By Fred Pawle

This election is becoming a test for who can hold the most contradictory opinions at once about religion, immigration, housing and what’s left of our culture. Albo, aka Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, will win it in a canter.

If Prime Minister Anthony Albanese looked self-conscious while chatting to the Most Reverend Archbishop Anthony Fisher after Mass at Saint Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney on Easter Sunday, it wasn’t only because he needed to make amends for having mistakenly wished the nation a lamentable “Happy Easter weekend” from his dogs two days earlier.

Albo’s self-consciousness could also be attributed to the fact that while the Archbishop talked in his ecclesiastic style about this and that, just over his shoulder, across the road from the cathedral, was Hyde Park, the starting point of the annual procession that is much closer to Albo’s heart and social circles, the gay Mardi Gras.

It’s a no-brainer, really. Celibate men in dresses serving vinegar-tasting wine and talking about Christ’s sacrifice, or occasionally overweight promiscuous men in sequinned underpants buzzing on party drugs and gaily abandoning the oppressive restrictions of religious persecution, all broadcast live by the rainbow collective itself, ABC TV.

Last month’s Mardi Gras, at which Albo was one of the star participants, even included a couple of traditional indigenous gay men re-enacting Christ’s crucifixion as if it was performance art for a sado-masochistic night club, a travesty Albo thought not offensive enough to require distancing himself from. Why would he? He’s a secular atheist republican. Iconoclasm is what won him the Prime Ministership in the first place.

This federal election campaign has not been a strenuous test of the candidates’ intellect or charisma, but it has tested their ability to hold two contradictory thoughts or take two contradictory stances at once as they move from one isolated fragment of Australian society to another soliciting votes with money and obsequious affection.

Albo’s opponent Peter Dutton has tried, but he’s a mere novice in the presence of the master, whose ability to adopt whatever demeanours are demanded by widely varying circumstances is unrivalled. Not only can Albo attend two fundamentally contradictory events — the Mardi Gras and Easter Sunday Mass — only a month apart, but for all we know he managed to endure the Easter service by privately recalling more exciting highlights from the extravaganza while the clergy talked about Christ’s painful death or ascension into Heaven or whatever.

There are times, however, when the poker face slips. Albo’s no saint, after all. A man can only maintain the illusion of interest for so long until he must let his real self off the leash.

There was once such moment last Tuesday, and it was for me the defining and most realistic moment of the entire campaign so far. Albo was in the foyer of the Grand Hyatt in Melbourne, passing time looking at his phone until the next choreographed event for the media began, when an ordinary bloke snuck in and approached for a chat.

“Mr Albanese, I have a question for you on behalf of hundreds of thousands of Australians around the country,” he said, holding his camera in front of him.

Clearly, he wanted to talk about the cost of housing and the rate of immigration.

Can you imagine? The absolute nerve of the bloke.

Albo looked at him in the way an overfed rabbi would look at a bacon sandwich. The footage is poorly lit, and Albo’s security cordon are well trained in taking a shot for their leader — well, a shot from a handheld low-resolution camera, at least — but his expression could not have been better captured if it was painted by Caravaggio. Albo’s contempt for this humble voter was part bewilderment that the bloke had got this close and part don’t you know who I am? He seemed to enjoy conveying his disdain to the uppity pleb for a second or two, then looked away, flicking his wrist limply like a diva who wants to wave away a fly but is worried she might scratch her $200 nail job.

The audacity of this moment was compounded by the fact that the very next day, Albo slipped on a high-vis vest and walked around a building site in Melbourne, excitedly expounding his government’s program to build hundred of thousands of homes, starting with the two being built at that very site. Utter contempt one day, smiling for the cameras the next.

Perhaps this rapid transition is just a psyop. Ordinary people are so outraged by Albo’s fake concern for the homeless that they overlook the even more outrageous proposition that the government needs to urgently become a construction company, an idea that is quickly and surreptitiously being normalised. You can imagine the attraction for Albo — more opportunities to strike deals with unions, more control over ordinary people’s lives. If this is Albo’s actual goal, he’s doing a fine job of getting away with it.

He is also getting away with ignoring a plethora of issues that really should be addressed at this stage of our “democratic” cycle. Has anyone pressed the government on the ethnicity of the men who burned a woman to death in a car in Sydney on Saturday night after bashing her child almost to death? What about the Middle Eastern migrants convicted of defrauding the NDIS and tax office of $5.8 million? Or the bloke charged with raping an 84-year-old woman in Sydney, whose name is a long way from Smith or Jones? Or what about the rumours of absurd new taxes Labor already has on the drawing board, but isn’t telling us about yet, to pay for all their extravagant election pork-barreling?

Australians have enormous, legitimate concerns that their country is disappearing down the gurgler and neither the government nor the opposition is even slightly interested in discussing ways to turn it around.

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Fred Pawle is one of Australia’s most experienced journalists. He worked for many years at The Australian newspaper. Surfer, veteran journalist and author Fred Pawle brings a larrikin perspective to the issues that perplex ordinary Australians. Are you bewildered by the conformity of politics, the idiocy of academia and the cultural authoritarianism of corporations? So is Fred. His scathing yet lyrical writing style presents a uniquely entertaining take on the Land Down Under.