Don't be Hastie, the joke's on you

When the knives were out for Sussan Ley, Andrew Hastie went into Parliament and flourished his copy of Sun Tzu's Art of War. The message was clear: I'm going to win, but I'll fight when I have the best chance of winning.

If Sun Tzu were to produce a modern edition of his Art of War, he would need to expand his advice on deception to include social media.

No doubt it would include a sentence warning readers against waving his book like a sword in front of friends and enemies alike-as well as a paragraph on the Streisand effect.

Had such an edition existed, Andrew Hastie, apparently an admirer of the ancient strategist, might not find himself where he does today. Nor would One Nation's cartoon Don't Be Hastie have acquired such a wide audience-or proved so embarrassing to the entire political caste.

Pauline Hanson is currently the subject of a media pile-on from friends of the Liberal Party. Liberal MPs appear to be mining her media and social media for out-of-context snippets which can then be weaponised by friendly journalists and publications.

If she makes the reasonable observation that scarce public housing can become a permanent entitlement without any reassessment of need, it is warped into the demonisation of the Prime Minister's mother.

Should she make an observation about the technological sophistication of Aboriginal culture at the time of British settlement, it becomes racial abuse.

And if she pins Don't Be Hastie, a Please Explain cartoon satirising the Liberal Party and the entire political ecosystem through the prism of the reality program The Traitors, and starring the member for Canning, Andrew Hastie, it becomes not a calling to account of the whole system but an attack upon Hastie-and everyone who has ever worn Australian epaulettes.

Hastie called Hanson and Barnaby Joyce "lying cowards". Jacqui Lambie improved the tone of public life by calling Hanson an "angry little woman", a "bloody coward" and a "bloody maggot". Apparently, the proper response to inflammatory political language is more inflammatory political language. To most voters, the spectacle must look less like moral leadership than collective dysfunction-which, inconveniently, is precisely the subject of the cartoon.

Don't Be Hastie is a real work of art, and I owe it to Hastie-and his failure to consider the Streisand effect-that I watched it. Me and somewhere around a quarter of a million others.

Such is the shortage of civilisational context, and the surplus of bloodlust, within the political caste that its members have completely missed the cartoon's message. It provides a compelling narrative of the predicament of the Liberal Party and Australian governance so accurate that it could have been written straight from my own research.

Its framing device is the reality television program The Traitors, in which a cast of contestants, marshalled in the Australian version by Gretel Killeen, tries to identify the secret Traitors in its midst. The Traitors know who one another are and work to eliminate the "Faithful". They may also recruit a Faithful-a "Chosen One"-to their cause. The audience is in on the secret from the beginning, while the contestants descend into paranoia, treachery, mayhem and destruction.