Today’s edition of The Outsider is all about Marty World, including our imagining of newspaper headings if Martin Hamilton-Smith had chosen a very different career path.

Emphatic message

The Advertiser produced a snap poll today of voters in Liberal turncoat Martin Hamilton-Smith’s blue ribbon electorate of Waite – but does it mean what they say it means?

The heading, “LYING IN WAITE”, and the sub-heading, “Hamilton-Smith to feel wrath of his angry electorate”, are a bit bemusing when you read the actual poll results.

In fact, Labor believes that on the strength of those results, MHS is an excellent chance to retain the seat as an independent on the back of ALP preferences.

The poll of 350 voters shows that one in five is more likely to vote for MHS, while 45.7 are less likely to support him.

While 42 per cent feel “betrayed” by the former Liberal leader’s decision to join the Labor Cabinet, a higher percentage – 46 per cent – feel no such sense of betrayal.

Remembering that Labor won just over 27 per cent of the primary vote in Waite, Hamilton-Smith will be very comfortable with these figures.

And Labor hardly campaigned in the seat.

As InDaily reported at the time, candidate Rebekah Huppatz spent most of the election campaign in Canberra, where she’s a staffer for federal MP Amanda Rishworth.

Meanwhile, Liberal hardhead Rob Lucas has poo-pooed the patently ridiculous idea that all the party’s old stagers should bow out in one super Saturday of self-sacrifice.

He told the ABC that he well remembered the “bright idea” of former leader Rob Kerin bowing out mid-term in Frome – a by-election that saw independent Geoff Brock elected and which, a few years down the track, sealed the Liberals’ fate for yet another four years.

Pol Pot, Mullah Omar and Martin Hamilton-Smith walk into a bar

Can you spot the difference?

• Pol Pot was the Khmer Rouge leader responsible for the deaths of up to 2.5 million Cambodians.

• Mullah Omar is the spiritual leader of the Taliban, the politico-religious movement that brought us up to 80 per cent of civilian deaths during the Afghan insurgency and who shot a young girl in the head because she wanted to go to school.

• Martin Hamilton-Smith is a South Australian politician who wanted a football stadium in the city of Adelaide and who has left the Liberal Party to become an independent minister in the Labor Cabinet.

And yet, this week the dear old Advertiser saw fit to describe Hamilton-Smith’s defection as “a sneak attack that would make the Khmer Rouge proud” and the political equivalent of rogue Afghan soldiers shooting their Australian colleagues.

Classy.

Fantasy MHS career metaphors

But imagine if Martin Hamilton-Smith had not been a soldier in a past life, but something more mundane?

How would political commentators have used the sheer persuasiveness of metaphor and analogy to allow their readers to truly understand the depths of MHS’s betrayal?

As Jeff Kennett put it usefully yesterday, if MHS had “aided and abetted” the enemy in a theatre of war, he would have faced charges!

Here’s what might have been, if MHS had chosen a slightly different career path:

MHS as former barista

BITTER CUP! “If Martin Hamilton-Smith had abandoned his post mid-pour, his customer would have ended up with a horribly over-extracted coffee – burnt and bitter, much like the emotions of the electors of Waite.”

MHS as former dentist

ROTTEN DEAL! “When you drill down into it, this decision is rotten – as rotten as a rotten tooth, filled with decay – decay as decayed as Hamilton-Smith’s sense of loyalty – loyalty which has been terribly eroded, like the dentine enamel of a child weaned on full-strength Coca-Cola.”

MHS as former office cleaner

REPUTATION TRASHED! “Hamilton-Smith has left the Liberals with all the cleaning up to do and trashed his reputation; worse, he takes with him knowledge of who eats the tuna in the office and fails to rinse the can before putting it in the bin in the far corner behind the photocopier that everyone forgets to empty. He knows who steals the receptionist’s skinny milk, even though she’s written her name on the carton. But, in the final wash-up, the  voters of Waite will leave him in the dumpster, struggling like a turtle with a weighty industrial vacuum cleaner of guilt strapped to his back.”

MHS as former sex worker

VOTUS INTERRUPTUS! “Given his past life, he should know that you never leave a client unsatisfied. One minute, the electors of Waite were lying back enjoying the show – the next, they’re cold, alone, painfully priapic, with the plaintive sound of air brakes cutting the air as their already-paid-for rumpy-pumpy drives off smiling in the passenger seat of Jay Weatherill’s battered Kenworth B-double.”

Crazy brave

Dateline: Saturday, March 15, 1800 hours – the state election polling booths close.

A TV on the wall shows Greater Western Sydney beating Sydney in the AFL, an embarrassing new low for the once great Swans.

A punter walks up to a bookie, packing up his stand after the last race at Morphettville.

“What odds can I get that Sydney will beat Geelong by more than 100 points in May coupled with a political bet that ex-Liberal Leader Martin Hamilton-Smith will be a Minister in the Weatherill Government?”

The bookie eyes the punter and mutters to his clerk: “A fool and his money are soon parted”.

He takes a $20 note from the punter’s hand and says: “Here a blank ticket, son. Write your own odds.”

And so, it’s on that basis that The Outsider will not be making any predictions about this year’s AFL premiership, the next election or who will win the Melbourne Cup.

But, the sun will rise again tomorrow morning (we think).