Today we have a wobbly sort of decision making in Canberra because of the arrival of the Australian Party led by Pauline Hansen, a group that will soon lose its lustre with the voters as each member produces his/her own agenda which might not be in accordance with the agenda of that of the party’s hierarchy.

That doesn’t mean it will not be a powerful influence on the future of politics in Australia and the future of Australia itself.

The Australia Party might seem to be a raggle-taggle group but this new party is, in fact, what democracy is all about, unlike the traditional parties that have become quite undemocratic, with head office, not the grass roots members, having the real power. What we have now with the traditional parties is surely not democratic. Democracy is supposed to come from the bottom up, not from the top down.

Malcolm Turnbull has had a bad run since he became Prime Minister and it’s not because a terribly tough Opposition has been creating the problems. The real problems are in his own party which is irrevocably split between ordinary Liberals and a powerful group of pollies who are so hard right wing that they have no semblance with the type of Liberal Party that was created by Bob Menzies. The original Liberal Party was just that, it had many liberal thinkers among its rank. Today the power appears to be in the hands of the radical right who would love to privatise our health system and, in fact, tried to introduce many of their hard right policies in that memorable 2014 Budget, a budget that was so extreme it was rejected by every moderate Member of Parliament in both Houses.

It might seem strange, however, that if there is an election in the coming year – and that seems very possible – credit should not go to the Labor Party, which has been very quiet. The Liberal Party is doing its own self-destruction. An election would be because of the undermining efforts of that far right group making it impossible for Mr Turnbull’s team to manage.  These hard-rights are doing the Opposition’s job.

The big worry is that these people have never admitted they have such far-right policies. If they force an early election by continuing to undermine everything Mr Turnbull tries to initiate, surely we need to know who these extremists are.

For the sake of the Liberal Party itself, the voters should know who are the moderate Liberals and those who would rather see Mr Turnbull fail than support him and his more moderate policies. The people of Australia have shown in the past that they do not want a far-Right or far-Left party running our country.

The extreme right faction, if they really believe their policies are better for Australia, should make it known where they stand on the political spectrum. They might even decide to create a new party.  If they really believe they have an acceptable policy platform, why not tell the voters who they are and what they really want for Australia and the Australian people.

Hardly a day goes past without some news item about ‘sexual harassment’ or inequality of the sexes – but it seems that we tend to forget that the human being is still part of the animal kingdom and we humans still have animal instincts.

The female human is still the producer of baby humans and they try to make themselves attractive, hoping to attract a suitable male of the species who will be a mate and also a suitable father of her children.

This is where lots of problems arise, in that process of the female making such an important decision because the male human still has the same instincts as those other male animals to ‘spread his seed’ as widely as possible and, in the more advanced species, to protect the offspring that he fathers.

Sure, the system doesn’t work perfectly but we are, despite our high standard of living, also real animals and still with those inherited animal instincts. We might be able to send a space ship to the moon and write serious scientific tomes but those instincts are still there.

Without those instincts, without the female’s instinctive need to attract a good mate and without the male instinct to ‘spread his seed’ the animal kingdoms would disappear from our planet.

On a different level, it is the reason we have a thing called ‘romance’.

Yes, we are a most advanced species in the animal kingdom and have rules and laws about how one gender should relate to the other gender and this might vary between different cultures and different cultural beliefs, such as in the Middle East where some cultures relegate females to a role far below that of the males, while most cultures put motherhood on the highest level.

But in all these different societies we tend to forget that we are all, male and female, part of the animal kingdom, the same kingdom as the lion, monkey and the ordinary domestic cat and dog.  

We should never forget that.

Ray Williams has been a Post columnist since retiring from the newsroom in 1993.