I've heard the term ''political junkie'' thrown around a lot over the years - and it's my generation, and perhaps the one before it, that really live up to the term ''junkie''.

It refers, of course, to users of heroin - a powerful drug that is known for its brief, ecstatic, incomparable highs, followed swiftly and inexorably by a soporific strawberry buzz and hours of sitting very still, nodding gently and trying to stay aware of one's surroundings, lest the crooked glance you just shot the coffee table makes it the last thing you ever see.

So, really, I shouldn't have been all that surprised - as a political junkie myself - to realise that, like many addicts before me, I've lost the buzz. Gone are the intense highs, replaced with a deepening ennui and sense of awful emptiness.

Because our politicians - and, by extension, our politics - have become stultifyingly boring. Irredeemably, dreadfully, malaise-inducingly dull. Asking your average Joe to name a single interesting politician is like asking a labrador to explain open-heart surgery. The results are invariably the same: a quizzical look and possibly a vigorous leg-humping as well.

It's a terrible shame. Even a cursory look at the political year that was 2011 will tell you that it should have been a corker. We had a hung Parliament, two party leaders well known for their ability to scrap like cornered dogs and any number of crucial policy points that should have provided more fireworks than Chinese New Year.

Add to that a few potentially juicy scandals and followers of Australian politics should really have had to do nothing more than pull up a deckchair, fire up the popcorn machine and let the entertainment begin.

Instead, we got a watered-down version of a high school debate.

Even the scandals turned out to be duds. Our politicians are so monumentally boring that the worst things they managed to do wouldn't look out of place on a list of schoolboy pranks. You know things are dire when it's headline news that a backbencher with an already chequered reputation is busted cobbling together his ''study tour'' report from outdated Wikipedia pages.

It's little wonder that most Australians aren't engaged, at all, with the political process. The cut-and-thrust of politics is a joke. There's no political parrying - you're more likely to see convincing swordsmanship from the Ashfield Amateur Dramatic Society than see anyone land a convincing blow on an opponent in the House. Because our Parliament is a Parliament of tumbleweeds. Benchwarmers and waterboys. Indeed, if the spark of initiative were literal, rubbing the lot of them together would produce such a feeble reaction that you'd be hard-pressed to light a barbecue.

It's now 2012 and nothing has changed. We still don't know what to do with the refugees. Gay folks are still fabulous but still can't get married. Corporations are still privatising their gains and socialising their losses. And we're still lumbered with a government so helplessly paralysed by poll results and a lack of real leadership that we're in peril of a serious national stagnation.

Television, as so often, has suggested the solution. Interspersed between carefully stage-managed sound bites of our politicians being tediously indecisive on the issue du jour were the flamboyantly stage-managed scenes of grief and national mourning for North Korea's Dear Leader, following his downgrade from Kim Jong-il to Kim Jong-dead.

I began to reason that, perhaps, that is where the answer to Australia's problems lie. Australia needs a strong-arm dictatorship - a home-grown Fidel or Saddam. Someone who's not afraid to make a decision and enforce it, with an ever-so-serious thrashing for anyone who dares question their authority.

The dictatorship need only last a few years - just long enough to make us more aware of the consequences of electing such a gormless mob of incompetents into power.

I won't even mind if they have a nifty uniform tailored, complete with bogus medals and a hat that can be worn at a jaunty angle when the occasion arises.

This country needs a revolution, not another election.

I call on all Australians to pop down to Bunnings on the weekend. I hear they're having a sale on barricades.

Gregor Stronach is a writer and one-time political adviser.

Binge Thinking is a journal of contrarian and controversial ideas, which can be downloaded at thoughtbroker.com.au.

Politics: all low, no high