opinion
Paul Murray: Australia’s hatred of Donald Trump obscures bigger issues facing us in an election campaign

As one very ugly American muscles his way into our national election, it might be time to reflect on our relationship with Uncle Sam. Generations of Australians that felt safer because of our enduring defence reliance, and who admired the American exceptionalism that sent astronauts to the Moon, are now feeling abandoned. When the bonds of trust fray, vulnerability rises. In an uncertain age of technological disruption, Donald Trump has become disruptor-in-chief. The President has taken America’s longstanding image of a global sheriff and deformed it to a bully that threatens to usurp strategic hot spots like the Panama Canal and Greenland regardless of sovereignty, and launches trade offensives at close allies like Canada and Australia. The rising hatred here for Trump creates a strange dichotomy with our national embrace of the brash American celebrity culture he exemplifies. One of biggest changes in Australian culture during my life has been the demise of a home-spun vernacular and its replacement with alien Americanisms. The advent of television supercharged the cane toad-like sweep of US influence that began with talking movies. The internet turned the infection into a pandemic. So now, as an egregious example, nearly everyone under 40 uses the cloying “have a nice day” to conclude conversations. Yuk. We pepper our language with adopted phrases like “stepping up to the plate” and “ballpark figure” and tell friends, none of whom have ever played or even watched an interminable game of American baseball, that we will “take a rain check”. Not cheque. We even “touch base”. We “shoot the breeze” and then “cut to the chase.” We are prepared to “go the extra mile” when “the rubber hits the road”. Wrap your head around it. Jump on the bandwagon. Go cold turkey. No pain, no gain. Bite the bullet Not convinced yet? How about game changer? Low-hanging fruit. Break the ice. Keep it real. Cut the mustard. Shoot for the stars. With all that language in common, you’d think our Prime Minister would be able to speak to their President about free trade. Apparently not. This linguistic hijacking is just one part of a wider American cultural invasion. Most younger Australians are unaware of this change because they have been immersed in it since birth. So it was almost refreshing to hear Anthony Albanese — even though he sounds increasingly like Donald Duck — hark back to a bygone era when he accused supermarkets of “taking the piss” over grocery prices. Despite its origins in Cockney rhyming slang, that phrase sounded genuinely Australian. And we all still know what it means: being played for a mug. But if the person accusing someone of taking the piss, is actually taking the piss themselves, then that would make him a drongo, wouldn’t it? More of that later. Trump is held out as a prime proponent of what has come to be known as the post-truth world. It’s most obvious in politics. Incumbent governments around the world with their backs to the wall over cost-of-living pressures are now peculiarly feeling some relief as Trump’s trashing of free trade bites and makes voters long for certainty. Labor is now attempting to harness anti-Trump sentiment by painting Coalition election policies as being stolen from the MAGA playbook. When Albanese repeatedly says Dutton will cut government spending, he is suggesting Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn DOGE experiment is the Liberal template. But what Albanese is really telling voters is that cutting spending is something he won’t do. Even though it’s what we desperately need. Why would the Prime Minister think that Australians should be continually tightening their belts, when his Government doesn’t take the same approach? Labor bragged about $2.1 billion in “savings” in the recent Budget. That is dwarfed against its $777.5b in spending, up $46b. And these proclaimed “savings” are never audited. Now, that’s really taking the piss. In past elections, Labor has resorted to what are now known as “Mediscare” campaigns to frighten voters that our health safety net is under threat. Even though Albanese has been waving his green card almost every day, it’s hard to win that argument when Dutton is promising an extra $9b in Medicare funding, trumping Labor’s $8.5b. We might not like what Trump is doing, but he’s carrying out what he promised American voters — a single-minded focus on restoring his country’s ailing economy — which is why he was elected a second time. Albanese has not done in office the three major things he promised: lowering the cost of living; bringing down power bills by $275 a year; implementing the Uluru Statement of the Heart (in full). So should we hope that Dutton — and Albanese — is at least a little bit like Trump in that way? That they will do what they promise — and put Australia first. That starts by standing up for our national interest and not, for example, making excuses for Chinese antagonism. Albanese pleased Beijing this week by saying its “research” vessel currently suspected of mapping the undersea cable network inside our exclusive economic zone was only doing what our navy does in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. That was not only factually incorrect, but hopelessly naïve. Our naval exercises in those waters are what is known as “freedom of navigation” operations to assert our rights in vital sea lanes linking us to the world in which China has unilaterally militarised disputed islands over the protests of neighbouring nations. But China has no legitimate interests along Australia’s southern coastline. While saying he would prefer that the suspected spy ship wasn’t there, Albanese effectively defended China’s right to deploy vessels within our territorial waters, whatever their real purpose. There was simply no good reason for the Chinese ship to be tracking along the line of the cables on its way home from a joint research task in New Zealand. The normal way back to China would not be across the Bight. Last week, China unveiled technology for cutting submarine cables and has been accused of using it to deprive Taiwan of communications. Chinese-flagged commercial vessels have been recorded passing over underwater cables in the Baltic Sea that have later been found cut. But back to something more mundane: those taking-the-piss supermarket prices. Albanese says he inherited the cost-of-living crisis, which means he’s had three years to do something about it. He belatedly called another inquiry into the supermarkets, which was tellingly designed to report just before the start of the election. Sadly for him, it found no evidence of price gouging. So when Albanese promised this week to crack down on supermarket price-gouging, he was asked to define what he meant: “How do you know what’s price gouging? Price gouging is when supermarkets are taking the piss off Australian consumers.” While that explained nothing to anyone, he’s obviously the one taking the piss off Australian voters. Then there’s this week’s very belated concession that his $275 lower power bills promise is a dud. Back in 2022, Albanese repeatedly said the promise was based on “the most comprehensive modelling ever done for any policy by any Opposition in Australia’s history since Federation” by a firm called RepuTex. Asked last Sunday about the policy, he deflected, declaring three-times that it was “RepuTex’s modelling”. He refused to own his failure. Voters should not forget this line from the recent Budget papers: “Without Commonwealth and State Government electricity rebates, electricity bills would have been, on average, around 45 per cent higher in the December quarter 2024.” Once again, he’s taking the piss. (By the way, Drongo was an Australian racehorse in the 1920s that always looked like winning a race, but ended up winning none. It entered the lexicon as a no-hoper.) But thank goodness for Greens leader Adam Bandt, who was on truth serum during his visit to Perth this week. Bandt definitely wasn’t taking the piss when he promised the Greens would force Labor to shut down Woodside’s North West Shelf gas project if they could. That would mean cutting gas supply to Perth, which depends on it for about a quarter of our daily power generation — up to 50 per cent during peak hours — and will do so for decades. “The Greens leader said knocking back Woodside’s plan to continue LNG production in WA’s north-west will be amongst his party’s list of demands to form a minority government with Anthony Albanese if needed after the May 3 Federal election,” this paper reported on Wednesday. In a Trumpian post-truth world, such honesty was nearly as refreshing as Albanese’s “taking the piss” moment. For completely different reasons. Bandt would bring WA to its knees to enforce green fundamentalism on a returned Labor government. Hard to trump that as an economy wrecker. But we worry more about Trump.

opinionPaul Murray: Australia’s hatred of Donald Trump obscures bigger issues facing us in an election campaign

opinion
Paul Murray: Australia’s hatred of Donald Trump obscures bigger issues facing us in an election campaign