If you have a go, you’ll get a go, he said.

Kicked back in a banana lounge, sipping pina coladas, hanging loose in a Hawaiian shirt. Not one of those orange ones made with his smirking mug to raise funds for underfunded fire services trying to save his country while it burned.

Another fire broke out in two hundred and eighty characters.

Hashtag where the bloody hell are you?

Nothing to see here said Scotty from Marketing, billions of tonnes of carbon leeching into the atmosphere, smoke choking cities. We’re doing our bit for climate change with creative accounting.

…but who counts the cost?

We’re back in the black, you bet we are. The whole east coast like charcoal, like that lump of coal you took to the house before it was cleaned. Dirty black smoke, soot so thick it turns snow capped mountains across the Tasman brown.

You don’t hold a hose, oh no. You try to fill your hands with the hands of those who don’t want to hold you in their grief because it should be you doing the holding.

But your hands are empty like your words designed for billboards and sound bites to entice us to buy something we don’t need and are disappointed in when we do.

How good is the cricket though?

You’ve thrown that curve ball before, so many times we know how to catch it, know it’s a distraction from your inaction on so many things. You won people with your words, but words are cheap and hopes and prayers will not win you this game.

Maybe you should make a pavlova this weekend and put a strawberry on it.

And you may well understand people are angry, but you should take it personally because politics is personal and anger is a seed that grows.

In two more turns, when we turn our eyes on you in your Canberra bubble with your smirking grin, we may just turn our backs. Because we have seen through, and we know what you do.

Nothing is not an answer when our house is on fire, and we’ve already gone down to the wire.

The quiet Australians got you in, but their patience is thin and I saw Australia burn from my balcony one day. Now it is you who flares like embers lighting up the night sky, a shooting star set to flash and burn.

But you were never my prime minister.

Image: Adelaide Festival Exhibit