade enough of them that voting Liberal is now unthinkable. Identify them as vegetables, then crucify them. For lo, the Beetrooter is risen.