Brand recognition is crucial to election success. That’s why you can’t walk three feet in an election year without being confronted by someone’s face on a billboard, T-shirt, or passing bus.

Politicians are essentially the Hollywood celebrities who sell tickets to over-priced blockbusters.

Sometimes the audience wants action thrillers. Sometimes they demand musicals.

Today, the voting public is obsessed with disaster flicks reminiscent of the 90s. Everyone wants to watch their favourite landmarks being destroyed by aliens, tidal waves, terrorists, and bureaucrats.

America is screening, Trump Tower Two, Deep State Reckoning while the UK is gripped by the runaway successes of Reform-ation and the black comedy, Four Peace Summits and an Unwilling Coalition. Europe is sticking with its direct-to-Neflix post-apocalyptic documentary Overrun where Germany accidentally starts its third global war by offering to save a billion climate refugees from a zombie bat virus.

Australia’s political theatre has twice the budget of its international peers with a fraction of the talent.

The upcoming film, The Day After Net Zero, is already attracting negative press for casting two rich middle-aged straight white male leads, ruling it out of the award season thanks to a lack of diversity.

It’s also a sequel to a sequel to a sequel to an original horror created by some obscure bloke known for kayaking around his harbourside mansion.

How many times can you tell people the world is about to end, force them to sit through three-years of disclaimers, and then reveal the real existential threat to be nearly a trillion dollars of debt?

The only good part of this story is the scoop from the research firm Redbridge that reported 25 per cent of its respondents had no bloody idea who Adam Bandt was.

Worse, that figure was even higher among Greens voters, at 31 per cent.

It’s unclear who is at fault here: Bandt or his clueless voters.

Redbridge went on to reveal that the people who disagreed with Mr Bandt were the most likely to recognise him.

It’s the equivalent of a D-list celebrity being shooed off the red carpet by an usher who has mistaken them for an Uber driver after they arrived on an e-bike.

According to the ABC, ‘[Mr Bandt] is best-known among the over-65s, among people who own their houses outright, and among those who describe themselves as being under no financial stress.’

In contrast, the voters who were least likely to know his face were ‘renters (33 per cent), young people (39 per cent), and people describing themselves as under a “great deal” of financial stress.’

Living the champagne socialist trope.

All of this suggests that the enduring popularity of Green parties across the West has very little to do with their either unknown or unlikable cast of leaders, and more to do with the market saturation of ‘green is good’.

It will take a while for people to expunge this fallacy from their psyche as they sober up to reality.

That said, Australian voters really should know Adam Bandt’s name, because he shows promise as a writer for the next great disaster film.

On March 13, Mr Bandt tweeted:

‘It’s crystal clear that Trump is a danger. Harsh words then business as usual are not enough from us. It is time to cancel Aukus and start acting in our country’s own interests.’

Because what could possibly go wrong with breaking a defence pact with the world’s most powerful military while the communists do laps around the island?

‘We’re all closer to becoming climate refugees than we are billionaires…’ complained Mr Bandt in February, despite racking up nearly $1 million taxpayer bill which includes riding on private jets. I can see old Leonardo DiCaprio giving him a pat on the back for that one.

It is impossible to write seriously about this absurdity.

We are forced to pay for the privilege of watching a poorly-written, predictable, boring, expensive, and lazy veneer of leadership strut around in front of an adoring press gallery.

Media giants praise Mr Dutton for his brilliance if he manages to make it one lap of the red carpet without tripping on his own dress, meanwhile Albanese perches on the nearest boom mic like a trained parrot squawking campaign lines. ‘Mediscare! Mediscare! Mediscare!’

If only the election could be switched off, but alas, the show goes on.

Flat White is written by Alexandra Marshall. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.