Former National Party leader and outdoors enthusiast Tim Fischer will lead a last-ditch search of the rugged Tasmanian wilderness for the mythical right-wing Phillip Adams. This grainy photograph is the only known image of the elusive beast. Its natural enemy, the left-wing Adams, is a large nocturnal creature that uses its Radio National show Late Night Live to spread a brain virus that conservatives say causes those infected to lean sharply to the left.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard is the most well-known believer in the fabled right-wing Adams, having long lamented that its genetic stock is needed to dilute the rampantly leftist morasse of chromosomes at national broadcaster the ABC.

Mr Fischer will be accompanied by anti-ABC campaigner Richard Alston, while right-wing columnist Miranda Devine has gleefully agreed to act as a sherpa.

While the adventurers set off with high hopes, debate rages over the creature’s exact nature and indeed its very existence.

Some biologists say it was introduced into Tasmania by logging companies to control the population of forest-dwelling vegan hippy ferals that plague old-growth woodchipping operations, gnawing their way into bulldozers and defecating in toolboxes. But since there is very little meat on a vegan hippy feral, the beast starved into extinction.

Other researchers believe Adamsius Conservatus was browbeaten and hounded to the farthest corner of south-western Tasmania by blatantly leftist ABC commentators whose snide eloquence it found hard to counter with its limited vocabulary.

The most likely explanation is that the right-wing Phillip Adams was a victim of its own evolution. Because of its right-wing bias, whenever it tried to fly it only went in circles and eventually flew up its own arse and disappeared.

Tasmanian Senator Bob Brown said he doubts the creature exists, labelling it just another of Tasmania’s many furphy folkloric phantasms like the Tasmanian tiger.

“People are always coming down here looking for the lesser-spotted (Senator) Brian Harradine and there are occasional ’sightings’ … but it’s usually some prankster who’s stuck a pair of glasses on a spotted-tail quoll. They are easily confused with each other,” he said.

Mr Fischer spoke enthusiastically about the quest, in tones that were at once crisp, clipped and almost staff-sergeantlike, yet warm and disarmingly yokelly. The speech was rendered no less comprehensible by his tendency to pronouce “th” more like “fv”.

“We fvink we can find it,” he said.

The trek will be funded by Cobbertone, a new cosmetic Mr Fischer is promoting that in 27 simple nightly applications can give an aspiring rural politician the weatherbeaten, credibility-enhancing look of a seasoned agriculturalist.