Lock up criminally minded children and teach them a firm lesson. Mind your cars, mind your keys. Chat about the Olympics and moan about whether stadia should be built or refurbished. Mumble about water, dams, and roads. Bridges for cassowaries that are not used by those magnificent yet inconsiderate birds. Marvel at members of parliament with duplicate names such as Grace Grace.

Clichés so clotted they would build the tower of Babel, including a nice touch by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: a presenter dressed in garish pink blending into the counting board and talking down to her audience.

Queensland did what it almost always does in elections: provoke, confute, and confuse the pundits. It remains, at heart, politically contradictory. As one of Australia’s most conservative states, it also produced one of the world’s first socialist governments, if only for a week, in 1899. With acid sharpness, a certain Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, scornful of a workers’ party that left capitalism fundamentally untouched, gave a summation of the Australian Labor Party and, inadvertently, its Queensland legacy in June 1913: “The Australian Labor Party does not even call itself a socialist party. Actually it is a liberal-bourgeois party, while the so-called Liberals in Australia are really conservatives.”

During this election cycle, the........

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