Arbibtruary

As faceless men go, he is the most faceless of all. His eyebrows have already disappeared, sucked into the vortex of his ruthless and soulless ambition. His nose, mouth and eyes will soon follow and he will become literally vacuus vultus – empty face. He is Mark Arbib, and he is the reason the impending apocalypse can be described as 'not all bad.'

Arbib represents the disconnection between the Australian populace and the political machine. He is utterly contemptible and unelectable however, he is a powerbroker, a chooser of Prime Ministers and a Senator. Like a vicious joke where you begin laughing but end up convulsed with grief. It's well known in politics that if want to put a snivelling cunt, an evil bastard or an unreconstructed socialist into parliament, you put them at the top of a major party's senate ticket. That is how such unrepresentative swill make their way into parliament.

What do these people achieve in parliament? The answer is nothing. They do not usually take ministries, they do not usually spearhead legislation, they sit in dark rooms and plan the next knifing, to be followed by the ascendancy of the person whom they have the most dirt on. When Julia Gillard pulled Arbib from Q and A on Monday the ABC picked the best possible replacement – an empty chair. Because that's what Mark Arbib is: empty…an empty chair.

A hung parliament is the only time in which power is removed from people like Arbib, so for now he will wither. He will however, survive. Just as cockroaches will survive the blessed nuclear apocalypse, so will Arbib survive this 'stable' minority government. He will emerge, sustained by the evacuated faeces of the dead, to once again take the shadowy throne of hackery.

These men will never go away, not when it is so easy to number that one box above the line and so hard to care enough to do anything else. Enjoy the brief loosening of their chokehold, before they once again tighten their grip, and suck the life out of puppies everywhere.