When Adolf Hitler was dictating his inane antisemitic Mein Kampf in prison in 1924, people thought he was a joke. Ten years later he became Fuhrer of the Third Reich.

Pauline Hanson is also considered by most as a short-sighted politician with plenty of grievances and no solutions besides her Trumpian call to stop immigration.

There are many others that also use the Trumpian drain-the-swamp analogies that to be progressive is elitist, condescending and lacking the common touch. Never mind that Donald Trump has since filled the swamp with billionaire elitists.

This century several Liberal party politicians have used similar language and moved the party further and further to the Right. Their views on the Voice, climate change and immigration have become almost synonymous with those of One Nation.

The diminishing number of moderate Liberals watch on as their rightist counterparts try to out-Hanson, Hanson. Unsurprisingly, their former supporters increasingly fail to see why they shouldn’t vote for One Nation, as they come to believe, albeit misguidedly, that Pauline has the whole box and dice.

Anthony Albanese has succumbed to enormous pressure initially driven by the media and then amplified by some politicians hell-bent on making political mileage out of a tragic event. Organised petitions around the country garnering influential support added to this pressure, as well as some of his colleagues saying to him that they thought this was the right thing to do. Not that his acceptance of a royal commission has stopped the criticism.

Now the appointment of the person to lead the commission, the distinguished former high court justice Virginia Bell, has also come under attack.

First Josh Frydenberg, who has been strongly urged by Liberal political figures to re-enter the political arena, was vocal in his concerns about Bell but he soon realised that such criticism would be regarded as churlish and unwarranted and backtracked to support her. That, however, has not stopped others from questioning her role investigating Scott Morrison’s usurpation of numerous ministerial positions without consulting the very ministers whose positions he had usurped, clearly a breach of the lowest bar of parliamentary protocols. It seems that even investigating a wrong-doing for which Morrison received parliamentary censure, was considered suspect by Albanese’s detractors.

The PM was right when he referred to past tragedies when our country came together. It seemed that because this one happened under a Labor government that was doing well, it was time to tear the country apart.