Crikey

APEC will be done and will leave something of a celebratory afterglow, no matter how desultory and compromised its ultimate declarations. A new parliamentary week will loom for Prime Minister John Howard, who will slip out of his Mambo farting dog shirt after the APEC team shot and fly to Canberra for Monday’s joint sitting to honour visiting Canadian PM Stephen Harper.

How odd that it should be Canada.

As Wikipedia records (on pages as yet undiluted by the office of the Australian Prime Minister and Cabinet):

The Canadian federal election of 1993 was one of the most eventful elections in Canada’s history, with more than half of the electorate switching parties from the 1988 election. The election was called by the new Progressive Conservative Party leader, Prime Minister Kim Campbell, near the end of her party’s five-year mandate. When she assumed office, the party was deeply unpopular and was further weakened by the emergence of new parties that were competing for its core supporters. Campbell’s initial efforts helped the party recover somewhat in pre-election polls before the writs were issued. However, this momentum did not last, and the Conservatives suffered the most lopsided defeat for a governing party at the federal level, losing half their vote from 1988 and all but two of their 151 seats.

Will it be sometime later on Monday that pollster Mark Textor visits the PM to deliver the sort of message that could never be written down, the kind of advice that has to be delivered man to man? What will Textor have learned from that latest surveys of previously undecided voters? Will the pollster have detected a shift in opinion away from the coalition? Will the PM then close his eyes … and think of Canada? Of his own annihilation? Of the only sensible course now left to him?