Peter Hartcher has the right idea for the wrong reason:
The message is loud and clear: The Australian people want their sovereignty back.
There are two pieces of fresh evidence. First, it’s the message from today’s Fairfax-Ipsos poll.
After months of political debate, Malcolm Turnbull has announced a royal commission into the banking sector.
Asked whether the party in government should change leaders between elections or whether they should be allowed to serve full term, an overwhelming 71 per cent said they should go full term.
…The second piece of evidence is Saturday’s by-election in New England. Rather than use the opportunity to lash out at an unpopular government by sacking the deputy prime minister, the voters restored Barnaby Joyce to the parliament with an even bigger majority.
These votes have nothing whatsoever to do with folks currently occupying Canberra. They are voted for because there is nobody else.
However, the point that Australians “want their sovereignty back” is crucial and goes way beyond one stupid IPSOS poll. It goes to the heart of everything that is wrong with Canberra (including Peter Hartcher).
If Canberra was ever the true capital of Australia, it is no longer. It is the capital of corruption, in its ideas, practices and institutions. Increasingly this corruption works for foreign interests that are here to rob and marginalise Australians and that is what the polity wants to stop.
Australians are not anti-globalisation, nor anti-immigration, nor anti-multiculturalism, nor anti-trade. In fact, we are wild enthusiasts for them all. Current disaffection is not xenophobia or racism or any other easy label. The polity is filled with disgust and dismay at Canberra and its total failure to manage these global forces in the national interest.
And it has every right to be so:
- mining corporations do whatever they want and when resisted drag down prime ministers;
- globetrotting European, American and local corporations are pillaging east coast gas resources while plundering household budgets as our critical energy market collapses into total farce;
- using foreign capital, the politico-housing complex has completely marginalised those aged under the age of 35 from owning a roof over their heads;
- persecuted refugees can no longer hide the mass immigration tsunami that has crush-loaded eastern city essential services and infrastructure, making house prices even worse, as well as ensuring that Australia’s post-mining boom adjustment is foisted exclusively upon deflating wages and unemployed youth;
- the education system is being sold to Asia’s dumbest, benchmarking us to them;
- Indian corporations install globally-destructive mines the size of Hell itself, expressly against the wishes of a climate-change concerned populace, and
- we are verging on a total sell-out of our strategic alliance with the United States, the only democratic power in the world that can prevent Chinese autocracy from installing undemocratic puppet states wherever it likes.
These are not minor compromises tolerated of the inept. We are witnessing the erosion, selling, uprooting and smashing of the fundamental pillars of our prosperous, modern, liberal and democratic nation. Even those that can’t articulate this fully know in their bones something is deeply wrong. The very base of the Australian version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is being destroyed for future generations:
It’s not any one of Liberal, National, Labor or Greens. It’s all of them:
- Liberals are refugee-bashing liars in the pocket of the mass immigration corporate growth lobby;
- Nats are racist, economic nationalists that wouldn’t know good economics if it grew on trees;
- Labor is a China-sympathetic mass immigration hypocrite that has forgotten what class war looks like;
- Greens are world government fruit cakes that don’t give two hoots about the local environment.
None of them represents sensible, middle liberalism promoting progressive values, open economics and sustainability optimised for Australians. That’s the sovereignty we all want. Indeed, were it not for Australia’s fantastic levels of sub-altern placidity, a revolution would have transpired long ago, as Donald Horne made clear decades ago.
To date we’ve been lucky. History has been kind with the two century global dominance of the Anglosphere offering an umbrella under which our sub-par leadership could endlessly fuck-up without consequences.
But today we are on the verge of turning into something none of us signed up for, nor want, and unless the Canberra corruption is stopped it is going to happen right before our very eyes.
It must be burned and its earth salted.
Something new is needed.
P.S. Just in case you’re tempted to construe me too literally, here’s a bit of Lonely Island to lighten your mood:
