Ghostbusters 2 finally available on VHS as New Rental in Blockbuster Australia!

The title of this post describes roughly what it feels like to see unavoidable news coverage of Australia's far-right fringe political party "One Nation" experiencing a surge in the polls.

In this regard, Australia is not so much "fashionably late" to the global right-wing populist phenomena as humiliatingly late. I'm aware we can turn and point to Reform UK as a virtually identical political development buuuuuuuuuuuuuut still, I mean it's also quite embarrassing given what people already think of Australia to have to sit here when people ask us "Is their an Australian Trump/Farage analogue?" and we've gotta be like "It's my mum she works in a fish and chip shop."

I Lose, You Lose, We All Lose for Losers

This is a global phenomena, and Australia is particularly analogous to the UK - the traditional "right wing" or Neo-Liberal Conservative party got obliterated in the last national elections largely because interest rates were high.

The only real difference, was that in Australia the Labour party, a left-wing neoliberal party were incumbent. All the polling showed that the traditional conservative party of Australia were set to take government, Albanese had no real answer, all he could do was delay, and delay, and delay calling an election until...Trump had his liberation day and announced all his Tariffs, causing a sharp drop in people's retirement savings and economic forecasts to worry about a recession.

Meaning the reserve bank of Australia began to cut interest rates. The polling literally did a 180, and by the end of the brief election campaign, the Liberal party was cut back to a single gangrenous foot representing almost entirely rural seats in Queensland the Alabama/Mississippi of Australia. 

So the UK Keir Starmer labour government has basically previewed what is now happening in Australia. The UK elections were 2024 where wherever you were in the world an incumbent got ousted, UK changed the Tories for Labour, the US changed Dems for Republicans. 

It was all interest rates, cost of living. In 2025 interest rates began to fall, and so an incumbent could hold on in Australia. Credit needs to be extended however, to the US who switched parties from a serious but ineffective party, to the clown party. The UK did not do this even though they've had a bunch of blunders and scandals, it is nothing compared to the succession of debacles and shit sandwiches and dumpster fires that have been the actions of the Trump Whitehouse, I mean they pretty much can't even be called a government.

Pauline Hanson, is closer to a clown like Trump however, than someone merely ineffective like Keir.

The Gary's Economics Dichotomy is I fell, right

The democratic moment we are living through, have been living through is basically some threshold being crossed likely in 2008, the GFC. That was the end of the economic paradigm people could tolerate because they were invested in riding speculative bubbles.

After 2008, there's been a demand for change growing, that legacy political parties answer in one of two ways - 

1. Ignoring the call, kicking the can up the road, trying to keep the old mule wheezing on a bit longer.

2. Blaming immigrants.

Neither of these will address the underlying issue. The problem is, one of them obviously isn't going to address the issue, and the other looks like it is addressing the issue.

Gary Stevenson, a youtube celebrity, former Citibank trader and campaigner for an undefined wealth tax, says that the dichotomy we face is: tax the rich, or blame immigrants. 

I believe he is fundamentally right.

The thing is, the UK government, the Labour Party, just will not tax the rich, so they are doing the kick the can up the road, doubling down on neoliberalism.

Tragically Australia is doing something about cost of living. There's a couple of problems though - the Labour party (Australia) recently declared its intentions to grandfather out Capital Gains Tax concessions, and Negative Gearing.

This is in terms of results exactly the kind of change democratic voters actually have been demanding since 2008. People forget that the GFC ultimately had its roots in housing market speculation, it was so bad because the doubling down reached the stage where the US property market had been inflated up to the point that to get people to buy useless houses in nowherevilles across the nation, they had to get promotional interest rates on mortgage loans with no documentation of their incomes and jobs (NINJA loans) and to feel safe in doing such a financially reckless thing, by knowing they could just mail back the keys and walk away from the debt at any time.

Basically, one of the best ways to attack the growing wealth inequality is to shut down "investment" in residential housing. 

The Labour government took some unpopular but long overdue steps in the direction of becoming merely as bad as countries like the UK and Canada and US already are.

Australia's tax code was, and is, to be blunt, fucking suicidal. People are basically forced to mortgage themselves up to the eyeballs and speculate on their own homes, by the tax code. They have to outbid dentists who can deduct mortgage repayments on an empty second home, from their income tax via negative gearing.

There is another thing that Gary is fundamentally right about, which is, the media are going to amplify the story that everything costs too much because immigration is too high, it's not going to work, and here is the fundamental part - things don't cost too much because of immigration.

So the US is in this one dimension, ahead of the game - the Trump administration smoked a bunch of ICE possibly injected ICE into the tips of their penis. It hasn't worked at all, and doesn't work and we know this because immigration went down and deportations went up under both the Obama and Biden administrations. The same is true of the Labour party under Starmer in the UK, they've got the immigration down, they've stopped the arrivals by boats.

The fundamental problem is that the economy is too complicated for voters to understand, nobody explains to them the counter intuitive shit that is FUCKING BORING it is so well determined - like if you cut government spending the economy will shrink - voters don't understand that money the government spends becomes someone else's income, so austerity is like implementing an economic recession. They don't understand that immigration can help lower the cost of living, not raise it, by filling gaps in the job market and reducing the cost of services, bringing in workers to support an otherwise ageing population.

Instead in the case of austerity, people make a false analogy between the government and an individual "If I'm in debt I need to live within my means and tighten my belt." 

And in the case of turning anti-immigrant, they don't see it as someone running up to help you push your stalled car, they see it as more people turning up to their job interviews, to their auctions, to their kids track meets. They just see immigration as more competition, so they experience the government basically saying "we know times are tough right now, so we thought you could use more pressure."

Non-Multicultural Voting

Earlier this year, King Chuckles went to the US and made a speech to Congress that was essentially a comedy roast of Trump. He gifted Trump a bell and lectured the people of the US about liberty and democracy. Shortly after Chucky's visit, Trump went to visit Xi in China, Xi gave him a packet of rose seeds and said something like "I heard your Whitehouse Garden got a bit messed up." 

The world is basically laughing at Trump now, and have switched from sycophancy giving him gold baubles like he is a great and powerful dragon, to giving him jokes.

It was very apparent in the US, going back to 2016, that the voters' egocentricity in electing Trump meant that while they voted for who they wanted and got a nice 'fuck you' off to the US citizens who very much didn't want Trump; they were also electing an ambassador to the world. So it is one thing to troll the half of the nation that looks down on you, it doesn't really work when you have to send your embarassment out onto the world stage to talk to serious people, however you feel about their ideologies, policies and cultures like Xi, like King Charles, like Keir Starmer, Angela Merkle, AMLO and Claudia Sheinbaum, like Putin, like Trudeau and Carney etc. etc.

Pauline Hanson is even less serious than Trump. As Destiny said "I love my mom but she'd make a terrible fucking president" or something to that effect, Pauline Hanson is, in the most derogatory way, somebody's mum. Seriously, you could go to any public primary school, and find someone who is as qualified to go out there on the world stage and represent to very serious people as Pauline Hanson.

Again, to lean on Destiny, he has this standing challenge, for anyone ever to find a single video of Trump where somebody would be like "man, that dude really knows what he's talking about." A beguiling, fascinating challenge that should make you go "aha!" to think that Trump has never once uttered anything that sounded like anything approaching expertise on any subject.

I think Pauline might be better on that front, like she writes speeches and reads them, can pronounce a word like 'divisive' but she's in tallest pygmy territory, and she is certainly too advanced in age for anybody to reasonably expect her to step up and have serious energy policies, serious tax policy, even serious immigration policy.

Conclusion

I actually don't think Australia is a particularly racist country. I've lived in other countries, I have access to the internet. It certainly has a violent history where the indigenous were dispossessed and then ignored and vilified while continuing to exist as best they could in the superimposed nation state. It certainly has overtly racist and discriminatory policy in its past, like the white Australia policy and what not.

But I don't think Australias modal voter wants racial purity and believes the nation exists within the blood of 5+ generation Australians with maybe a bit of Aboriginal or a bit of Greek or Italian or Vietnamese or Hong Kongese or Dutch or German or Philipino or Argentinian or Samoan or Fijian or Vatu or...you get the point, in them.

I think they care about interest rates, and their kids living similar lives to themselves. I think they largely can't connect the appreciation in the value of the home they are paying off, with the fact that they are somehow going backwards in quality of life because the maths is too counterintuitive.

That a One Nation lead Australian government would not succeed in any way shape or form of making any of their constituents lives better, is one of the easiest predictions to make.

The shame is, on a greater set of shoulders that sets the editorial tone of public discourse. Australia is, for example, one of the places making strides on opening up the conversation on our housing policy, and allowing the public to hear voices explain the drawbacks of negative gearing, and giving capital gains tax discounts to real estate sales that are not given to shares or other productive investments.

Australia remains a media silo where I don't think you will ever hear anyone say "The housing affordability crisis is because of investment."

The relatively good and decent government we have right now, is trying to address this on the downlow, because Australia the nation, is not emotionally mature enough to be spoken to like adults, and we don't really have any voices both large and independent enough, to begin the tantrums and the sobbings and get us to where we can restructure our tax code to make people pay for what they take, and not for what they make.