A government is in trouble when it has to utter the banal and reiterate the damnably obvious. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is certainly struggling of late, a state of affairs all the more unspeakable given the calibre of his opponent. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton barely makes the grade of a two-dimensional politician, but has risen in the polls on a drab mixture of resentment, loathing and fear. Such a political approach does not always work but has done so in the past.

In a national Newspoll conducted from an August 5-9 sample of 1,266 individuals, Labor and the Coalition were found to be tied at 50-50, with the Coalition rising one point since the last Newspoll conducted three weeks ago. Albanese continues to be viewed as the better prime minister by a modest margin: 46-39.

With Dutton stealing the show on the national security front, be it over the spectral threat posed by Palestinians from Gaza with alleged Hamas affiliations entering the country, boat arrivals off the coast of Western Australia, the release of detainees into the community, or delusions of nuclear energy, the Australian Treasurer, Jim Chalmers thought it appropriate to use the 2024 Curtin Oration to attack Dutton. It was an attack that did the latter an odd service, giving him a dash of undeserving, if dark, significance.

Initially, the speech featured the state of the economy. A history lesson in political economy is offered, exclusively from view of Labor’s leaders. Then comes the clumsily wielded blade. Leadership of the “destructive” and “divisive” sort, Chalmers argues, is “not really leadership at all”. It was exactly that sort being offered by Dutton, “the most divisive leader of a major political party in Australia’s modern history”. The times were seeing “most sane people” rejecting “political divisiveness” across the globe. But here was Dutton embracing it with relish, a fact that should be “disqualifying”.

If Chalmers had kept the criticism accurately confined to Dutton’s encyclopaedic ignorance about economics, he would have remained well moored. “He picks fights and stokes division on national security because he’s got no idea about economics.” But Chalmers made a cardinal error in omitting one crucial, and unmatched, figure of divisive politics. For there is no more obvious candidate for the category Chalmers identifies than Prime Minister John Howard, the one figure who turned Australia into a nation of arriviste pettiness, land of the aspirational voter and squeezed middle class, terrified of outsiders, constantly obsessed by security threats posed by those arriving by boat without the appropriate papers, and the enemy within. After Howard, Australians have learned to be more suspicious, less trusting and less generous.

No Australian prime minister was as successful for so long in poisoning the wells of debate and stunting the vision of a country’s development. It would be impossible to note all Howard’s ghastly achievements, but some are worth noting in terms of their sheer divisiveness. There was, for instance, the ludicrous funding for private schools from the public purse, an unspeakable slight to public education in the country that persists to this day. The pioneering of excision zones for refugee boat arrivals and the establishment of tropical offshore concentration camps for asylum seekers was another nasty gem. Then came the pampering of such industries of plunder as mining, the mocking of international law and international institutions and the less-than-gentle sneer against climate change.

In all this miasmic horror, others, be they Tony Abbott, the faux liberal Malcolm Turnbull, and the instinctively base Scott Morrison, worked in his long cast shadow, their movements mimicking the Howard monster in fear, veneration and reverence. Labor prime ministers such as Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard did not do much better, capitulating to the narrow world of Mr Divisive.

Under Howard, social cohesion as a term was a scribble of a nonsense: what mattered was a monoglot, monochrome vision of an Australia trapped in sepia, the Victa lawn mower, the mandatory polluting car, the suburban home, and a dedicated hatred of some enemy. The terror of communism or the Cold War could just as easily be tailored to another threat: Asian immigration, for instance, or the arrival of swarthy boat people from the Middle East. Australia was, to use that insipid word, “comfortable”, but with a frown of worry that someone, or something around the corner, was about to disrupt it.

Howard also laid the ground for the ultimate withering of Australia’s already stunted sovereignty. His gaze was fixed, adoringly and simperingly, on the United States and its pursuit of that stretchy, malleable term, the “Global War on Terror”. He sent soldiers to fight in the name of US interests, committing them to the blood-soaked sands of Afghanistan and Iraq, the latter most profoundly illegal as a crime against the peace. But even before that, he was responsible for diminishing Australia’s role as an independent middle power operating with fortitude and maturity in the Indo-Pacific. It was telling that under Howard’s time in office, the interest in Asian languages collapsed.

By elevating Dutton to the mantle of most divisive leader of a political party in Australia’s recent history, Chalmers has ignored the most successful practitioner of that sort of politics. Far from being disqualifying, it’s the very mantle that may well win an election. And Dutton is more than likely aware of that fact.

https://johnmenadue.com/missing-the-point-chalmers-dutton-and-the-politics-of-division/

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.