Comment

Dana White looks like a cauliflower in a suit, except cauliflowers have more charm. When Donald Trump called him up on stage this week, he was calling up the forces that had him re-elected.

The presidential campaign in the United States was the most divisive, destructive, distracted and chaotic ever. It was driven by lies, misinformation, fake news and polls, hate speech and vilification, and many attempts at voter suppression. The campaign has sliced and diced American society and foreshadowed the most dangerous and uncertain global environment since World War II.

There is perhaps no more perfect an illustration of the crudeness of Australian public life, the saucepan on one’s head stupidity, than the fact the commissioner of the country’s leading anti-corruption body is a member of the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge.

Whoever wins next week, America loses. One candidate is grotesque and the other insipid. Donald Trump’s television-inflated personality and proto-fascist flirtations divert focus from the inadequacy of Kamala Harris, who until recently was a near-invisible vice-president. She is a calculated, accidental candidate, who was resoundingly rejected by the Democrats the only time she sought the nomination.

You know a government has a problem when every time a minister or even one of the backbenchers puts their head up for an interview, they are asked to defend their prime minister.

I remember when they moved in. It was shortly after I’d given up my workspace in State Library Victoria and had relocated indefinitely to writing from my home. These were the first days of the pandemic and perhaps the isolation facilitated the listening. This can’t be real, I remember thinking. What do they want?

We are still waiting for the government’s promised reform legislation on political donations. It was pledged as a key element of Labor’s first-term agenda, and yet here we are with just a few weeks of parliamentary sittings left this year – or, indeed, before the scheduled March pre-election budget – and there is no movement.

It wasn’t until she saw the king that Lidia Thorpe felt the violence of the moment. “I looked up at the pompous stuff, the extravagance, and then the just blatant disregard for what had happened to our people.”

Surely this should be considered a national catastrophe. How can this be, in a country as wealthy as Australia – a globally significant food exporter? How is it that our governments can get their priorities so wrong as to actually leave so many so far behind?

Judging by the glib claims of monarchists in media interviews, the king is merely ‘a figurehead at the top of the system’ that they say is not broken and serves the nation well. Somehow it is a stable underpinning of our democracy. Except when it isn’t. For these people it is as if the Dismissal never happened.