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There's nothing quite like the sudden realisation your backyard is about to house toxic waste to spur people into action.
Facing that prospect in the early 2000s, farmers, conservationists and townies found themselves more than 500km from home, on the steps of Melbourne's iconic Flinders Street Station, handing out more than half a tonne of oranges.
Back home on the outskirts of Mildura, signs dotted the Calder Highway decrying the state Labor government's plans to establish a toxic waste dump on Mallee bushland.
Those on the train station steps weren't the typical campaigners you'd see at a protest. It's likely they were nowhere to be seen when the government had previously proposed a different site for a new toxic waste dump.
The region in question is often dubbed part of Victoria's fruit bowl. It's renowned for the citrus, grapes and dried fruit it produced. In handing out those oranges, these regional campaigners wanted Melburnians to get a sense of what was at stake - their livelihoods and the food people eat.
The toxic waste dump wouldn't eventuate, with the state government abandoning its plans.
Reality bites
The Mallee toxic waste dump debacle serves as a timely reminder for how people respond to a reality rather than a hypothetical.
There have been no shortage of references to younger people being more willing to embrace nuclear power than older generations, as the Coalition ploughs on with its bid to give Australia a nuclear future.
The general thesis is younger people fear climate change more than multi-headed, radioactive fish.
The Coalition's now overdue plans to announce its proposed sites for nuclear power plants are said to be coming "very soon". With their release, a hypothetical prospect of nuclear power will become a reality for more than a handful of communities.
For the affected community, it will become more than a debate about the economic viability of nuclear, which was again in the headlines this week after the CSIRO found it would cost at least $8.5 billion and take 15 years to build a large-scale nuclear power plant.
The frontrunner electorates are those who have been home to retired, or retiring, coal-fired power plants.
Coalition MPs in those electorates months ago were talking up a big game about their willingness to embrace a (hypothetical) nuclear power plant in their backyards.
With an election now firmly in sight, all eyes will be on these same politicians to see if they're still pushing a Yes In My Backyard campaign when their own re-election prospects are suddenly on the line.
Separately, it's not just the affected communities the Coalition will need to win over.
Short of a landslide election that has the Coalition take control of the Senate, it remains unclear how a Peter Dutton-led government could pass legislation to overturn Australia's ban on nuclear energy with Labor vehemently opposed and the Greens holding the balance of power.
With friends like these
The thing about election campaigns is they bring with them surprises, as was the case this week when the federal opposition leader found himself with quite the unexpected bedfellow.
There's been no love lost over the years between Dutton and fellow Queenslander Steven Miles, the premier of the sunshine state.
They might disagree over who said it first, but Dutton and Miles are now firmly singing from the same song sheet in pushing for deep cuts to Australia's migration program.
Like those anti-toxic waste dump campaigners, Miles' argument boils down to Not In My Back Yard.
He says you just need to look at the state's congested roads, its struggling health sector and lack of houses to see the problems his state is facing.
(Yes, it is an unusual tactic for a government seeking re-election but Miles insists it's because his state is so great that he can't blame people flooding in at record levels)
Federally, migration is shaping as a key election issue that Dutton and the Coalition want to campaign on ahead of the federal poll. The opposition is conscious that it's not just Queenslanders experiencing those traffic, health and housing struggles on the back of surging immigration in recent years.
The trouble for Dutton is his shadow treasurer seemed to get confused at his own party's policies, with an address to the National Press Club that Treasurer Jim Chalmers gleefully dubbed "shambolic".
Mr Dutton used his budget reply speech last week to announce the Coalition would cut the number of permanent visas issued from 185,000 to 140,000 in year one if it were elected, only to confuse the policy the very next day.
Angus Taylor then suggested his party would also cut total migration (which includes permanent migration) by 25 per cent over a term in office, a move that Labor says would blow a hole in the budget and lead to critical worker shortages.
Taylor's comments were new and a departure from what his leader has pledged, not that he was willing to concede that when he faced repeated questions to clarify.
In the words of the shadow treasurer: "well done, Angus".
Clean up on aisle Albanese
Taylor found himself in good company in needing his comments mopped up this week.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese performed quite the political gymnastics when he went from refusing to comment on the International Criminal Court's prosecutor's request for arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister and leaders of Hamas, only to then immediately wade into the ongoing legal stoush of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
"I don't comment on court processes in Australia, let alone court processes globally, that which Australia is not a party," Albanese responded to questions in Sydney this week, prompting accusations from Dutton that he'd "squibbed it".
The very next question he insisted "enough is enough" and that Assange should be released.
LoadingIt's not the first time Albanese has found himself facing accusations of hypocrisy.
Last year, the PM refused to say whether he'd raised the plight of injured Australian Navy personnel with Chinese President Xi Jinping, only to this year rush in front the cameras and detail the contents of a call with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the death of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom in Gaza.
Albanese too was very keen to park his standard approach of not commenting on individual immigration cases to offer his two cents worth on the plight of the French national known as Bollard Man.
In the case of the ICC, it fell to Chalmers to offer the lines Albanese failed to say a day earlier.
It's not like Chalmers was freelancing, he merely offered the government's well versed lines - that it was a matter for the ICC, that Australia wanted a humanitarian ceasefire, that it supported a two-state solution, that Hamas has no future in Gaza and there was "no equivalence" between the terrorist organisation and Israel's leaders.
Had Albanese advanced his government's position a day earlier, it likely wouldn't have needed the treasurer to clean up the matter the next day.
The PM is in rare political air that despite the struggles his government is facing, no one is seriously doing numbers to put forward a replacement.
But the whole saga offered a reminder that Labor's best week of the 2022 election came when Albanese was on the bench with COVID.