Barnaby Joyce’s sprint into One Nation marks a shift from policy argument to performance theatre. It is not a conversion so much as a wager: that in a crowded media field the shortest message wins. One Nation’s platform thrives on what could be called ideological constipation — gripping a few ideas so tightly they can neither evolve nor adapt. By refusing complexity, they promise certainty; by simplifying everything, they sell clarity without comprehension. It is a political diet of slogans: easy to swallow, nutritionally void, and harmful to anyone who relies on it to make sense of the world.
Yet the deeper story is not the performers but the stage. Communication systems now reward conviction detached from thought — certainty that never had to earn its place. Democracy assumes citizens who reflect, wrestle with complexity, and build their own positions; our attention economy instead accelerates borrowed convictions, ready-made and comforting, narrowing judgement into reflex. The more tangled reality becomes, the more power shifts to those who insist it isn’t. Joyce and Hanson aren’t shaping this landscape; they are symptoms of a network that mistakes immobility for strength and performance for leadership. A civilisation facing cascading complexity is being served constipation as a cure — when the real illness is the machinery that persuades people that not thinking is easier than thinking, and therefore good enough.
Daedelus Kite 