Is this some sort of a case of subliminal advertising? Or at very least, someone adhering to the principle that first impressions last?

The tired, washed-up, old hacks who compile this column would love to know what possessed the graphics artist to put together the image (above and below) at the top of a Latika Bourke article for The Nightly on the political battles Prime Minister Anthony Albanese faces as 2026 unfolds.

Taken together, the image and the heading, How orange poll surge colours the PM’s tough new political reality, suggests Sussan Ley and the LNP are looking good for the year?

Ley has orange creeping its way up to her very generous mouth so she and the federal LNP must be the beneficiaries of this orange advance in Newspoll?And that poor Albo with a little hand in orange is slow in the pickup, as Newscorpe will always argue?

Not really. So colour the MGH team confused! The body of Bourke’s think piece is that a surging One Nation primary vote of 23 per cent in Sunday night’s Newspoll, the first time One Nation has eclipsed the LNP clinging to a near-death 22 per percent, has mainly put Albanese and Labor on notice.

We’ve got it now! Pauline Hanson’s One Nation uses orange a lot so that orange we saw at the top was infesting Ley and giving her the pip (sorry!), not helping her. The orange was ON’s agent! (Sorry!)

And seeing Newspoll has that racist organisation infested with morons ahead of the LNP. So much so that Hanson is now claiming she’ll be the next PM who, with three decades in public life, has all the answers for our nation’s woes (hint: too many blacks, browns, yellows and brindles and they’ve got to go! Put on ICE! (sorry!).

Having the national leader of the white indigenous One Nations people as PM and the likes of Ralph Babet with a brain activity barely capable of sustaining life as a senior government minister would have many Australians heading for the departure lounges at our international airports, along with all the handcuffed Muzzies and other groups of undesirables (eg. woke lefties and whities pretending to be darkies being sent back to where they came from.

Being the fair and reasonable folk we MGH folk are and have always been, we accept that the artist’s aim was maybe to show the orange onslaught taking over our two main political leaders. Hmm, maybe.

We’ll stick with our view it’s all a rather odd colour coding exercise that’s a bit misleading but accept the other argument has merit so please let us pivot instead, in the very unlikely event we’ve gotten things wrong, to an analysis of Bourke’s outstanding political nous.

We at the MGH will take a guess that she has never penned anything negative about the disgraceful politicisation of the Bondi killings by the federal Opposition and almost the entire mainstream mediocre. We would love a dollar for every time Albanese has been painted as dithering and weak since that terrible Sunday arvo. Albanese has himself party to blame: arguing he was always in favour of a federal RC into Bondi despite constantly rattling off some very good reasons for not having one; it just took a while to organise was pathetic and proved he’s just any other pollie after all. Full of bullshit when it suits.

While all that has clearly seen a large dip in the PM’s personal poll ratings, we unlike Bourke can see those ratings rebuild in the wake of the passing of watered down anti-hate laws that has opened up fresh division in a fairly ineffective Opposition, and the guns-buyback plan passed with the help of The Greens.

And Bourke may not be able to see it but a 55-45 2PP result to Labor in that Newspoll after weeks of being under sustained attack suggests that Hanson has a long steep hill to climb to see her dream come true of storming The Lodge and throwing out any Abo-themed artwork she finds there.

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