The hard-headed assessment of one of Anthony Albanese’s closest allies is that Peter Dutton is the best thing Labor has going for it at the next election. Not because the unpopular Liberal leader cannot win, but rather because he can. This creates the circumstances for the election to become not a referendum on the performance of the government but rather a choice between Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party and Peter Dutton’s Coalition.
Denial is a funny thing. We have to find slippery ways of trying to live with high levels of cognitive dissonance: the discomfort we feel when faced with the reality that our thoughts and actions are contradictory. We must somehow rationalise the ways in which we fool ourselves. In the words of Seinfeld’s George Costanza: ‘It’s not a lie if you believe it.’ Nowhere is the denial of reality clearer than the political response to dealing with the existential threats posed by climate change.
The Albanese government’s signature, visionary policy for the next election is shaping up to be the Future Made in Australia. So far, the prime minister has faced criticism for his government’s reliance on subsidies in its support for high-priority projects and sectors under that framework, which the Coalition is calling ‘billions for billionaires’.
American hedge fund Starboard Value rallied fellow News Corp shareholders on Monday to ‘collapse the Company’s dual-class share structure’, which gives the Murdoch family 41 per cent of the voting rights despite owning only 14 per cent of the shares. … If the campaign succeeds in ending the Murdoch stranglehold this year, it will be more than a victory for corporate democracy. It promises a lift in the standard of democratic discourse in Australia and the world.
Trump is an American grotesque. He is such a théâtre de l’absurde that it is too easy to miss that Harris, too, lacks meaning or purpose. Like an absurdist play, her utterances end in baffled silence.
Party insiders argue that elections ought to be like AFL grand finals – only two teams are on the field. Independents and single-issue candidates are more attracted to the model of a horserace or Olympic sprint. All voting systems have inbuilt anomalies, however.
If the government takes a cue from what worked this week, and extends it to land clear messages on the things that matter most in election campaigns – jobs, wages, tax and cost of living – it could just make retaining majority government possible.
Dutton has announced, on several occasions, that he is developing a strategy to win back the teal seats but has not actually moved to improve the Coalition’s policy commitments in the three areas that cost it dearly at the last election.
Albanese’s declaration ... that ‘the government is not for turning’ on the CFMEU clean-out evoked the defining quote of the late British Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher. He has gone from fighting Tories to quoting them.
Dutton is a master of the malign narrative. Under his leadership, enough fear-based narrative trips and twists weave through immigration policy and administration to keep journalists in train and Labor on the defensive.