We sometimes encounter commentary that blows away the smoke that provides cover for important myths…
Australia is not America – elections after Trump
Last week, the – 2025 Canadian federal election – was held and the Liberal Party won for the fourth consecutive time securing 169 seats (in the 343-seat House of Commons), just short of a majority. They also won the popular vote (43.7 per cent of the vote – up 11.1 per cent), which was the first time they had achieved that since 2015. The Opposition Conservative Party leader lost his own seat in the election. On January 7, 2025, national polling saw support for the Conservatives of around 47 per cent and support for the government around 20 per cent. By the time the poll came, that had shifted dramatically in favour of the government. In between, came Trump. The UK Guardian analysis (March 19, 2025) – Canada’s Liberals on course for political resurrection amid trade war, polls show – said the shift “has little precedent in Canadian history, reflecting the outsized role played by an unpredictable US president”. To some extent, the craziness of the US political situation at present also impacted on the – 2025 Australian federal election – which was held on Saturday (May 3, 2025). The incumbent government, which was well down in the opinion polls before Trump took power, won in a landslide achieving the highest two-party preferred outcome in Australia’s electoral history. The parallels with the Canadian outcome are strong despite the different voting systems in both countries. Moreover, the conservative Liberal-National Coalition in Australia, the dominant party in the Post-WW2 era has been reduced to being little more than a far Right populist party. Similar to the Canadian situation, the Opposition leader also lost his seat, which was the first time that has ever happened in Australia. So Trump is undermining the very movements he is trying to promote. But what is very clear is that Australia is nothing like the US, despite some commonalities (language – sort of!).
How crazy is the state of US politics right now?
Answer: Very.
I woke up early on Sunday morning (May 4, 2025) and read the ABC news report – Donald Trump posts AI image of himself as the pope ahead of Catholic Church conclave – and wondered if I was reading a satirical story in the spirit of ‘America’s Finest News Source’ – the Onion.
This photo, posted by Trump himself on his own Twitter clone, summarises just how demented the whole US situation has become.
America’s early history as a revolutionary nation needs revival given the destruction the current Administration is causing.
I am no supporter of the Papacy but it is inconceivable in the wake of the former pope’s recent death, that a national leader would think it appropriate to fiddle with AI to cast themselves in this way.
It signals some deep mental fissure is at work.
While Australia was not being declared the 51st or perhaps 52nd state (given aspirations over Canada) of the US by the US president, the craziness entered the Australian electoral environment as well.
When Trump put out his plan to “level” the area of genocide in Gaza and create a “riviera under American control”, the conservative Opposition leader (Peter Dutton) praised the plan and said that Trump was a “big thinker and a deal maker”.
Dutton also claimed that the Arab nations should resettle the Palestinians after the US and Israel clears them out of Gaza.
Even the influential “Australian Jewish lobby” called Trump’s plan a “loopy proposition”, which amounted to “ethnic cleansing” (Source).
Dutton, thinking that Trumpism would appeal to the families in the outer metropolitan areas where the cost-of-living crisis was most apparent, then appointed a loud-mouthed colleague as the Shadow Minister of Government Efficiency (SMOGE), to clear out the public service agencies, mirroring Elon Musk’s ridiculous but damaging crusade through Washington.
The SMOGE was to cut “wasteful spending” and he said this new role would see 41 thousand public servants sacked and those that remained would no longer be allowed flexible working arrangements.
There were statements about public servants being lazy and abusing work-from-home rules.
Women voters who were not already alienated soon joined the ranks of those who were.
Flexible working arrangements have been very good for women in particular.
The Opposition claimed that research proved work-from-home arrangements lowered productivity, when, in fact, the opposite is supported by the serious research evidence.
SMOGE would also purge so-called cultural Marxism and woke agendas in the public service.
The SMOGE Minister provided the foreword to a newly published book, which demanded Australians realise that an (Source):
… insidious cultural Marxism is not just the barbarian at the gates, but it is in fact inside the gates. It’s wreaking havoc everywhere, undermining the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage, a heritage which has given us the most prosperous society the world has ever known, thus putting in grave danger the hard-fought freedoms we take for granted.
The newly appointed SMOGE MP was then exposed wearing a Trump MAGA cap and claimed it was all a joke.
It might have had the effect of signalling a ‘Make America Go Away’ message because the Opposition conservatives soon found out that its lurch into Trumpism was toxic in Australia but by then it was too late.
Message received – and the polls turned hard against them.
However, these characters cannot help themselves and at various times during the 35-day election campaign they lurched back into the Far Right messaging with attacks on indigenous Australians, attacks on young people, attacks on women, and more.
They also signalled they would turn to nuclear energy despite it being obvious that the cost would be prohibitive relative to a further investment in renewables and that the Earth would be fried before the new reactors were built and made operational.
Australians have a long dislike of the nuclear industry and the promise to buck that dislike was imposed on the Coalition by the junior partners – the Nationals – who represent the well-to-do farming communities and are now the epitome of Far Right crazy.
They forced the unsalable nuclear option as the price of them staying silent about a zero emissions target by 2050.
None of them believed in the climate issue and some actually were caught out telling followers that they were for ‘drill, baby, drill’ policies.
But in coming out with the nuclear plans, the Opposition looked more bizarre than they have ever looked and that is really saying something.
They couldn’t have designed and executed a “please don’t dare elect us” message any better.
The blue suit wearing Opposition men (the party is dominated by males) – in their Trump look-alike outfits – were declared unelectable by the Australian voters.
What all the evil woke Marxists were up to on Saturday is anybody’s guess, but notwithstanding the relentless messaging about these Marxists skulking around in shadows ready to do us all harm, the Labor government created history on Saturday and as a first-term government actually increased their majority.
A rare feat.
To put the rest of this post in context, I was happy when the Labor Party retained government on Saturday even as the landslide in their favour emerged.
But that is in the context of they are the lesser evil.
It is clear that Australia (and probably Canada although I am not an expert on that country) is not America.
We outrightly reject American cultural imperialism.
I recall some years ago when neoliberalism was taking hold here that the Pentecostal lot tried to make those religious TV crusaders from the US viable voices on Australian television.
We had midnight to dawn religious programs for a short while.
They disappeared as quickly as they came as no-one really could be bothered watching comedy at that time of day.
There is no thirst in Australia for the types of narratives that seem to elect Presidents in the US.
We just think they are crazy stuff.
To understand the next graph, readers should be aware of the particular voting system we use in Australia.
Many countries, including Canada use the ‘First-past-the-post’ system where a candidate is elected if they receive the most votes in a single count.
So with many candidates, a successful candidate might get say 20 per cent overall and still win.
The problem then is 80 per cent of voters didn’t want that person elected.
To overcome that issue, the – Electoral system of Australia – uses preferential voting, where, in the case of the lower House of Representatives, voters must “mark a preference for every candidate on the green ballot paper” (Source).
So, primary votes are cast for the voters preferred candidate.
But the voter also nominates or ranks the other candidates.
If on the primary vote there is no absolute majority achieved, the Electoral Commission then excludes the least popular candidate and their preferences are distributed to the remaining candidates.
A process of attrition occurs until there are only two candidates left and the successful one is the candidate with the absolute majority.
The so-called ‘Two Party-Preferred’ (TPP) measure is thus the final distributed outcome.
That is what the graph shows for the nation as a whole and recognises the dominance of the two major parties – the Labor Party and the Coalition (which is a combine).
The graph shows this statistic for every federal election since 1949.
Saturday’s election gave Labor party the largest TPP outcome and the Conservatives the lowest TPP outcome since that data was available.
The lower house comprises 150 seats in Australia.
Going into the 2022 federal election, the conservatives were in government with 77 seats and lost office at that election, gaining only 58 seats and a TPP vote of 47.87 per cent (after a primary vote of just 35.7 per cent).
While the 2025 election results are not fully finalised, at the time of writing, the conservatives have lost a further 18 seats and had a TPP of 45.29 per cent (with a primary vote of 32 per cent).
The Labor government improved from 77 seats in 2022 to now holding (so far in the count) 86 seats.
First-term governments just don’t improve majorities historically.
The Oppositional leader lost his seat as did a number of touted future leaders, leading to what the press is now calling a leadership vacuum.
There was one headline in this morning’s Age newspaper (May 5, 2025) – The Liberal Party does not need a renovation. It’s a knockdown rebuild job – a ‘knock down’ means it is worthless.
The author of that article was a former conservative party federal treasurer.
He admitted that the Liberal Party “is both organisationally moribund and dysfunctional” and assessed Saturday as “one of the more lamentable election nights since Federation” (Federation was in 1901).
The point is that the once dominant Liberal-National Coalition has over the course of two elections been reduced to a rump as a Far Right populist party with little credible policy narrative, who tried to win the election with a string of Trump-like culture and hate statements.
Australia is not America.
We don’t fall for that sort of narrative.
Australian politics has been recast over last weekend.
The disarray that the Liberal-Coalition now finds itself in is breathtaking.
Already, the recriminations have begun and there are influential elements demanding the Coalition go more Trump-like (presumably they saw some Marxists lurking in alleys or somewhere).
There is no real leadership left in the Liberal party.
The proportion of women in the party is low and the voting women dislike the misogyny of the blue suits.
The youth of Australia dislike the conservatives who are basically climate change denialists writ large.
Is there a lesson for the rest of the world here?
We now have two observations in the recent period – Canada and Australia.
While the electoral systems are different, the resonance between the two outcomes is high.
It is plausible that Trump and his crazies are actually providing fertilisation for a return of social democratic political forces.
I am not saying the Australian Labor Party is a desirable social democratic force.
But they resemble one, even if they have been infected with neoliberalism.
The conservatives have gone so far to the Right that they had made themselves irrelevant despite their dominant history.
Could the great socialist and social democratic parties of Europe, for example, see a similar trend by not kowtowing to the Trump bullying?
I am not convinced yet.
My fear is that the authoritarian sentiment is more rooted in European countries than it is in the English-speaking countries (excluding the US).
The performance of AfD in the last German elections tells me that the far Right is anything but dead in that nation.
The far Right didn’t win a seat in the 2025 Australian election and gained around 8 per cent of the total primary vote.
Conclusion
Two good election outcomes – Canada and Australia – demonstrate how isolated the US has become in the English-speaking world.
Trump would get nowhere here.
That is enough for today!
(c) Copyright 2025 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.
I said the same about Australia not being the USA to some friends on Saturday night following the election result. And what a relief! Australia is far from perfect but nowhere near as screwed up as the USA at present.
Still, Labor is now claiming that Australians support what they are doing, when that is clearly not the case. 34.8% of the primary vote is hardly a glowing endorsement of Labor. Not that long ago, a primary vote percentage that low would have translated to a landslide defeat.
More than anything, the election result was a rejection of the Liberal Party and Peter Dutton. Nor was the result a good one for the Greens. They would have and should have done a lot better if they were good enough, which they aren’t.
There are reasons to keep goofy out of power, but when pressure builds up and people need an escape valve, it usually comes around in various shapes, beeing the most foolish one the fitest for the job.
Paulo Rodrigues: There is plenty of pressure building up in Australia – stagnant real wage growth, continuing labour underutilisation, a housing affordability crisis, and huge pressures on a very fragile natural environment, just to name a few of Australia’s problems. Yet, in the Federal election we’ve just had, Australians rejected anyone who remotely associated themselves with Trump-like policies and attitudes. Australia might look like the USA on the surface, but below the surface, Australia is nothing like the USA. Most Australians are nothing like the 80 million or so Americans who voted for Donald Trump. We are different, and for all Australia’s shortcomings, I’m proud of that fact.
As we know, it was James Carville the US political strategist in 1992, who gave us the catchy phrase: ‘It’s the economy stupid’ referring to the public’s true voting motivation.
The Trump/tariff stock market crash came at a critical moment for the Australian Labor Party (ALP), just when people were seeing their superannuation funds dwindling. This financial shock activated their “reptilian brain” response, focusing their attention intensely on economic issues and personal financial security. This is the main factor in the ALP increasing their parliamentary majority in the Australian national election, May,3, 2025.
For 2025, the James Carville phrase needs to be modified to the following: ‘It’s the misunderstanding of how the economy really works causing people to vote stupidly’.
Why has the USA elected trump in the first place? against the vast majorities financial and social best interest, if MMT was common knowledge it would result in trump not being the president and no DOGE and no authoritarian terror tactics of disappearing people to El Salvador.
The Reform party (Nigel Farage) are on track to take power, thanks to the dense UK Labour party.
As an aside — any mystic James Carville once had has now evaporated, we now know he is just a political celebrity propagandist/ignorazzi corporate shill for the right-wing neoliberal US democratic party.
mk: Few Australians know how the economy works or understand MMT. That didn’t stop Australians rejecting the Liberal Party and Peter Dutton, especially traditional Liberal Party voters who are not a bunch of people who all lack progressive social and environmental attitudes, as many people believe.
Australians did not vote for Labor in droves – Labor received just 34.8% of the primary vote – and the fact that Labor will have a massive Lower House majority exposes the weakness of Australia’s preferential voting system. I’d much prefer the Hare-Clark system used for Tasmanian and ACT elections.
Because there is not widespread support for Labor, and because you don’t have to obtain the primary vote support you needed in the past to win government, it would not take much for the Coalition to win back government. The Greens, who should have benefited from the collapse in Liberal Party support, are in trouble. They went backwards. People are far more willing to vote for an Independent more closely aligned to their values than vote for the Greens in protest. Some Libs clearly voted Labor, but probably in seats where there was not a Lib-like Independent candidate on offer (Teal Independents). The Libs would only have to produce a popular Leader and kick out most of the right-wing extremists to change things dramatically.
I met my birth-mother for the first time three years ago (I was adopted at birth). She lives in Melbourne (I live in Adelaide) and she is a small ‘l’ Liberal. She is 82 years old with open and tolerant attitudes you’d expect of someone half her age. I don’t know who she voted for. But I can tell you that if someone like Malcolm Turnbull was Leader of the Liberal Party and the right-wing extremists were kicked out of the Party, she’d vote Liberal in a heartbeat. She detested Dutton and Morrison before him. I don’t think she’d be alone.
The Greens know how fiat money/MMT works as Bill explained it to them way back. Bob Brown acknowledged its veracity in discussion which Bill has related elsewhere. However, they failed to comprehend the next step as to how to use that understanding and then explain a way forward to electors which would benefit those in distress and advance the common good. As a result of failing the test the Greens reverted to the fiscal rules as ingrained via the narrative of the orthodoxy by pushing the justice/fair play line of clamouring for taxes on the wealthy so as to be able to spend on the many. There’s no way that is going to happen. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is insanity.
Running with the MMT story was a step too far for the Greens. Content to maintain the feelgood status quo clamour for nil result to infinity is lousy politics but good for seat warmers. They would have needed to be prepared to have a plan and a strategy to deal with the brickbats from the wailing banshees of the orthodoxy and their propagandists. No ticker, just like Albo in his first term and, as I suspect, will be, over the next three years unless he acts out of character within the first 6-9 months. JobSeeker above the poverty line with removal of its punitive measures would be a start. Such a paucity of intelligence, political smarts and imagination in the schoolyard that passes for our parliament.
The Senate Greens + crossbench seem like a prospect while the community independents in the lower house need a bit of a big bang to cement their continuance where they have so little influence following Saturday’s election. It’s way past time to crash or crash through by taking a leaf out of Gough’s book.
The Gen Y & Z are primed for something that isn’t “the tranquilising drug of gradualism” and I’ve been there for years.
Regarding this statement:
Yanis Varoufakis has recently written an interesting article for Unherd “The centrist comeback won’t last“. Short version: “Political trends in Canada and Australia are similar to those in France”, i.e. the failure of centrist politics creates an unhealthy co-dependency with an emergent right wind party.
Trump’s demolition of post-war institutions, economic relations, and security arrangements will have large, long-lasting effects, regardless of the outcome of national elections.
I am pleased to see that the Australian people have rejected any Trump-adjacent politics. And while we have mostly done the same here in Canada (I say mostly because Carney’s Liberals fell short of a majority mandate — they are rather in a strengthened minority position) the margin of popular support is, under the circumstances, uncomfortably narrow. And why should we be surprised? Neoliberalism has gone precisely nowhere in Canada (despite doing less than nothing for the well-being of Canadian working people), and both the Liberals and Conservatives remain deeply in its thrall — Carney ran not one, but TWO central banks (institutions I deem to be aristocratic and inimical to labour by design) for heaven’s sake!
As for the Conservatives (bizarrely the equivalent of Australia’s Liberals) their obsession with seeing “cultural marxists” (or for that matter, ACTUAL Marxists, not that they have the first clue about either Marx or his works beyond possessing a ritual mantra that “socialism is evil, m’kay?”) lurking in every shadow is beyond ridiculous.
The only good outcome I can hope for is that Trump’s behaviour will have so fundamentally broken the existing system of economic arrangements such that the Canadian government will be FORCED to try something different. Here’s hoping … 🤞
It was at least good to see a non Liberal win and a grubbing!
People are increasingly becoming disheartened and dissatisfied with the system parties, the parties that have dominated politics in any particular country for a long time; socialist and center right have moved into the neocon neoliberal globalist camp in foreign policy particularly. That camp is dying, it is in decline!! However new coalitions in foreign policy have formed round it !!
Foreign policy locally did not get a mention as they both had the same policy and given our location geopolitically we desperately need a plan that is not based on vassality to a Plutocracy in decline and a camp in decline !
The move away from the major parties, as a trend, continues; we are seeing this being played out in the EU right now and Britain and there is no room for complacency in a new Albanese government.
While the Australian election turned out well for the ALP in the circumstances for a range of reasons and the party were deserving winners over a chaotic Opposition, the actual policy differences between the two major parties are quite limited. Notwithstanding Labour’s genuine albeit inadequate climate policy, nothing was proposed to address the worsening inequality that is behind the widely publicised cost of living crisis, and which is the result of both major parties being fully invested in neoliberalism.
Though as Australians we may feel good about rejecting Donald Trump, we have already made huge concessions to support America’s continued world domination, which is not in our national interest.
To put Labor’s agenda in perspective it should be compared not with their opponent’s, but to that of the Whitlam government, or the tiny Australian Citizens Party which doesn’t have any representatives in parliament but confronts most of the big issues that the major patrties sidestep to avoid upsetting their corporate donors.
For example, the ACP proposes returning to an independent foreign policy including opposing regime change wars and the Anglo-American strategic escalation against China and Russia, and independently opposing the brutality in Gaza.
It proposes breaking the oligopoly of the Big Four banks and guaranteeing full, low cost banking services while ensuring the viability of Australia Post by the establishment of a publicly owned postal bank.
There are also policies to prevent corporate malpractice and corruption, protect whistleblowers, ban corporate political donations and discourage outsourcing of public service responsibilities to expensive consultants.
They have a comprehensive approach to return to affordable housing, including changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax, as well as a plan to restore electricity generation to state ownership, and a commitment to end the supermarket duopoly. They support nation building infrastructure development such as fast rail.
I would personally not support all Citizens policies, but could say the same for all political parties, including the Greens whose environmental strength is the Citizens’ major deficiency. Some policies designed to fund ambitious government initiatives simply reflect a lack of understanding of how a currency issuing government pays for its program but are inspired by pre-neoliberal values.
Lacking representation in the parliament has never prevented the ACP from finding common ground and working constructively with individuals from other parties. The ACP succeeded in getting the Labor government to examine and consider adopting its signature Postal Bank policy, but although this would presumably have been a potential vote winner it was rejected, no doubt at the insistence of the banks.
Surely that says a lot about the power balance in Australian politics.
In Australian elections, I don’t know if there are deserving winners, just deserving losers.
Dave, I think you already know this, but the “Australian Citizens Party” are a renamed Citizens Electoral Council of Australia, i.e. LaRoucheites.
Their policies are irrelevant, it’s a cult.
Malcolm,
I have only a passing interast in the influences that shaped the Citizens Party. I am more concerned about the way that powerful forces like banks, powerful corporations and foreign governments are able to stifle policy development by the major parties.
Any policies that can potentially address the mainstream policy vacuum and contribute to peaceful relations and the reversal of neoliberalism are indeed relevant, whichever group presents them.
Regards, Dave.
One of the problems we face is that, to save the planet and ourselves, it will require a massive change in the way people live and especially what we can do and consume.
Failure to do anything about population growth has reduced the options available to us, since a sustainable pathway in a world of 8.2 billion people (and rising) cannot entail anything other than a dramatic reduction in per capita rates of just about everything. And this in a world where billions are materialistically deprived, thanks to obscene inequalities.
For example, to reduce total GHG emissions to 40% of current levels, it will require per capita emissions to fall to 40% of existing levels, assuming no decrease in population. The same applies to rates of deforestation, materials and energy consumption, pollution, desertification, etc. That requires massive lifestyle changes. If the number of people on Earth was what it was in the year I was born (3.25 billion in 1964), total rates of the things I’ve just listed would be 40% of current levels without the need for lifestyle changes (3.25 billion is 40% of 8.2 billion).
Necessary policies do not see the light of day unless they are accepted. Powerful individuals stand in the way of necessary policies. But so do the expectations of the masses, which increase over time and morph into perceived ‘needs’ (e.g., an annual overseas holiday) even though their satisfaction does not increase people’s wellbeing. Most people would not accept the lifestyle changes required to save the planet. Indeed, most people aren’t aware of the lifestyle changes required to save an overpopulated planet, even though most of these people want something done to ‘save’ it. It’s not unlike George W. Bush’s statement that “the American way of life is non-negotiable”.
Non-negotiable expectations constitute one of the reasons why political parties will only advocate BAU (high consumption) policies that lighten the environmental impact whilst meeting people’s lifestyle expectations. Advocating anything else is political suicide. However, believing that we can sustainably have our ‘cake and eat it’ is a pipe dream.
Paul Ehrlich was right in 1968. Population growth is a ticking timebomb that, more than anything else, will reduce what future generations can enjoy and do. They will have to reduce per person consumption by design or have it forced upon them by disaster. Dealing with population growth should be front and centre of every conference, rally, policy, and political party serious about ecological sustainability, yet it is hardly ever mentioned. You wouldn’t believe some of the insulting responses I’ve got when I’ve dared to raise the issue.