Australia is dying. It’s being killed by neglect and corruption.
At the head of the destruction is Do-nothing Malcolm and his vacant non-plan for the country.
Consider what “Australia” is. An Anglophone nation in Asia defined by a working class ethos of the “fair go”, English pragmatism, sport and self-effacing good humour.
In recent decades it has bolted on a thriving multicultural dimension that integrated well precisely because the defining culture is so…well…lazily defined.
This has been more than enough to carry Australia through the era of globalisation. From the seventies post-war Japanese embrace, to the more fulsome “Asian engagement” of the nineties, to the practical connectivity of the millennium and onto the wild China boom years. We’ve survived and thrived amid it all. Prospering economically and evolving socially to make the most of our circumstances in the Australian way.
But no longer.
Today Australian values are under direct assault. It’s been a long time coming in many ways but is also peculiar to today’s leadership. How so?
There are five strands coming together in the ineptitude of Do-nothing Malcolm that are doing Australia in.
First, Do-nothing Malcolm has no agenda. It is literally like he rises every day with his cognitive hard disk wiped clean. Whether it is energy, decarbonisation, tax reform, the budget, the post-mining boom economy, infrastructure, so on and so forth, he literally responds like he is ADHD.
This goes way beyond a splintered political party. It appears to be who is, unable to focus longer than a minute. Indeed, party fracturing may well follow not lead.
Second, the failure to address a single issue on it’s merits leads the government to rely on one policy over all others to support growth: mass immigration.
This might be fine if we had a capacity constrained economy but we have the opposite. So the fallout from Lucy Turnbull running her Sydney and Melbourne apartheid growth agenda is that wages are falling far faster than at any time in recorded history.
This is pure class warfare as Do-nothing Malcolm and his mates in Point Piper soak up the gains from rising aggregate demand while the working classes bear the losses in falling per capita standards of living.
Third, the failure of Do-nothing Malcolm to address the bare basics of the energy crisis is disastrous. Two of the hottest stocks on the ASX today are Origin Energy and Santos. Both are members of the east coast gas cartel that has destroyed Australia’s decarbonisation agenda and is gouging the life out of households and wider business.
Again, this is a rampant class war as energy makes up a much larger component of the spending of vulnerable households, which is why they got tax cuts when the carbon price was introduced.
Moreover, in time it will also worsen our acute dose of Dutch disease, hammering everybody.
Fourth, Do-nothing Malcolm’s external agenda is vacuous. He allows the corruption of parliament via Chinese bribes to go on, at the same time that he over-commits to China-hostile US mis-adventurism in Korea.
He has no obvious framework for dealing with the complexities of our Great Power relationships beyond enthusiastically saying yes to everything on both sides.
This must have both wondering who the hell we are and on what we can be trusted. It is accelerating the point of no return in both relationships.
Finally, Australian society has tumbled into the Do-nothing Malcolm great vacancy. In lieu of a constructive national agenda addressing fundamentals, a million voices have filled the vacuum pursuing a million different needs. From gay marriage to the citizenship crisis to burkas and the culture wars of the Right, we’ve dragged our anchor on all of it as relatively minor issues echo resoundingly in the empty heart of Canberra. The media follows it down rabbit hole, splintered straight down tribal lines and we risk social disruption as over-addressed trivia buries the unaddressed fundamentals that determine people’s quality of life.
We are at an extraordinary national turning point when the choices that we make will determine whether “Australianess” can survive the next round of globalisation or we will follow the path of other Western nations into paralysed oligarchy.
The empty suit ruling over us is taking us straight into the arms of the latter.
