Mark Latham: Political outsiders’ anger claims another victim in Mike Baird
BAIRD has gone because the voters said they would no longer put up with his authoritarianism. His polling numbers collapsed, says Mark Latham.
Opinion
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LAST year brought a revolution in politics, with the rise of Trump, Brexit and third-party electoral success in Australia. Across the globe, outsiders are rebelling against the political establishment by throwing arrogant insiders onto the scrap heap of public life.
Now the fallout has rocked NSW politics.
The stunning Orange by-election result in November, with a 34 per cent swing against the Baird government, forced the axing of Troy Grant as Nationals leader. But it was also a damning reflection on the Premier himself.
After his early popularity, with buoyant polling numbers and a triumphant 2015 election, success went to Mike Baird’s head. He started to overreach, trying to close the greyhound industry, breaking election promises through council amalgamations and relocating schools (including Hurlstone at Glenfield) without consultation.
The man developed a God Complex, thinking he could get away with anything.
This is what outsiders hate: politicians serving their own out-of-touch authoritarianism, rather than the people.
Baird has gone because the voters said they would no longer put up with it. His polling numbers collapsed and Orange produced an electoral earthquake.
The Outsiders Revolution has claimed another scalp.
With the great man Donald Trump’s inauguration tomorrow, the timing couldn’t be better. Anyone wanting to understand politics in 2017 needs to be asking: who are these voters causing so much disruption?
Let me give you my best answer for our country.
HOW MIKE BAIRD PASSED THE BATON TO GLADYS BEREJIKLIAN
The typical Australian outsider is distrustful of the major institutions of public life: big corporations, trade unions, the media, political parties and nanny state bureaucracy.
They hate political correctness, social engineering (such as banning greyhounds) and the type of identity politics that subdivides the nation on the basis of race, gender and sexuality.
They dislike the inner-city elites (Greens, Labor and Coalition) and their condescending attitude to everyday Australians.
They resent the way the elites regard themselves as culturally superior, hectoring the rest of society to conform to their views.
In particular, they despise the ABC, Fairfax press, Section 18C, Waleed Aly, the Human Rights Commission, hysterical Left-feminists, Safe Schools and safe spaces — institutions that artificially segregate Australians from and against each other.
Financially, they could be any of us. Outsider politics cuts across socio-economic boundaries.
Some outsiders have been excluded from our open, globalised economy, left behind by the establishment.
Others have good jobs or own thriving businesses, but feel excluded and sneered at by Australia’s cultural elites.
This is where we differ from Trump’s America. We haven’t got large rust-bucket regions busted up by globalisation.
Australia has enjoyed 25 years of unbroken economic growth, improving the circumstances of most households.
While the lack of productivity reform in the Rudd/Gillard/Abbott/Turnbull era has retarded income growth in recent years, we are still one of the world’s success stories.
This is why we have a lower proportion of economic outsiders and a bigger share of cultural outsiders: voters who detest political correctness and language control.
Our typical outsider thinks David Morrison is a fool, people should be able to race their animals and the neo-Marxist gender theory being taught in our schools is from another planet.
Australian politics has become a parallel universe.
The insiders (representing no more than 10 per cent of society) are mainly cultural producers, working in the media, advertising, design, arts and education industries — as well as politics.
Among the other 90 per cent there’s genuine rancour about this elite domination of information and culture.
With rising levels of education and prosperity, people don’t want to be told how to live their lives — what to say and how to think. They want the freedom to be self-reliant and self-governing.
This was the strange thing about the last 12 months of Baird’s premiership: in his decision to ban greyhound racing and support Safe Schools he looked more like a Greens leader than a sensible conservative.
Make no mistake: the revolt of the outsiders in Australia is a revolt against the cultural producers. In the US, Trump won by mobilising the votes of the forgotten people: hard working white men hostile to the segregationism of identity politics.
Something similar is happening in Australia.
In the outer suburbs, gender politics is poison, and not just among men. The women I know see themselves as outsiders.
They hate the Left-feminist obsession with female victimhood and the way in which it talks down to women and girls, lowering their horizons in life.
In the real world of the Australian workforce, these women don’t regard themselves as victims of discrimination. If anything, their gender has been an asset in securing promotions.
If anyone has tried to hold them back, it has been other women, not men.
Outsider politics is on the march. Having woken from their democratic slumber, voters in the suburbs and regions have the numbers and are using them with devastating effect.
The question for Canberra is not if the Outsider Revolution will hit, but when and how. Both Labor and the Liberals are vulnerable.
In Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten they are led by out-of-touch PC devotees who have formed a unity ticket on the policies outsiders hate: high immigration, high taxation, identity politics and social engineering programs.
As a duo, Shorten and Turnbull are the most unpopular party leaders in Australian history, making them ripe for third party insurgency.
It’s simply a matter of time.
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