It is a pity that a greater number of Australians either don’t know that, or – worse – don’t care about it.

Just think about that in Bendigo. Would we now have this astonishing new hospital without politics? Or the beautiful Ulumbarra Theatre? Or View Street? Or the art gallery? Good roads? The brilliant Calder Freeway? Peaceful forests? They were all facilitated by politics.

Bushwhacked would like $1 for every time in the past decade people moaned about politics, how bad it is, how crook MPs are, how argumentative they are, how richly rewarded they are. And so on, and on.

Hardly a single TV news(ish) program is aired without someone rolling his or her eyes at politics and dredging a cheap, sarcastic giggle from an audience.

And, while we’re in quoting mood, let’s revisit 19th century French commentator, Joseph de Maistre: “Every society gets the government it deserves.”

Now, the likelihood is that you feel these two quotes to be true, based purely on the fact that you are reading this in a newspaper or on a newspaper’s website. You’re an exception.

The sad fact is that all those eye-rollers and sarcasm-drenched people don’t read news in any real sense. Not in the sense of someone searching for information to help them make sense of the world. Mostly they’re looking for swim-suit pix dressed up as news or piano-playing cats, which reinforce their misguided view that they are smart and connected.

I came to this conclusion this week while lolling on the sofa trying not to drown in a surplus of muck in the lungs. I was watching the Australian version of The Chaser, a very good common knowledge TV show.  

The amount of times that Australian contestants under the age of, say, 40 demonstrate an appalling ignorance about modern Australian politics, our system of government and of members of Parliament is disgraceful.

Here we have young urban professionals, all girded with their apps and abs, who could not tell you that the immediate past Prime Minister is Tony Abbott. Or that the Victorian Premier is Daniel Andrews. Or that our Governor General is Sir Peter Cosgrove. They are obsessed with the Kardashians and ignorant of what’s happening in Canberra.

Do we need ask therefore why nearly every Victorian or national election in recent years has been close to a hung parliament, with an increasing number of single-issue road-block MPs effectively stalling any genuine efforts at public administration?

It has often been remarked on, that as the digital age overtakes civilisation, societies are becoming dumber. We keep going back to the hustings, asking people to make informed decisions and they keep getting the same result time after time. This should not be surprising, because a definition of madness is the repetition of an act and expecting a different outcome.

But, sarcasm-sprayers blame the MPs, the politically active, the political organisations.This is like blaming a car because it ran out of petrol, or because the tyres were bald.

Long-term studies in the US show that the accelerating decline in the number of newspapers leads to lower social participation by communities, poorer political outcomes – and a growing irrational anger among people.

Hmmm. Probably the fault of the bloody gummint?