Why Australia is no better than the US
AUSTRALIANS have spent the fortnight feeling slightly smug that we have not had our own divisive social crisis in the vein of Donald Trump or Brexit.
We’ve been patting ourselves on the back about the fact Americans want to move to Australia and insisting that the politics of hatred and anger bubbling over in the States could never take hold here.
Yet all the signs since election day suggest such a rupture in our cultural fabric is a not-too-distant possibility.
Fear and resentment is building in Australia, and the political establishment appears to have learnt nothing from America’s mistakes.
Labor leader Bill Shorten sezied the opportunity to insist he would “heed the lessons” from the Rust Belt and buy, build and employ Australian, while Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull retorted that he was “playing shabby political games” with the monumental news.
Politicians and thought leaders insisted Pauline Hanson could never be elected Prime Minister on Q&A, shortly before the One Nation leader praised Mr Shorten for backing her call for a crackdown on foreign worker visas.
Meanwhile, the Government has unveiled its bizarre scheme to have the US resettle refugees who are being held in offshore processing centres on Nauru and Manus Islands — if Mr Trump doesn’t back out.
And last week polarising former PM Tony Abbott spoke out to applaud the President-elect’s position on climate change, saying the “moral panic” about global warming was “over the top.”
Such antagonistic behaviour is only gaining momentum as the Trumpian era gets underway.
A GROWING SENSE OF ALIENATION’
Allan Patience, principal fellow in the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne, told news.com.au the conditions are ripening for our Trump-xit moment Down Under.
“There’s a growing sense of alienation and a locking out of the economy we’ve been seeing for 30 years, which has intensified since the Global Financial Crisis,” he said. “It’s creating serious social problems and great social inequality.
“There are many indicators: crime rates rising, more incidences of pathologies including anxiety, angry graffiti in working class suburbs in Melbourne and Sydney.”
It’s paved the way for the emergence of far-right voices from Ms Hanson, whose party has four senators in federal Parliament, to groups like Reclaim Australia, whose sympathisers are taking to the streets in droves following the US election result.
Just as white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan latched on to Mr Trump’s movement, the more extreme elements of Australian society simply need a viable leader.
The right-wing faction of the Liberal Party has already started tapping in to their insecurities, with George Chistensen demanding that no more 457 visas for foreign workers are issued in central and north Queensland, since, “Australian jobs should be for Australian workers.” More surprisingly, the Labor Party is on his side.
Benjamin Isakhan, Associate Professor of Politics and Policy Studies at Deakin University, notes that Clive Palmer is a right-wing, populist leader of just the same type as America’s new Commander in Chief.
“He has all the same hallmarks,” Associate Professor Isakhan told news.com.au. “He wasn’t successful but someone of his ilk may rise through the ranks.”
‘THEY ARE UTTERLY CUT OFF’
The resentment simmering in this country springs from similar factors seen in the UK and US, a combination of economic and cultural forces.
Jobless, disenfranchised Australians who feel their identity is being eroded are blaming immigration, with politicians and the media abjectly failing to address their concerns.
More than a million Australians are now “underemployed”, wanting an average of 13.5 hours extra per week or two million days.
Serious job poverty is feeding a wave of “humiliation that the government is not picking up on,” according to Professor Patience. He said an almost “almost fundamentalist” belief in a range of public policies had “blinds them to the real humiliation” felt by so many Australians.
“Like many establishment politicians in America — certainly the Democrats and some Republicans — they are utterly cut off,” he added.
Assoc Prof Isakhan says that right-wing politicians are trying to sate the panic with draconian measures, while the left responds with the polar opposite viewpoint and a refusal to engage on people’s concerns. The issue has become too politically loaded to discuss.
Mr Trump’s call for a total ban on Muslim immigration, and his grand vision for his wall between the US and Mexico, is echoed in Malcolm Turnbull’s plan to ban asylum seekers who arrive by boat from ever settling in Australia.
Immigration Minister Peter Dutton warned the threat “had not subsided” and that if Labor did not support the bill, they risked “border chaos.”
‘IF WE NEED SCAPEGOATS, WE’LL KNOW WHERE TO LOOK’
Australia has the potential for a Brexit, a Trump or a far-right backlash of the kind seen across Europe, but we have yet to see the street riots and racist violence that have broken out elsewhere in the world.
The experts say that perhaps the one thing saving us from anarchy — a feeling that certainly threatened during the election — is our very isolation.
For Assoc Prof Isakhan, it was a cancer that started in 2008 that has in many ways led to the shock events of this year. “Perhaps the thing protecting us is our economy,” he says. “We survived the financial crisis and live lives of relative prosperity.
“If Australia suffered some kind of economic crisis, the right ingredients are there.”
The professor says immigration is not the only issue in the US, the picture is much bigger and more complicated. But he believes Australia could avoid some of the same problems through a “robust public debate” in which people can air their insecurities free from a fear of retribution.
He warned that ordinary suburban families had been “whipped into a frenzy” over immigrants since the 2001 Tampa affair, when the Howard government refused to allow a Norwegian freighter carrying rescued refugees to enter Australian waters.
“If we need scapegoats, we’ll know where to look.”
Posted without comment for now. Will put my thoughts to screen when time permits.
