MALCOLM HITS MANHATTAN, MANHATTAN HITS AUSTRALIA
Maureen Dowd, the Old Gray Lady’s old gray lady, drops by to favour us with a New York Times perspective on local political events.
Maureen Dowd, the Old Gray Lady’s old gray lady, drops by to favour us with a New York Times perspective on local political events.
As you’d expect, it’s mainly about Donald Trump:
Welcome to chaos, Australian-style. Down under, there’s no demonic, mesmerizing Macy’s parade balloon of a leader like Donald Trump. But there are still plenty of echoes with America’s mad, ugly Thunderdome.
Even 15,000 kilometres from her office, Dowd cannot escape The Donald. The NYT’s headline on this, by the way, is “The Trump Vibe Spreads Down Under”.
In the dizzying quadrille of leaders known here as “Canberra’s churn,” Australia has a brand new prime minister.
Nobody refers to it as “Canberra’s churn”.
That makes six prime ministers in 10 years, with Kevin Rudd serving twice. While everyone in America knew who Trump was when he was elected, only half the people here were familiar with Scott Morrison when he suddenly catapulted to the top job a week ago.
So why does Trump even appear in that paragraph?
As in America, a woman in the running — who had been the top diplomat — was shockingly shoved aside at the last minute.
It wasn’t shocking at all.
And the man who has taken over is not as popular as his more personable predecessor.
Malcolm Turnbull is “personable”. Sure he is.
In Australia, they use a deceptively innocent word, “spill,” to describe the brutal parliamentary decapitation wherein politicians can topple popularly elected prime ministers and put another in place for no apparent reason.
Oh, there were reasons. Rudd was removed because the Labor cabinet hated him. Julia Gillard was removed because Labor feared electoral oblivion. Tony Abbott was removed because Turnbull briefly convinced everyone he was more “personable”.
And now Turnbull has been removed in part because he’s Turnbull, which is reason enough, but mainly due to his craving for a carbon tax.
“Polls tell us that if elections were held next Saturday, this government would be swept from office in a landslide,” says Frank Bongiorno, a professor of history at the Australian National University.
Dowd really lined up some A-list voices for this one.
Morrison’s main appeal is that he beat out the man who started the spill, Peter Dutton, a repellent Ted Cruz figure …
Bit of a reach there, which not unexpected when you’re writing a column about US politics that just happens to be filed from Sydney.
Morrison also took a hard stance on refugees to maintain Fortress Australia, with his “Stop the Boats” policy as immigration minister.
Morrison didn’t “maintain” Fortress Australia. He built it, to his great credit. The joint was previously Welcome Mat Australia.
Australian opinion on climate change is more liberal than the position staked out by Morrison. Just as Trump talks about “beautiful” coal — maybe precisely what you don’t want in your Christmas stocking — Morrison last year brought a lump of coal to the House of Representatives and stroked it while he complained about “coal-o-phobia” on the left.
There’s Trump again. The gal’s obsessed.
Tony Abbott, the former Liberal prime minister who helped mastermind the ouster of Turnbull …
Turnbull called for the spill.
… called climate change “absolute crap,” comparing efforts to fight it to “primitive people once killing goats to appease the volcano gods.” Is he oblivious to the fact that half the coral in the Great Barrier Reef is dead, looking ghostly gray and white?
Damn. If it was looking healthy and orange, Dowd could’ve worked in another Trump reference.
The spill did not do anything to improve Canberra’s reputation as a breeding ground for toxic frontier masculinity, where women are in a subordinate zone.
That's the thing that immediately strikes all visitors to Canberra. The sheer masculinity of the place.
Julie Bishop, the popular Liberal Party’s minister for foreign affairs, got iced out by her less popular male colleagues; JBish, as she is known, took it with her usual style, wearing defiant scarlet satin heels for her resignation press conference.
Dowd knocked this together after skimming the SMH for five minutes.
As Bongiorno notes: “It’s a very bad look. And in the end, if a government smells bad enough, it will be tossed out at re-election for sure.”
Imagine how lame were the Bongiorno insights that didn’t make it to publication.
The spill was so crazy because it was not a contest of ideas, just slippery mud wrestling.
That would’ve been an accurate line in 2015. Now, not so much:
.@chriskkenny : The reason the Liberal Party had leadership trauma and we have a new Prime Minister is because of climate and energy policy.
— Sky News Australia (@SkyNewsAust) September 3, 2018
What they have to do is fix this and get rid of their emission reductions obsession.
MORE: https://t.co/ykweMevBOK #Credlin pic.twitter.com/OQeXp75Bva
UPDATE. An earlier take on the greatness that is Maureen Dowd.