By Tony Wright
Casting about for a subject for this first column of 2025, it was tempting to flirt with the idea of a grand sweep of the world’s state of affairs.
But what is there left to say that might shed a sliver of light into the gathering darkness?
Sussan Ley and Elon Musk on a Mars landscape.Credit: Matt Davidson
And then, to the rescue, entered Sussan Ley, importing her favourite Martian, Elon Musk, into the nation’s perennial dispute about Australia Day.
Ms Ley has been a gift to those seeking lightness in national affairs since 2015, when she revealed why she’d added that extra ‘s’ to her name.
“I read about this numerology theory that if you add the numbers that match the letters in your name you can change your personality,” she told a reporter. “I worked out that if you added an ‘s’ I would have an incredibly exciting, interesting life and nothing would ever be boring. It’s that simple.”
Sussan Ley and Peter Dutton, deputy leader and leader of the Liberal Party, seeking the stars.Credit: Rhett Wyman
Sussan – interesting and never boring because of the extra ‘s’ – is currently deputy leader of Australia’s Liberal Party.
Her leader, of course, is Peter Dutton.
Since making it to the leadership after Scott Morrison was cast off, Dutton has tried adding a bit of something to his not-over-exciting identity by borrowing a little of the Trumpian divide-and-conquer style that has worked so well in the (dis)United States of America.
Well, why not?
Donald Trump’s stupendously profitable pursuit of adulation, power and revenge began when Barack Obama skewered him at a fancy dinner in 2011 over his addiction to conspiracy theories, and his “leadership credentials” on the TV show Celebrity Apprentice.
Dutton had his fires stoked when Anthony Albanese told him to “sit down, boofhead” during a parliamentary stink in 2021.
Perhaps Albanese should have taken note of what happened when Obama humiliated Trump, whose subsequent never-ending vengeance propelled him to the White House. Twice.
With a federal election barely a breath away, the opposition is now leading Albanese’s government in the polls.
And Dutton, who once flew across Australia to spend an hour at Trump-adoring billionaire Gina Rinehart’s 70th birthday party, and has since taken to railing against “woke” causes, has suddenly appointed a shadow minister for government efficiency.
It is precisely the approach urged by Rinehart after her recent “dig baby dig” meeting of minds with the triumphant Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Two days after Trump’s inauguration, Rinehart declared: “If we are sensible, we should set up a DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] immediately to reduce government waste, government tape and regulations.”
Former Hancock Prospecting employee James Radford, Sam Bjelke-Petersen, Gina Rinehart and former Liberal Party vice-president Teena McQueen at a Trump rally in Virginia.
And who did Dutton choose for this Gina-ordained job, with its unmistakeable echo of Trump’s appointment of Elon Musk to head the US DOGE?
Why, it’s Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Dutton’s leading combatant in the divide-and-conquer campaign that killed the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum and set him on the front foot last year.
You can never have too many government cost-cutters in this new world, it appears.
Looking to Mars. Elon Musk and Donald Trump at a SpaceX rocket launch.Credit: AP
Dutton already had a shadow minister for government waste reduction, James Stevens, who retains his duplicated position.
Meanwhile, what of Sussan Ley?
The day after Price was given the Musk-lite job in Dutton’s line-up, Ley, apparently desperate for a slice of the attention, brought her favourite would-be Martian into the annual Australia Day stoush.
Her insistence is that Australia Day must be celebrated, and that those opposing it are troublemakers lacking patriotism.
Speaking at Donald Trump’s inaugural parade, Elon Musk twice extended his arm in what looked like a Nazi salute.Credit: NYT
It is thus worth repeating Ley’s breathless, surreal defence of her version of the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove in 1788 – the genesis of what eventually came to be called Australia Day.
“All those years ago, those ships [of the First Fleet] did not arrive, as some would have you believe, as invaders,” she declared.
“In what could be compared to Elon Musk’s SpaceX’s efforts to build a new colony on Mars, men in boats arrived on the edge of the known world to embark on that new experiment.”
Setting aside the inconvenient truth that it clearly was an invasion – Australia was occupied by an ancient people who were driven from their lands, starved, massacred, treated like vermin and are still denied a treaty – any correlation between the Australia of 1788 and some phantasmagorical future colonising of lifeless Mars, bankrolled by a self-absorbed billionaire, is piffle.
Might it also be considered a little unwise to have granted any reference to Musk in an Australian dispute about its racial history on the very weekend he was advising the German people to vote for a far-right party to protect their culture against multiculturalism, which, he lectured, “dilutes everything”?
His rant – eugenics anyone? – came as the world prepared to remember, at Auschwitz, the Holocaust of 80 years ago.
Ley’s version of what happened at Sydney Cove, anyway, was less an adventurous “new experiment” than simply a last-ditch attempt by Britain to rid itself of its most miserable and undesirable people – convicts who had been cluttering the kingdom’s fetid jails and rotting hulks to the point of bursting.
And why was this so?
Britain had lost America, its traditional foreign dumping ground for convicts.
Since 1615, British convicts had been transported to the American colonies. At least 52,000 were sent in 58 years of the 18th century alone.
But when the American Revolutionary War ended in 1783 with the defeat of British colonial rule, it also ended the transportation of British felons to America.
Australia – about as far from Britain as possible – was the answer. Industrial Britain’s expelled criminals would be out of sight and out of mind.
And so the world turns.
Today, Trump and his henchmen loudly justify rounding up and expelling millions from the US because, in Trump’s own words (untrue, naturally) “prisons from all around the world have been emptied out into our country”.
Elon Musk’s plan to blast off to Mars can’t come too soon, really. Could he reserve a few seats for a felon mate or two? And maybe a space cadet?
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