The four horsemen of the apocalypse are coming. One for each political party

October 31, 2026 — 2:00am

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At this federal midterm moment, we can see that there are four horsemen of the political apocalypse on the horizon, one bearing down on each of the main political parties.

The parties share the same basic arithmetic problem. None are polling above 30 per cent of the primary vote. It’d be very hard for any of them to win majority government decisively while their primary vote is in the 20s.

But their individual disorders are all different, all potentially fatal.

Labor’s is a kind of delirium about where it is, what it’s doing and its purpose in office. This sort of delirium shares many symptoms with agnosia, the condition made famous by the case of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In that story by neurologist Oliver Sacks, his patient had lost the ability to recognise faces. Leaving the doctor’s clinic, he tried to grab his wife’s head, thinking it to be his hat. In this condition, your senses are working just fine and continue feeding information to the brain. But there’s a breakdown in the brain’s pathways to process the information.

Labor took office with an equity agenda. After nearly a decade of growing inequality under the Coalition, Labor wanted to redress the balance with higher wages for the low-paid and more services such as childcare and aged care. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wanted to be liked. Which political leader doesn’t? Or, if he couldn’t be loved, he was content with being merely not loathed.

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