Ill winds are blowing in from the United States of America. In the times ahead we will be tested in Australia, across the spectrum, as to whether we adopt a similar approach to our politics.
The early signs aren’t good. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has tailored Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” to the more palatable “Get Australia Back on Track”. He has congratulated Trump on his “out of the box” thinking on Gaza, despite the International Court of Justice warning of a plausible genocide and most of the international community speaking out against an idea of ethnic cleansing spruiked by a would-be property developer.
The early days of the Trump administration have seen swathes of executive orders (including those that appear to be plainly unconstitutional such as seeking to end birthright citizenship), attacks on the independent media by installing cheerleaders like Breitbart, Newsmax and OANN in the Pentagon, further eroding the separation of church and state by creating a “White House Faith Office”, giving the world’s richest man and idol to incels access to private data on millions of US citizens, withdrawing from international conventions and imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court. Because of the Bannon tactic of “flooding the zone”, it can be hard to keep up – and that is by design. Overwhelm and undermine. Distract and destroy.
Over the past few years, institutional Republicans have seen the writing on the wall, with leaders like Paul Ryan, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger having either left the “new” Republican Party voluntarily or having been “primaried” and pushed out. However, perhaps the most concerning thing is that many people who have previously strongly opposed Trump have remained silent or fallen in line, or in the case of his vice-president (who famously described Trump as “America’s Hitler”), joined the team. These are not normal times.
Why should we be concerned? First, we’ve paid hundreds of millions of dollars in down payment to be part of a military alliance through AUKUS to partner with a president who openly talks about seizing Greenland and annexing Canada. A person who appears to be a purely transactional if not a malignant force. A person who tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after he lost the 2020 presidential election and who, in the face of the re-emergence of far-right extremism, made one of his first steps in office to pardon and release about 1500 people who stormed the Capitol on 6 January. And who is now turning his sights on those people in the FBI and Department of Justice who had the temerity to hold those people to account. With a compliant legislature, it now appears that the judiciary is the last guardrail and a significant target for the Trump administration in its endeavour to exercise unrestrained executive power.
But we are also seeing the warning signs of Trump’s authoritarian populism here, and Dutton seems to be prepared to engage in copycat politics honed for an Australian audience. Dutton, whom former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull famously described as a “thug”, has been widely criticised for seeking to politicise the conflict in Gaza for his own short-term political ends, and for stoking the flames of racial and religious division. He goaded the government to adopt mandatory sentencing laws for new hate speech offences despite widespread criticism from the legal community, and is prepared to push the buttons of a culture war through seeking to punch down on the trans and gender-diverse community.
We are about to see a series of puff pieces in the tabloid media about Dutton’s background, to seek to humanise a politician who opposed “restraint” during Israel’s brutal bombardment of Gaza, refused to participate in the apology to the Stolen Generations, led a grossly inhumane regime of offshore detention for refugees and people seeking asylum, tried to whip up fear about “African gangs”, said Malcolm Fraser made a “mistake” with Lebanese migration, led a misinformation campaign during the Voice referendum, and has attacked judicial officers, including those who had the gall to be “civil libertarians” before being appointed to the bench.
More recently, Dutton has been condemned for politicising the very concerning rise in antisemitism while remaining silent on Islamophobia, unfairly criticising groups like the Jewish Council of Australia who seek to resist a caricature that to be Jewish must be to unwaveringly support the actions of the Netanyahu Government. He has called for the deportation of some protesters attending pro-Palestinian rallies, and said that a minority Albanese Government with Muslim MPs from Western Sydney would be a “disaster”. He has equated neo-Nazis with the Greens, saying they have “no place in our society at all”.
Why does this matter? First, along with Scott Morrison, Dutton is perhaps the leader of the Coalition in the modern era most willing to embrace a Trumpian style of politics. That should send a shiver through our spines. But more concerningly, what brand of politics is this?
It’s not liberal politics. The “moderates” of the Coalition — despite Howard’s description of it being a “broad church” — have left in droves. This has led to the success of the Teal movement, which despite the fear campaign from the Coalition that they are Greens by stealth or, even worse, “reds under the bed”, are in fact largely disaffected liberal moderates who have been left without a political home. If a central tenet of liberalism is John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle”, and that people should be free to live their lives the way they choose provided it doesn’t cause harm to others, that finds no real home in Dutton’s politics. For example, freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, harm minimisation for illicit drug users, and freedom of sexuality and sexual identity, appear to be no friends of the Opposition Leader.
But perhaps even more concerningly, where is the conservative tradition here? Dutton has displayed clear hostility to the judiciary. Mandatory sentencing undermines the separation of powers and the rule of law. True conservatives know the importance of spreading power across all branches of government; they don’t seek to consolidate all power in the executive and to diminish the judiciary as the independent umpire. That is the path to tyranny.
Antagonism towards the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court and international law more broadly weakens the international rules-based order that protects us all. These institutions and Conventions were forged after the horrors of the Holocaust to try to prevent it from ever occurring again. Australia’s vital role in establishing those Conventions should be a great source of pride. But now they’re targets to be dismantled.
The reality appears to be that the liberal tradition of the Coalition — a tradition forged by people like the late Liberal Senator for Victoria, Alan Missen — is terminal. And now the conservative tradition is in strong decline. What remains is a kind of authoritarian populism that seems distinctly Trumpish.
And where is Labor? Prime Minister Anthony Albanese capitulated on mandatory sentencing — reportedly overriding his own attorney-general — despite the ALP’s own national platform, has remained weak on calling out Trump’s appalling conduct, and has failed to speak out to protect international institutions. Once again Labor, true to the past two decades, appears to be sacrificing principle for short-term political gain, never learning the lesson that they can’t avoid being wedged by the Coalition unless they try to win hearts and minds and explain to the public why these things matter. There will be testing times ahead where the Australian Government — of whatever political persuasion — is going to have to work out whether it’s worth diminishing our integrity in an attempt to ward off a tariff.
So we have a timid government, an opposition party testing the waters of a Trumpian authoritarian populism, and our “great and powerful friend” seems to be lurching towards despotism. It’s clear that the speed of what has been happening in America is making things difficult for those seeking to oppose it. Despite the warning signs, they appear to have been caught flat-footed. Having now seen that occur, people here who care about our democracy — from all sides of politics — need to organise and work to prevent us going down the same path.
Michael Stanton
Michael Stanton is Senior Counsel for the State of Victoria and the Immediate Past President of Liberty Victoria (the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties). Barrister at Brian Bourke Chambers. He has written widely on human rights and civil liberties, and given evidence to both State and Federal Parliamentary Inquiries on a range of law reform issues including the re-emergence of far-right extremism.