G-r-e-e-n Acres is the place for me

Farm livin’ is the life for me

Land spreadin’ out so far and wide

Keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside.

If you know the tune to Green Acres and can sing the full lyrics off by heart, you were born in the 1950s.

The TV sitcom Green Acres was launched in 1965 and remarkably ran until 1971.

If you’ve ever seen the show, it’s proof that children of my generation would watch anything on telly. The Abraham tin lids would even sit watching the test pattern until black and white programs began in the afternoon.

The premise of the show was simple. Successful New York Attorney Oliver Wendall Douglas, played by Eddie Albert, and his high-maintenance Hungarian-born wife Lisa, played by Eva Gabor, move to a busted-arse town called Hooterville to start a new life on a decrepit farm – Green Acres. The reluctant Gabor spent most of her time flouncing around the farmhouse in flowing negligees.

Oh, what fun was to be had as the couple from the Big Smoke try to make a go of it, while being played for wood ducks by the local rednecks and shysters.

Little did Eddie and Eva know back then, but they’d now be called “homesteaders” and homesteading is all the rage in the post-COVID era.

The homestead movement is apparently going gangbusters among young suburban families in Australia. In its purest form, it involves doing a bunk from the Big Smoke and going the full Green Acres experience.

But your average Eddie and Evas with a heavily-mortgaged house in the ‘burbs simply stay put and start planting carrots and cucumbers on every square inch of dirt.

As luck would have it, I got a free practical briefing on all this just last weekend while down on my hands and knees helping our younger daughter and her hubby knock up veggie beds in their backyard.

This is called “micro homesteading” and it’s a phenomenon that may very well be shifting the landscape for political parties trying to win votes by thinking big when many of us are taking comfort in thinking small.

It’s underwritten by the ridiculous supermarket grocery bills heaping pain on families already battling with an unprecedented string of mortgage rate increases, ugly energy bills and petrol pumps where $2.29 is the new $1.69 a litre.

It’s the waa-waa-waa effect, where voters try to block out the annoying campaign static.

The conventional wisdom was that after the two-year COVID “experiment”, where we were controlled by bureaucrats and confined for weeks on end in our homes, that we’d all bust free.

Who knew that so many of us would instead discover that staying home isn’t so bad?

When I asked one local parish priest how Mass attendances had bounced back after the pandemic-enforced lock outs from Catholic churches, he said they were back to roughly 60 per cent of pre-COVID numbers.

Shrugging his shoulders, he said that may be as good as it gets.

Habits of a lifetime were broken during those two pandemic years, some permanently. They’ve only just restored Holy Water to the bone-dry fonts at our church. Refilling the pews won’t be as easy.

Political parties, and big corporations, who don’t sweat the small stuff risk finding their messages stranded like a car stuck on the O-Bahn tracks.

It’s why voters didn’t give a rats about Lot Fourteen, former Premier Steven Marshall’s love child.

It’s why they don’t give a flying fig about the big ticket Whyalla “hydrogen jobs plan” that so excites Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas.

It’s why the deepening ambulance ramping crisis has become like unwinding a big ball of political fairy floss for Labor, getting stickier and stickier the more it tries to untangle itself from the unambiguous promise to fix the problem.

And it’s why the Voice referendum is in such dire straits, based on every mainstream polling outfit that shows the Yes vote “sinking like a stone”, as pro-Voice RedBridge pollster Kos Samaras puts it.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reasoned that once he locked in the referendum date, Australians would engage with the issue in the six week “campaign” running up to the poll.

The referendum is now less than four weeks away on October 14, and all the opinion polling suggest the reverse is happening – voters are becoming disengaged. It’s the waa-waa-waa effect, where voters try to block out the annoying campaign static.

Last Saturday, The Australian’s SA correspondent, David Penberthy, reported that while the PM named this state as a crucial “swing state” for the Voice, there had been little sign of a groundswell of support to deliver a win in SA.

Opposition Leader David Speirs, told Penberthy he believed the Yes vote was in freefall and “I would almost bet my house on it losing in SA”.

Citing what he said was the biggest cost-of-living squeeze since the ’80s, Speirs said: “There are a lot of younger blokes in white vans in my electorate who think all this time and attention is a distraction from other issues that matter more.”

For the record, Penberthy, who co-hosts FIVEaa’s breakfast program with Will Goodings, is planning to vote Yes and happily declares this to his listeners.

Labor’s Attorney-General, Kyam Maher, told InDaily on Tuesday that after a morning handing out flyers at Adelaide Railway Station, he senses momentum swinging toward the yes ledger.

“The level of positivity seems different,” he told InDaily’s political journalist Belinda Wills. “I think people are turning their minds to this now, I think the majority of people had not considered this in depth… and I think the better side of humanity in people is coming out.”

It’s likely many of those train commuters were coming to the CBD from the southern suburbs that Speirs represents as MP for Black. They’d be the ones not driving white vans.

Speirs and Maher can’t both be right.

Maher smoothly steered SA’s version of a Voice through our state parliament early this year. Unlike the proposed federal model, that would be permanently inked into the Australian Constitution, the existence of the SA Voice is legislated and can be modified, or scrapped, by parliament.

A Yes win is still possible, but the aggregate of polls shows the No case sitting in the high 50s, the Yeses in the low 40s. Tasmanian poll analyst Kevin Bonham says the downward trajectory of the Yes polling matches the slump in support for the 1999 referendum on an Australian republic.

The republic Yes vote did bounce up in the closing weeks, but not enough to rescue it.

Bonham says the Voice Yes case can win if it gets most of the undecideds, holds the soft yeses and flips the soft nos, “but in practice it doesn’t tend to work like that”.

It is a big ask. But this is the first Australian referendum conducted in the chaotic social media space, so who knows?

As for Green Acres, it was a sister show to Petticoat Junction and the Beverley Hillbillies.

It was cancelled by CBS in 1971 as part of a “rural purge”.

Time for Eddie and Eva to be dusted off on prime-time TV.

Right now, life in Hooterville doesn’t look so bad.

Matthew Abraham is InDaily’s political columnist. Matthew can be found on Twitter as @kevcorduroy. It’s a long story.