Guest post: Then he announced an Australian DOGE
Originally a comment by Rev David Brindley on Trump boosts the other team.
Peter Dutton is the first opposition leader to lose his seat. As late as January all the polls were predicting he would be the next Prime Minister with a sizeable majority. Then he announced an Australian DOGE to be headed up by a woman wearing a MAGA hat, an uncosted plan to build 7 nuclear power plants around the country, sacking 47,000 unspecified public servants, and most tellingly, insisting that women would be forced back into the office instead of working from home, and if they didn’t like it, they could quit or job share.
He would announce a policy today only to reverse the announcement tomorrow. Sound familiar?
He would not appear at media events all previous party leaders attended, would only do interviews with Sky (our Fox, also Murdoch owned) and refused press conferences with other media. Sound familiar?
And his team? Well, who could blame Angus Taylor (shadow treasurer) for forgetting to log into his sock puppet account before tweeting in reply to himself “Well done Angus. Good job, Angus.”? It’s not like he planned to manage a multi billion dollar economy, is it?
To them Australia would be God’s Own Paradise, if it wasn’t for the immigrants stealing Australian jobs, if it wasn’t for the loss of manufacturing to China, and if it wasn’t for the Australian people preferring their nationalised health system over the US model Dutton wanted to impose.
I didn’t change a single person’s vote, I am sure, but I was still pleased to do six hours standing in the sun handing out Labor How To Vote Cards in a seat Labor will never win, but where the fight is all about as many Senate votes as we could garner.
I love the forgetting to log into his sock account thing. It’s so very Wally Smith/You’re Not Helping.
Trump avoids this by being his own sock account all the time.
The recent Canadian election was pretty close, closer than I would have preferred. Still, the resultant Liberal minority government was better than the Conservative majority that polls were forecasting just a few months ago. Conservative leader Poilievre might have won more votes for the party than any time sine 1988, but he blew a 25 point lead in the polls, and failed to win his own seat. He might not have been launching his own DOGE, but he failed to distance and distinguish himself from Trump quickly enough. I get the impression that he only did this because somebody told him it would be a good idea for him to do so, rather than coming to this conclusion on his own. I believe this was his biggest mistake and it was a telling failure to read the room, and an indication that he didn’t take Trump’s threats seriously. If he’d thought Trump’s threats were dangerous and offensive, he would have denounced them immediately, rather than being forced to. In any case, he continued to sound too much like Trump, and continued to campaign against Justin Trudeau (against whom he would have likely won, as he was past his best before date), rather than Mark Carney, who campaigned against Trump. If Poilievre had taken Trump off the table immediately, the campaign (and its result) might have been much different. Instead, he lost out to a Liberal leader who had never before run for elected office.
The Canadian Conservative Party has been through a number of iterations, some more or less extreme than others, but all manifestations are unforgiving of perceived mistakes, and actual electoral defeat. There are undoubtedly already those within the party that see Poilievre as damaged goods in need of replacement. Some are probably surprised and disappointed that he failed to resign for the good of the party on election night itself, like NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, who had the sense and grace to do so following failure to win his own riding, and the failure of the NDP to reach Official Party status in Parliament, with their number of of seats, and their share of the popular vote falling to single digits.
Until he wins a seat in Parliament via by-election (a newly elected Conservative MP from Alberta has already offered to give up his seat for Poilievre to run), Poilievre will be on the sidelines, looking into Parliment from the outside. Alberta is very safe Conservative country, so he should win the proffered seat without any trouble. Still, I don’t expect him to be party leader when the next election rolls around; if he doesn’t jump, he’ll be pushed.
I think a lot of people were dabbling in conservatism because they’d been alienated by the left’s creeping dogmatism. But with Trump 2.0 everybody realized no matter how badly the left had been tainted by extremism — and all of us in the gender trenches have the scars to prove just how bad it got — the right is dangerous, too, so much so that it’s become an existential threat to democracy.
I’m furious at the Liberal party. I’m furious at the CBC. I’m furious at pretty much all of Canada’s progressive apparatus. But I’d rather work to repair it than to see the conservative apparatus take over. Every time I read the right-wing National Post I’m reminded I’d rather see the CBC overhauled than dismantled. Every time I hear what the Tories or the People’s Party have to say on just about any issue besides gender extremism, I’m reminded that gender is the lone, tiny island of common ground between me and them, and the rest is a vast ocean of get-the-fuck-outta-here-with-your-backwards-bullshit.
Some stubborn optimism still lingers in me that Trump 2.0 will flame out soon and spectacularly — and in the aftermath the left will do some soul searching and come back to its principles.
— Robert Graves, I Claudius.
Claudius was tragically wrong: Nero was indeed a disaster, but instead of spurring reform or a return to republican values, Rome simply continued deeper into autocracy. The imperial system adapted, survived, and endured for centuries after — often brutal; never democratic.
Claudius’s grim, utilitarian gamble was rooted in the belief that Rome still had a moral centre that could be shocked back into balance. History proved otherwise. Now the US has its Nero, and it’s facing the same test.
Seeing how high the stakes have gotten, Canada and Australia smartly decided not to take the bet.
[…] a comment by Artymorty on Then he announced an Australian […]
Concerns about the Liberals (Can), Labour (Aus), and Labour (UK) aside, I’d rather they won than the alternative. We shouldn’t take too much comfort from these recent victories though. Quite aside from the fact that governments will face headwinds over the next few years and will inevitably take the blame for the deteriorating lifestyles and sense of safety that are almost certain.
Of real concern is an underlying swing toward rightwing and in some cases authoritarian leaning parties in western democracies. Consider that although the Canadian Conservatives lost, they still had a swing pf +7% in their favour. In Australia the One Nation crowd went +1.7%, while just recently Reform (UK) have had a huge sweep in the local council elections – going from zero seats to 577 out of 1600 seats. opinion polls shows a +12% swing in Reforms favour since the last national election won by Labour.
Similar patterns show up throughout western democracies. Even where liberal or conventionally conservative parties win elections, there is an underlying drift rightward. And still the focus of so many remains on insisting that men can be women, and even if they are not we have to let them have their way, as if this is the defining cause of our age.
Rob, don’t be too concerned about One Notion’s increased vote. A lot of that came from Palmer’s United Party’s collapse and rebirth as the Trumpet of Patriots. In my electorate, the combined vote of those 2 is 3.41%, at the previous election their combined total was 10.57%. And I live in a rural, conservative electorate where an empty suit with a Liberal badge would win (Barker).