And so it's time again for our gala ceremony to announce the Australian Whinger of the Year. I got more than 400 emails from readers last week, most agreeing with my short list of Tony Abbott, the retailer Gerry Harvey, those meddlesome priests George Pell and Fred Nile, and the moaning, mining magnates Twiggy Forrest and Gina Rinehart.

But there was a slew of other nominations, headed by Christopher ''Poodles'' Pyne, the manager of opposition business in the Parliament. Or Whiny Pyney, as one reader dubbed him. Scott Morrison, the ''Shadow Minister for Xenophobia'', Andrew Robb, the Liberals' lugubrious finance spokesman, and Barnaby Joyce also got gonged.

Kevin Rudd won a couple of mentions. Inexplicable, that, for as Kevin never ceases to tell us, he is sublimely happy being Foreign Minister, working hand in glove with Julia Gillard for the national good. (Pigs cleared for takeoff.)

The media also copped a hammering, including my good self. One nark suggested a winning trio of my Fairfax colleagues Michelle Grattan, Peter FitzSimons and Richard Glover; an eclectic combination, to say the least.

There was a torrent of scorn for the radio ranters Alan Jones and Ray Hadley, for Melbourne's village idiot Andrew Bolt, and for his News Ltd alter ego in Sydney, Piers Akerman. Bolt was singled out for his week of tear-stained self-pity after he got done for breaching the Racial Discrimination Act. And The Australian took a heavy beating, too, exquisitely birched by one reader for ''its bullying, fact distortion and the flagrant abuse of the newspaper for News Ltd's own corporate purposes''. Deary me.

Quite a few emails nominated all of us. The Australian people, that is. ''I suffered some pretty nasty reverse-culture shock,'' wrote a man newly returned home after three years as an aid worker in Laos. ''I couldn't believe how bad things had become here: the rampant sense of middle-class entitlement, aggressive self-interest, the constant braying over a thousand petty grievances. There is no sense of proportion on how lucky we actually are.'' Good point.

But there'll be no surprise at the outright winner. The best of our national leaders have sought to draw out what Paul Keating calls the golden threads of our society. Robert Menzies could do this when he chose to; Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke understood it instinctively.

Tony Abbott does not. Like his mentor John Howard, he plays to our base instincts of greed, selfishness and fear. He wallows in the politics of NO, apeing the hysteria of the shock jocks: we are on the brink of economic disaster; climate change is ''crap''; we are ''threatened'' by gays and left-wing social engineering; a flood of ''illegals'' is swamping our borders.

We have the ''worst government in our history'', he howls, blithely ignoring Billy McMahon's Coalition shambles of the 1970s and Arthur Fadden's wartime conservatives of 1941, who collapsed in a heap after just 40 days in office.

And so on and on, ad nauseam. Tony Abbott: you are the 2011 Australian Whinger of the Year.

Mike Carlton