In the aftermath of the Victorian election, leftist politics are in flux. After a campaign marred by allegations of sexual assault and misogyny, the Greens will likely lose all but one of their seats in the Legislative Council. Rather than gaining the balance of power in the lower house as projected, they lost Northcote and failed to pick up the soft Labor seats of Brunswick and Richmond. Prahran still hangs in the balance.

In the Victorian state elections of December 1908, the Victorian Socialist Party (VSP) – then the largest radical party in Australia – threw down the electoral gauntlet to the Australian Labor Party by running candidates in two inner-city Melbourne seats.

For Trump, nation-building is essentially a form of ‘politically correct’ warfare, in which one tries to sort the good from the bad. The premise of nation-building – that other people were virtuous, ‘yearned for freedom’ and should be liberated from their oppressors, and turned into loyal American allies – is detached from its position on the political right, and re-attached to liberalism/progressivism, which is where it was located from Theodore Roosevelt to the fall of LBJ in 1968.

An Australian politician doesn’t usually become immigration minister all at once. Generally, the portfolio takes some time to work its evil magic on new appointments. Think of the slow desiccation of Liberal moderate Philip Ruddock, transformed, over a period of years, into an animated cadaver clutching an Amnesty badge in its withered claws.

It would take a special sort of demagogue to argue against the essence of Thomas Jefferson’s famous assertion that ‘an enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic’ but we might also reasonably wonder what the upshot of Fray’s ideal of political accountability by fact-check is. Are politicians any more truthful, or even careful, as a result? (There is, in fact, some evidence that the more politicians lie, the better they poll).

The recent breakdown in the Labor-Greens relationship over the issues of voting reform and an alleged preference deal with the Liberal Party has highlighted the fact that it was electoral necessity, rather than ideology and values, which kept the two parties working together.