Looking back over the last political year, I could not help but reflect that we certainly send some interesting representatives from Victoria to sit in the federal parliament. Two of them made a mark in the last sitting week, Senator Lidia Thorpe, the firebrand renegade who left the Greens because it was not left-wing enough for her and Senator Ralph Babet who was elected to the last remaining Senate spot for Victoria with the help of a $100 million donation from Clive Palmer. The two senators are like chalk and cheese but this time they formed a unity ticket in both being censured by the Senate for bad behaviour, Thorpe for her anti-monarchy rant and personalised insult in front of King Charles, and Babet for posting allegedly ‘racist and homophobic slurs’ on social media. The penalty in Thorpe’s case was censure and being banned from official overseas trips, the equivalent of capital punishment with extreme prejudice in politics and made the more severe by the Star Chamber passing the motion in her absence. Babet’s censure also took place in his absence and without a hearing, a regular feature of all repressive regimes. Naturally, the mainstream media piled onto them and revelled in the condemnation of Thorpe and Babet by their colleagues; it is guaranteed these days that if anyone dares express an opinion that the priestly class of the media dislikes, they will be abused even for having the audacity to speak.

But if their lordships in the Senate had paused and asked if punishing senators with draconian penalties for speaking their minds is really what the Senate should be doing, they might have curbed their enthusiasm and let the two senators say whatever they liked. Senators might even have thought, as I do, that it is wrong in principle to censure two elected representatives for speaking their mind when they were elected to do exactly that. Their role is fundamental to a working democracy even if they are out of step with their colleagues and the prevailing community sentiment. In fact, there are real advantages in letting them do it, no matter how silly or extreme they may be.  Thorpe’s outburst, for example, showed the true value of the monarchy, with the King showing grace under fire, a symbol of dignity, charm and stability in contrast to Thorpe’s demented ravings. She did more for the monarchy than a dozen royal visits. Many people would undoubtedly have thought that if Thorpe is what a republic entails, we want to keep the monarchy, a desire endorsed overwhelmingly in the latest opinion poll and a more recent one that Thorpe is the least likeable politician in Australia. Her Amazonian rampage must also have convinced anyone who saw it that they would rather have nothing to do with the left-wing nonsense she spouts about colonialism and her extremist First Nations mumbo-jumbo.

Moreover, the real effect of Senator Babet’s ‘racist and homophobic slurs’ must surely have been to alienate others from adopting the same opinions, not to enlist support for them. We are now following a worrying trend in this country of stifling other peoples’ right to speak, and it is doubly bad if it spreads to silencing and punishing our elected representatives for speaking their minds, no matter how vacuous their minds or how eccentric their opinions.

Not long ago, I warned that the negotiations on the Victorian Aboriginal Treaty would soon be underway. I was right, because our Premier announced that as of 21 November they had begun. She announced this with the usual blandishments that ‘Treaty is not about blaming or shaming’, not about ‘finger pointing’ and ‘not about pulling us backwards – or apart’; oh no, it is about ‘moving us forward, together’. There were so many meaningless clichés in her announcement that even Kamala Harris would have blushed. But what was absent yet again was any assurance that while we are moving forward together, we will have some say in what the so-called treaty should or should not contain, unless of course we are part of the elite of self-appointed indigenous powerbrokers. Instead, it will be the almighty government and only the government who will be negotiating with this elite. Worse still, it is now clear that we will not even have a vote on the final form of the treaty. It is alarming that Peter Dutton and the Coalition have made no protest about this ramrod process and that they are letting a fantastic opportunity pass by to show that they actually stand for something, namely that treaties are the sole responsibility of the federal government, that any state-based treaty will be rescinded under the federal power and that race-based deals will never be allowed. Surely, the win on the Voice referendum shows how well this position would be received by the people.

I am glad I prepared you for the final showdown in my electorate of Prahran which has now occurred. The local member with the wandering member, Sam Hibbins, has now resigned from both the Greens and the parliament and there will be a by-election on 9 February. He pulled the plug when a new allegation emerged that not only did he have an illicit relationship with a member of his own staff, which he disingenuously excused as being ‘consensual’ and finished, but he had also tried to kiss a female intern and been barred from the parliament’s intern program as a result, no doubt to the relief of potential female interns. Why am I wallowing in this unseemly spectacle? Because it shows yet again the monumental hypocrisy of the morally superior and censorious Greens, who I trust the good people of Prahran will reject at the by-election. The ALP is not running a candidate, which is probably just as well in view of its latest tax grab, increasing the so-called motor vehicle congestion tax, so that we can all share in strangling Melbourne, naturally while we are all moving forward, together.