Peta Credlin: Why Trump could happen in Australia

WHETHER he wins, the phenomenon of Trump will not go away anytime soon and many of the preconditions that saw his rise are relevant to Australia, writes Peta Credlin.

YOU have to feel a bit of sympathy for the Americans at the moment.

After eight years of an Obama presidency heavy on rhetoric and light on delivery, they’re now faced with a vexed choice on Tuesday ­between the mad or the bad — ­Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.

In a nation of more than 300 million people, that these two flawed ­individuals won their respective nomination contests says a lot about the major parties, and the changing nature of the US electorate.

Whether he wins or not, the phenomenon of Trump will not go away anytime soon and many of the preconditions that saw his rise are relevant to Australia.

Could Trump happen here?

You bet.

Trump is no master politician but he’s a canny businessman.

It’s been a long campaign, even by US standards.

But what’s made it even longer for us here in Australia is the smugness of some commentators when it comes to Donald Trump, and their Pollyanna views on Hillary ­Clinton.

Now, I am no fan of Trump — particularly his repeated and offensive views on women, his thinly exposed policy platform, his contrary views on foreign policy and his own financial past — but Clinton is barely worthy of support either.

The web of financial dealings around the Clinton Foundation are unprecedented.

Claims of millions of dollars being channelled into a private fund so ­people could gain access to the then US Secretary of State are just the tip of the iceberg.

Add former President Bill and his commercial involvement, the conduct of the Democratic nomination process, thousands of classified emails deleted and now an FBI investigation that’s caught up Hillary’s most trusted staffer and her husband, the aptly named ­Anthony Weiner (a former MP caught sending lewd pictures to young girls) and it all looks like a script Hollywood would reject for being too far-fetched.

And on it goes.

Take last week when Hillary Clinton tweeted out a line from Obama’s speech against Trump, which said “that if you disrespect women before you were president, you will disrespect women when you’re in office”.

Hello? Did she think we had forgotten she is married to Bill?

Here, as in the US, there’s been a reluctance by the media to really examine Hillary. For the most part, this is because Australia’s media leans to the left and it has had an antipathy towards Trump from the outset.

There’s also Clinton’s “first female” mantle too. I have always said it is way past time for a woman to lead the US but, by god, do we really have to accept such a flawed choice?

I had hoped for a first woman president who would inspire all women, regardless of their own politics, but instead she merely divides us.

There are many complex reasons why the Republicans and the Democrats have put up the two most ­unpopular and flawed candidates in a generation. There’s almost an interdependency about their survival: if ­either of them were facing someone better, they wouldn’t still be competitive. But there they are, still neck and neck in the polls, going right down to the wire.

Some commentators are saying it shows how compromised Clinton is that Trump is still standing but that belies the fact that he’s still in the race because he speaks to, and for, so many citizens who feel that Washington DC has forgotten them.

And that’s the lesson for us here in Australia.

Trump is no master politician but he’s a canny businessman who has seen a gap in the market and ruthlessly exploited it to his own ­advantage. When the Tea Party picked up support from an almost standing start, with little formal organisation, no real leader and no real money, the writing was on the wall. Trump read it and his campaign for President was mapped out.

The elites mocked him at every turn, but they failed to see that in mocking the man, they mocked his people. And that was the deadly ­mistake.

In the US just like here at home, the middle class are being squeezed at every turn. They work hard but don’t feel like they’re getting ahead. There’s been very little real wage growth in the private sector. The cost of living keeps going up. They support a safety net but resent the welfare class that don’t work when they can and should.

They are sick of big business which avoids taxes when they pay their fair share. They have had enough of ­political correctness being shoved down their throats: what to say and what to think.

They want their leaders to stand for something — to say what they’ll do and do what they say. They want the problems fixed and then they want government to let them get on with their lives rather than constantly find new ways to interfere and waste their money.

While they support immigration in principle, they don’t think enough care is taken about the people let in and they worry about safety in their communities and their family.

These concerns are real yet they’ve been dismissed by the same sniggering classes who told us we were environmental vandals if we worried about the cost of a carbon tax; that we were racist if we wanted an honest conversation about dysfunction in indigenous communities; that we were intolerant if we questioned gender education for primary schoolchildren; that we lacked compassion if we wanted boats turned back and an immigration program managed by the Australian government and not people smugglers.

Brexit, too, was a demonstration that an arrogant leftist commentariat lording it over ordinary people isn’t just an issue for countries that share the Pacific Ocean.

Here at home, on it goes. The latest example was Friday’s closure of the Hazelwood coal-fired power station in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley.

After many years of hysteria ­regarding the use of coal, we now have the Labor Party (state and federal) crying crocodile tears over the loss of 800 jobs and telling us not to worry about the loss of a quarter of Victoria’s electricity supply.

Premier Daniel Andrews says it will only increase power prices by a mere 4 per cent.

Industry experts, on the other hand,   say   it   will   be   closer  to 25 per cent.

This is the same Premier who spent a billion dollars in compensation for not building a much-­needed road, so forgive me if I don’t think he can add up.

The zealotry that’s driving the shutdown of coal is the same zealotry that would have us believe wind and solar are a viable baseload replacement. As we have seen in South Australia, that’s rubbish.

Yet Bill Shorten has a policy that will see Australia shut down baseload electricity generation to deliver his target of 50 per cent renewable ­energy by 2030.

Despite the hectoring of the green-edged cultural elites, feeling good about renewables is cold comfort when you’re sitting in the dark and you’re out of a job because industry has gone offshore.

When people say to me “there’s no way Trump can happen here”, I tell them they need to go for a drive outside their leafy suburb, find a pub, sit down in the front bar and just listen.