The most affecting songs are usually grounded in heartache – whether it be a result of lost loves, lost lives … or even lost jobs. So when news of Amanda Vanstone’s Australian hymn of gravitas broke on Sunday, it was hard not to indulge the image of a solitary former cabinet minister, forlorn and lost in the Adelaide Hills, penning such stirring stanzas as Nature’s earthly heaven / Glory for our eyes / Ours alone those treasures / Under Southern Skies…

The unfortunate reality is that the Sunday Telegraph supposedly got hold of the song after a staffer at record label Sony/BMG “inadvertently” made mention of it to the tabloid. While chatting with the Senator yesterday, the aspiring songstress told us she had sent a demo CD “three or four years ago” to the record label, which was promptly ignored. Sony/BMG’s penchant for patriotic prose, it would seem, is limited to Nollsy’s version of Come On Aussie, Come On.

Although Mandy’s claim that this thing’s been in the works for over five years is frighteningly believable, the timing of its exposure is rather interesting. But regardless of whether this is another exercise in creative PR, it’s succeeded in only two ends: this Government honestly believes its constituency will consume vacuous rhetoric ahead of thoughtful reflection; and Mandy’s musical panache is problematic at best.

This first point is self-evident, so let’s concentrate on the second and lever it to a term well understood by an enthusiastic economic liberal – synergy.

Of course, she doesn’t claim to understand the mechanics of music. Her assertion that she used the Tory call-to-arms Land of Hope and Glory merely as “something to hang the words on”, as if the music is unrelated to the message, is understandable – after all, the secularist also told us she “just as easily could have used the [Anglican hymn] Onward Christian Soldiers” as her template.

But this is hardly a creative endorsement for a tune intended to evoke pride, or Australianness, or whatever. Mandy must learn that an anthemic tune is borne in the relationship between words and music, creating an entity far more powerful and voracious than the sum of its parts. Synergy is to music what Senator Coonan’s media laws are to PBL.

The Scorpions’ banal declaration I follow the Moskva / Down to Gorky Park was in itself never going to challenge the structural integrity of the Berlin Wall – but place this in the vicinity of some plangent whistling, righteous minor-key changes and determined snare drumming and you have Wind Of Change, the greatest freakin’ political power ballad of the early ’90s. The message and the music are written as one, using knowledge and experience gained from Cold War survival and 80s hair metal.

Mandy can’t engage in an exercise of musical cut-and-paste and expect that the end result will sound anything greater than a sad attempt at musical manipulation and a cynical belief in blind populism. Then again, maybe that’s why she chose to send her CD to Sony/BMG, the home of Idols past.