Politics

Like the dog that caught the car, Australian conservatives have succeeded in a decades-long quest to crush the bargaining power of unions and workers. And, in turn, they have succeeded in crushing average wage growth.

Try as he might, Scott Morrison can’t help letting slip his early-election ambitions. His most telling giveaway was in his first pep talk of the year to the Coalition party room in the Great Hall at Parliament House. But the prime minister merely confirmed the buzz of expectation that was already spreading through the corridors of power.

The more certain a 2021 election becomes, the less certain the leadership of the Labor Party appears. Though the next poll may be any time from August 2021 to May 2022, there’s a distinct election-year feeling in the air – and an open-season vibe in the opposition.

As Joe Biden prepared to take office as the 46th president of the United States, promising to ‘restore the soul of America’, his mission statement found an echo in Australia. The language was less portentous, and the crowd more mundane. But in a speech to the Perth USAsia Centre at the University of Western Australia, Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese found a local variation on the theme. According to Albanese, Trumpism had tarnished not only the former US administration, but the current Commonwealth government as well.

Most Australian politicians, particularly those in the two major parties, lack the political will to do what the majority support. Instead, they pander to conservative ideologies, driven by the morbid fear of criticism from a small but vocal minority. Australian politics is, for the most part, power without passion. And nowhere is this more stark than in Aboriginal affairs.

As the year like no other draws to an end, the challenges and crises it presented have highlighted the nation’s strengths and dramatised its weaknesses. Facing up to these realities will be particularly daunting for our political leaders as they ready themselves for the next federal election.

Victoria, a state that had as many as 700 new daily Covid-19 cases at the peak of its second wave, has gone many weeks without community transmission of the virus. Yet it now seems the health system is at risk of being pushed further beyond capacity than ever before.

The prime minister was more the circuit preacher than ‘Scotty from marketing’ as he addressed the final Coalition party room meeting of the year. His stirring words of self-congratulation were tempered with a gentle reminder they all needed to stay humble. The old retort – they have plenty to be humble about – can be applied, but at the end of a year that ‘has been like no other’, Australians have survived better than many. And Morrison wouldn’t be a politician if he didn’t claim a lion’s share of the credit.

Upon mature reflection, it is increasingly looking as though Scott Morrison’s angry reaction to a ‘truly repugnant’ social media attack from a Chinese government official has only deepened the crisis in the relationship between the two nations … In lashing out, Morrison broke one of the cardinal rules of social media.

Consider some of the most notable and concerning examples of ‘bad behaviour’, excess and the abuse of power and privilege of just the past couple of decades, which have seen an alarming erosion of ministerial responsibility, transparency and accountability.