I forgot to vote last Saturday, so I am expecting arrest by the Australian Political Police at any moment. We are legally beholden to vote here in Australia – well, no thinking person would want to  spend time going to the polling station to vote for most of the no-hopers who present themselves for election here unless forced to.

However, I wanted to vote, for what little good it might do, and am very annoyed with myself for forgetting. But there is nothing I can do about it now. Why did none of the idiots who pestered us over the phone for weeks, with their wretched polls and political messages, do something as useful as phone us on polling day with a reminder to vote?

Not that I could have influenced the final result. Unfortunately we have new generations of voters who are unaware of the disastrous results of voting for the Liberal party in the past. Or perhaps they don’t believe it could happen again – just like they know that the tooth fairy exists.

For the record, about 20 years ago we – for I was one of the idiots who voted for them – gave the Liberal party in South Australia such a huge majority that the Labor party should have become an historical footnote. Then the Liberals discarded Premier Dean Brown, inserted John Olsen into a ‘safe’ seat and established him as Premier.

Olsen had slunk away into the Senate in a snit when the voters had previously rejected him and only came crawling back when he saw that the Liberals were on a roll. He later reportedly lied to a judicial enquiry about questionable deals that he was involved in – although he escaped prosecution, as major politicians invariably do – and resigned in disgrace; leaving behind him a bankrupt State in chaos.

(To be strictly accurate, the bankruptcy was a legacy of Tim Marcus Clark who, during the preceding Labor government, ran the State Bank into the ground, somehow escaped paying all but a trivial amount of the damages for which he was liable (and most of THAT was paid by his wife) and retired to live out his days in luxury in Sydney. Another fine Liberal no doubt.)

The Labor Party that inherited this mess were not people for whom I would vote; yet for the past 16 years they have struggled against odds to put things right and have done a pretty good job of it. They have been forward looking, embracing alternative energy sources and reducing our reliance on power transmitted from other States. They have fought to gain manufacturing and shipbuilding opportunities for South Australia and to improve the quality of our education system and hospitals.

Now we have a Premier whose stated ambition seems to be to lead us back into the beginning of the previous century, with our electricity derived from coal-fired, outdated, polluting, power stations located in other States. We were World leaders in innovation for a brief moment; now that’s apparently being thrown away. Perhaps a previous career in daddy’s furniture manufacturing business does little to develop ambitious dreams and broad horizons.

I don’t suppose he will do the sort of shonky dealing that Olsen reputedly engaged in; I doubt that he has the initiative. So, unless we are fortunate enough to experience some major crisis, we have four years of tedium and stagnation to look forward to.

Sometimes I have a yearning for tumbrils.