Well now I know who to vote for when Mayor Bloomberg’s term is up. Someone just as willing to stand up for what his city needs: John Molony, mayor of Mount Isa, a mining town in Australia.

Of course, what his city needs is a little different from ours. We need 2007 back (minus the rats in KFC). His city, meanwhile, needs more of the, uh, “beauty challenged.”

Yes, that’s his term, and yes, he was only referring to women, and yes, a goodly portion of Australia is now (forgive me) hopping mad. But all the mayor said was this: “With five blokes to every girl, may I suggest that beauty disadvantaged women should proceed to Mount Isa.”

Asked by a TV reporter whether he meant if “Those women would have a better chance there of finding a partner than they would in other places?” the mayor, blunt as Mr. Bloomberg, replied, “It would naturally seem that there may well be less competition.”

And for this simple truth, he’s been getting clobbered.

“We’re appalled,” a councilwoman from Mount Isa told Australia’s Courier Mail, neatly summing up the local mood.

“It’s a public attack on women and a form of verbal and emotional abuse,” a domestic violence worker there said.

But really: Who is being abused?

The mayor did not point to specific women: “You there! In the tube top! Get over here!” And he didn’t elaborate, either: “You know — I’m talking about anyone with bleach blonde hair who looks like my big, fat sister.” He left “beauty disadvantaged” in the eyes of the beholder — which is where it always is. Same as beauty.

The thing about beauty and love is that they are intertwined in many different ways, not all of them so hot. It may actually behoove the men of Mount Isa to be surrounded by a bevy of non-beauties. And the non-beauties may have a better shot at happiness than the hotties, at that. Just ask Christie Brinkley.

In the short run, of course, pretty is powerful. It’s what the former editor of “Psychology Today,” Robert Epstein, calls a “motivator.” If you’re a guy and you run into someone who looks like Halle Berry, or, if you’re female and you run into that Olympic beach volleyball guy from Switzerland — the one with the beard and the mean partner he did not deserve — you are “motivated” to get to know them.

But googly eyes across a crowded room — or stadium — are not necessarily the surest path to wedded bliss. (Bedded bliss, another story.) In preparing a new reality TV show called, “Making Love,” Mr. Epstein found that “romantic” marriage, the kind that begins with a lightning bolt of lust, often ends up less happy than the typical arranged marriage.

“The love in ‘love marriages’ starts out high and decreases very substantially after a year and a half or two years,” the Harvard Ph.D. said. “But in arranged marriages, it starts at zero and gradually increases. It surpasses the love in love marriages at around the five-year mark.” By year 10, it’s — on average — double. Beware the relationship based on va va voom.

On the other hand, love can grow out of something very different from beauty. Proximity.

If you’re at a party in a room full of strangers, you head for the hunk or hunkesse. “But if you’re in a room full of people you’re working with every day, then over time other kinds of interactions take place which allow the superficial characteristics to fall away,” Mr. Epstein said. “So in other words, you can become psychologically intimate with somebody just because of proximity and repeated interactions.” Tell me that never happened to you.

All Mayor Molony was trying to do was set up those simple, daily interactions for his manly miners and some women who felt they weren’t going to win in the party setting. This is as noble as matchmaking. In fact, it is matchmaking, in the great tradition of Yente: “With the way she looks and the way he sees, it’s a perfect match!”

Ironically, Mount Isa may be in for a flux of real foxes. So many women who are beautiful don’t think they are. Ever read People Magazine’s “Most Beautiful” issue? All the ladies say, “In high school, my legs were so long I hated them.” Boo hoo.

Mr. Molony’s burg may get those body dysmorphic types. And then, so many women who are beautiful and do know it may still long for a place where men are men and just want the wife, not the trophy. His burg may get them, too.

Well. Maybe not. But it certainly sounds like a town where you don’t have to spend a lot of time at the gym. Far from discrediting his neck of the woods, Mayor Molony made it sound like a place that’s not totally skin deep.

For all we know, it’s not about to plunge into a crippling recession either. Guess that’s what they call a high koala-ty of life.

lskenazy@yahoo.com