Oh, What A Week

Last night I dreamt that Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump and Scott Morison died in the same week. Rupert died peacefully in his sleep. The Donald choked on a hamburger. And Scomo died of shame in Glasgow. It was one of those happy dreams that you never want to wake up from. But I did wake. Damn!!! It didn’t happen, did it? Then I began to wonder – would it have made any difference to our current problems, to the crises that seem to confront us on all sides?

Rupert’s influence is still strong but falling as he progressively unwinds his corporate structure. News Corp still matters politically in America and Australia through Rupert’s continued control of Fox News and most of Australia’s print media. His anointed successor, eldest son Lachlan, seems to share his father’s ruthlessness and willingness to place profit above everything. But he’s not as smart as the old man and this might mean the likelihood of future missteps conducive to healing democracy in the places of the father’s birth and chosen citizenship. Murdoch junior and the young Packer, James, burnt a billion dollars in Australia’s phantom dot.com boom. The fact that as directors of a company that crashed spectacularly, they walked away unscathed after apparently taking a relaxed attitude to their director’s responsibilities, said much for the weakness of corporate regulation and the power of their fathers, the twin titans of Australian media. Will Lachlan be able to exert the same kind of bowel constricting effect on editors, journalists and elected officials as his dad did? Will he have the same ability to squeeze blood out of the banks to rollover the debts of the declining empire? Will he have the same visceral fascination with newspapers? Or will he quickly move like James Packer to divest and move into socially useful ventures like gaming? Finally, will his siblings who have been progressively sloughed off the company payroll mount a comeback? Will it be Shiv or Roman or Con or Gerri? Ah, but the final series is yet to air. The old man ain’t dead yet.

I’ve just finished reading the latest books on Trump by Michael Wolf and Bob Woodward. What a tale they tell of a wounded ego striding around the White House on his last days, bellowing rage and threats to the declining numbers of adults in the joint. The hard heads in the Senate, Mitch McConnel and Lyndsay Graham, know that they need him to mobilise the base of angry white working class and small business voters, the people living in the forgotten lands. They need his intimidation factor to cower appointed officials and politicians fearful that he could turn his wrath on them if they even think of stepping out of line. The problem for the hard heads who are well on the way of turning the US electoral system into a machine for permanently electing GOP administrations at state and Federal levels, is that they also need Trump to moderate his performance to reassure traditional middle and upper class Republicans in the suburbs of the big towns and cities.

The problem is that Trump can’t be reeled back. He is temperamentally incapable of approaching the world from any other viewpoint than his own. He does inhabit an alternative universe, one in which the stars and planets revolve around Him. Politics is theatre and he is the headline act. Whenever advisors and political colleagues beg him to use his powers to focus on positioning the Party to recapture Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024, he reverts to haranguing them about the stolen 2020 election and insisting that they parrot his rage. This idee fixe has already hurt the GOP by losing it the two Senate seats in Georgia and control of the upper chamber. Instead of campaigning for the Republican sitting senators, Trump was trying to strong arm Georgia’s governor and other officials into losing ‘illegal’ 2020 votes. This is driving the grey eminence of the GOP, McConnell nuts. He would gladly lose Trump but can’t. Trump, for his part, will never forgive McConnell for pinning the January 6th insurrection to his amble rear end. The two maintain a seething feud behind a façade of mutual loathing.

If Trump was really lost, to a big Mac or natural causes, how would the Republican Party fare? It might be expected that after a period of faux public mourning and slavish hagiographic gymnastics, the party fathers would regroup and exert iron control in order to impose their rolling program of political domination. Freed from the ever-present threat of a Trumpian outburst reliving ‘the steal’, and demanding vengeance on the thieves, the polite norms of political subversion and subterfuge could be resumed. The adults would be back in control. Alternatively, or in parallel, a bumper crop of mini-Trumps could appear like flies out of a cow pat and attempt to claim the crown. Trump’s ghost may well proclaim “Après moi, le deluge” – I know, most unlikely that the Donald would be aware of Louis XV but indulge me – however many will fancy their chances. After all, there must be some reward for licking the king’s boots all these years. Ted Cruz, Kevin McCarthy, and a host of red state governors are lining up waiting for the starter’s gun. The chances are that the rush would inject an even greater degree of confusion, incoherence and even violence into American politics. The great fear of party leaders is that the movement unleashed by Trump and kept alive in the hearts of his base will spark a fragmentation of the GOP into warring sects. It would only take one substantial break out for third candidates to split the carefully curated Republican strategy of voter suppression to hand electoral victories back to the Democratic Party – depending, of course, on whether the Democrats can manage the internal tensions between centrists and progressives, the followers of Bernie, Elizabeth and AOC, now that the main man is gone.

Prime Minister Morrison has flown out of the country to attend, if not actively participate in, the COP26 meeting of political leaders in Glasgow. Much anticipated, this coming together is supposed to sign off on the results of the previous Paris accords and set ambitious new targets on reducing carbon emissions to keep the planet from frying. The picture in Australia is gruesome. Since 2013, when Australia’s emissions trading scheme was repealed by the incoming conservative government total emissions have flatlined. In spite of active policies by state governments and eager consumer demand for solar panels on their roofs, every attempt to move the Federal government to encourage these trends through helpful energy and public investment programs, has failed. Several Prime Ministers have lost their jobs trying. The current locum tenens, Scott Morrison, is what in Australia we call ‘a Steven Bradbury’, after the Australian speed skater who won an Olympic gold medal because he stayed on his feet while those competitors in front of him crashed to the ice. Morrison is also known as ‘Scotty from marketing’ due to his previous occupation before politics. He appears to have no grand political narrative to pursue. Simply winning elections is his thing. He’s not there to change the world, which his personal religious beliefs as an evangelical Christian suggest is soon to end.

It took until the eve of his departure to Glasgow for his government to publicly endorse Australia’s commitment to reaching net zero emissions by 2050, long after every other comparable country had done so. What he is not taking is any commitment to increase the risibly small 2015 commitment to reduce emissions by 2030 by 26-28%. Even the largest state of the nation, conservatively governed New South Wales, has committed to a 50% reduction by then. Moreover, the 2050 target is opposed by significant numbers of government MPs. And it doesn’t matter anyway because there are no new policy measures included in ‘the plan’ that would give investors and business confidence that the economy will get there. The plan Morrison waved at a press conference prior to boarding the plane was nothing more than a glossy marketing brochure. If presented in Glasgow, Morrison is likely to receive the fringe award for best comedy routine worthy of a performance up the road in Edinburgh.

So, what would happen if Scomo was no more, if he was gone and forgotten? Would the absence of the self-proclaimed miracle man who won the 2019 election, against the opinion polls and a weak adversary, result in a new Labor government? Or would the conservatives successfully regroup under a successor and retain power? And would it matter who governs?

Labor says ‘yes’ to the last question, claiming to have policies that will drive emissions down by 2035, consistent with the net zero 2050 commitment. They haven’t yet shared the detail of these policies with the voters but promise to do so before the election due in the first half of 2022. Their caution comes from the old adage – once bitten, twice shy. In 2019, Labor laid out a detailed set of policies months before the election that were skilfully misrepresented through Morrison’s marketing strategy. To avoid repetition, the Labor Party is keeping things close. This risks leaving the government to fill in the gaps and scare voters again about what the Opposition really has up its sleeves. It also energises forces on Labor’s left in the environment movement to cast doubt on Labor’s real intentions. Caught between the vice of left and right, Labor hangs on grimly, hoping that Morrison’s woeful performance on Covid and the preceding bushfires will be gilded by achieving pariah standing in Glasgow. Even so, Labor will need to manage the internal tension between pro-mining sensibilities and fears in Queensland and the impatience of Southern voters in urban seats eager for strong climate and energy policies to kick in. This is the tension that did for the Opposition last time.

However, suppose the conservatives regroup under their new leader and win the 2022 election. Who might that leader be? The front runners appear to be the Minister for Defence from Queensland, Peter Dutton and Treasurer and Liberal Party deputy Leader, Josh Frydenberg from Victoria. Dutton narrowly missed the top job when Sydney-sider (Mr. Harbourside Mansion) Malcolm Turnbull was rolled because he was seen to be too ‘soft’ on the issue of climate change – that is, he believed it was happening. Morrison ended up skating into the job because the ‘moderates’ in the Liberal Party lined up to stop Dutton whose hard-line, head-kicking persona was feared as off-putting to the party’s genteel base. A Dutton-led government would mean a government led by a Queensland ex-copper and an ex-Queensland senator, with a bevy of noisy minors, rural and regional Queensland MPs from the junior coalition Party. I can hear the ghost of Joh Bjelkie Petersen chuckling. He made it to Canberra, after all.

If Frydenberg wins the keys to the kingdom he is still likely to inherit Morrison’s burden, a bunch of bolshie backbenchers and National Party Cabinet Ministers determined to stave off the challenges gathering from further to the right, a mish mash of libertarian sovereign citizens, shooters and fishers, One Nation followers of Pauline Hanson and mavericks, the whole clown car. Frydenberg, if he holds his inner urban seat, under attack by greens and independent Liberals, is wedded to the neoliberal faith that has got us into our current predicament. The ‘low taxes and small government’ mantra will still echo through the hallways and chambers of Parliament House.

The nightmare continues.