They can’t help themselves. Despite the ancient warnings against counting chickens and the dreadful memory of the unlosable, but lost, election of 1993, many Liberals and Coalition voters have been hubristically celebrating their victory this weekend well before voting booths opened or party workers began handing out their how-to-votes and long before the scrutineers began challenging dicey ballots. I went to a couple of these ‘premature’ celebrations. One was in the bohemian Pyrmont Bridge Hotel in Sydney. Paul Murray of Sky News welcomed us all to what he described as the monthly meeting of the Pyrmont Chapter of the Liberal Party of Australia. The main item on the agenda was his launching of Rowan Dean’s Beyond Satire, a treasury of cameos from this magazine and the Australian Financial Review chronicling the comic misadventures of the Gillard government from its excruciating creation by Rob Oakeshott in his unforgettable 17-minute speech on 7 September 2010 through to Rudd’s Revenge in June 2013. The leading Labor characters are all there in Dean’s chrestomathy: Julia Caesar, Kevin Sutra, Billy Shortfuse, Grog Combat, Senator Bob Carcass, Nicola Roxoff and Jock McTarantino, not to mention Professor Torn Flannel-Shirt and David Shakesmarr. The work of the ABC’s Q&ALP and Emma Alberquirky are also acknowledged. Murray closed the meeting with a declaration in words unsuitable for this publication to the effect that Rudd is, well, finished. But future generations looking for clues to the extraordinary Rudd-Gillard-Rudd episode in Australian history will find all the guidance they need in Dean’s book.

The US does not have any winning options in Syria. To impose regime change would almost certainly bring the Islamists and al-Qa’eda to power in Damascus. A targeted punitive strike — the Obama option — will achieve little or nothing since the Assad regime will have moved its vulnerable facilities.

The US is reduced to merely symbolic actions. So are we. Australia is president of the UN Security Council but it is subject to the Russian and Chinese veto and remains ‘paralysed’. Kevin Rudd said he would not ‘turn a blind eye’ but he did not say what we can or should do. But he did succeed in misquoting and distorting Tony Abbott’s reasonable comment that the civil war in Syria is largely between two ‘unsavoury’ sides . The use by the Assad regime of chemical weapons is, Abbott said, an unspeakable abomination, but the opposition forces include some which are ‘highly influenced by al-Qa’eda’. He did not, as the shameless Rudd alleged, equate the Syrian National Coalition with the Assad regime; he simply urged caution. We should avoid ‘well-intentioned actions which could end up making a bad situation worse’. Yet there is still one option we can and should adopt and that is to increase the humanitarian aid we already give. We do not have the resources or power to do more.

But what is to be done about the Syrian refugees who now number over two million, about 10 per cent of Syria’s population, in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan? The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, among others, wants Western countries to take in as many as possible.Australia which has already absorbed hundreds of thousands of refugees, legal and illegal, could follow the Howard government’s policy in 1999 when it gave temporary visas to 4,000 Kosovars and returned them to Kosova the following year. The issue came up at the Quadrant dinner last week when the guest speaker Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, suggested that the vast, empty and fabulously wealthy Saudi Arabia, not to mention the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain, should absorb, at least temporarily, thousands of Syrians. Refugees, Pipes said, should ideally go where they best fit in and can stay true to their traditions. They need not, Pipes said, end up in Western countries most of which have Christian or infidel majorities and which ban polygamy, child marriage, slavery, wife-beating, female genital mutilation and honour killing, but tolerate immodestly dressed women, out-of-the-closet gays and lots of pet dogs. Australians would be disposed to do more for Middle Eastern refugees if they saw the rich Arab states setting an example.

I met the television ‘superstar’ Sir David Frost, who died this week, during the awkward Australian interlude in his legendary career. It was in the early 1970s. He invited me to Channel 7 for an interview on some obscure morning program. I was cautious, even a little nervous. He may have been going through a bad patch, but he was still a formidable interviewer. He immediately put me at ease and even managed to suggest that he was immensely enjoying our conversation. I recall only one part of it. I ventured (forgive me!) to touch on the question of the decline of Western civilisation. Frost nodded and quietly agreed. A parliamentary backbencher and a ‘faltering’ broadcaster discussing the end of the world! Not really a Nixon moment in the annals of Australian television, but hard to forget. He was the greatest broadcaster of his time.

When recalling politicians of an earlier age, it is often the unexpected personal touch that sticks in the mind. When the current election is recalled years hence, I should not be surprised if Tony Abbott’s passing remark about himself in his talk the other week at the National Press Club is best remembered : ‘I am not much interested in being personally wealthy. Never have been. Never will be.’ A clue to the real man.