Whilst the Coalition parties are doing a superb job of burying themselves - and the nation - the time is now paramount for the Labor Party, if it is aware of the state of the nation, to begin telling electors how it proposes to fix things.
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That's a suggestion to the column in the wake of last Friday's first of a three-part series about the current depressing state of politics. It comes after another week of turmoil for the Coalition and the media revelation that some veteran ALP MPs, retired and otherwise, are not pleased with the rate of progress by their camp.
A life-long ALP supporter, a DA reader and regional Australian, he noted: "If ever the time is ripe for the party to get organised, frame new policies and find a way forward - and preferably with hand-picked local candidates to replace those who have been MPs too long - it is now.
"If the party thinks, as it did in the lead-up to the last federal election that it can wait for the Coalition to lose then it is doing itself and the nation, especially regional Australia, a disservice and it, along with the Coalition, does not deserve to be re-elected.
"The retention of a leader of Bill Shorten's obvious unpopularity, trust and lack of regional knowledge for three terms indicates that the ALP needs to also get leadership right." Our reader's note is on the mark. Further, ALP stalwarts resigned because party heavies and MPs ignored the warnings about Shorten's standing way past the point of fixing it.
Yes, Anthony Albanese has had some decisive wins - none more so than the sports rorts - and while Albo is a distinct improvement on Shorten, he is still not seen as decisive, positive, sure and the sort of leadership level Professor Ian Chubb called for in a Senate inquiry to return democracy to the highest standards Australians expect.
If our major parties don't know what that is, then they need to ask voters. Don't depend on your members - from experience, paid-up party members will only tell them what they want to hear, not what they should know, understand and fix.
Incidentally, that inquiry was set up by a long-time leader in Labor's left, Kim Carr, and emerging leader in right-wing thinking, Liberal Amanda Stoker, so there are obviously still some MPs concerned about where democracy is being taken by the major parties.
Chubb said the lack of trust in politics was down to the way politicians behaved, for example, disgracefully within question time, public funds being wrongly used and more lenient rules applying to politicians. More emphatically though, that trust was lost because governments allowed the public service to be depleted in standards, staffing and quality. Parliaments also sold off national public institutions and departments to the private sector - itself an institution which itself has become a protector of white collar incompetence, unprofessionalism and tax-dodging not to mention greed, as the Banking Royal Commission and various other inquiries proved beyond doubt in the past decade.
What's been done about it by the Coalition and ALP? Precious little!
Perhaps we are not trying hard enough to establish a better system.
Sam Roggeveen, a director of the Lowy Institute, told the inquiry much of the political instability in Australia in the last decade was a result of the decline of main stream centre-right and centre-left parties; but, on the other hand, that has led to voters turning to independents and minor parties, a much better course of action, it is argued.
New parties like the Shooters, Farmers and Fishers are listening as we once would have expected any politician to do, just as independents have done since well before the current rot set in and are still doing with obvious voter satisfaction.
Trust in government in Australia has reached its lowest level since the Whitlam Government's dismissal.
Dr Jonathan Cole, assistant director of the Public and Contextual Theology Research Centre at CSU confirmed Australians were deserting the major parties. Membership was growing exponentially of activist groups like GetUp on the left and the Australian Christian Lobby on the right.
Winston Churchill was quoted as saying democracy may not be the best form of government but was better than all those others that were tried. Perhaps we are not trying hard enough to establish a better system.
That will be part of the third column in this series next Friday when we will also review why the Morrison and Berejiklian governments are dawdling about finalising the investigation into the Murray-Darling Basin. Maybe they fear further findings to embarrass their governments.
