If you listened to Scott Morrison’s concession speech you would have heard him say, in part, the following:
Tonight I’ve spoken to the leader of the opposition and the incoming prime minister Anthony Albanese, and I’ve congratulated him on his election victory this evening.
In this country, at a time like this, when we look around the world, and particularly when we see those in the Ukraine fighting for their very freedom and liberty, I think on a night like tonight we can reflect on the greatness of our democracy.
And so on a night like tonight it is proper to acknowledge the functioning of our democracy. I’ve always believed in Australians, and their judgement, and I’ve always been prepared to accept their verdicts, and tonight they have delivered their verdict, and I congratulate Anthony Albanese in the Labor party and I wish him and his government all the very best.
Now, there are many votes still to count, that is true. And there are many prepolls and postals that will still come in. But I believe it’s very important that this country has certainty. I think it’s very important this country can move forward, and particularly over the course of this week with the important meetings that are being held in Tokyo I think it’s vitally important that there is a very clear understanding about the government of this country.
Call me cynical, but after having heard Morrison’s repeated lies over the past four years, seen all the corruption, noted his unwillingness to condemn Trump’s incitement of the attempted insurrection, and witnessed his disdain for a proper ICAC (and by extension the rule of law), I find it rather cute that Morrison so gallantly supports the peaceful transfer of power in Australia. If we go by the maxim that we know Morrison is lying because his lips are moving, his championing of “the functioning of our democracy” should be taken with a pinch of salt.
While we know that the Murdoch media’s anti-government, libertarian stance verges on the anti-democratic, we also know that Australia is nowhere near as far gone as the United States and that Australians in general are nowhere near as rabid as Americans can be. There’s no way Australians would accept anything overtly like January 6th, and Morrison by default couldn’t possibly say anything but what he stated the other night.
Nonetheless, as stated in the post the Murdoch media propaganda unit and those they’re involved with are playing the long game in Australia, just as they did in the United States. It would be foolish to think for a second that Morrison’s concession-speech words relayed above are anything but words made to pacify Australians into thinking that the kind of shift that is occurring in the United States could never happen in Australia.
As we all now know the Liberals lost a slew of seats in this 2022 federal election, while in the process the Nationals lost absolutely none. In effect, the Nationals now have a larger proportion of seats in the Coalition and will therefore have a larger share of shadow ministries as well as more control in the joint partyroom. Could this further shift to the right have been somewhat by design? Bernard Keane makes an interesting observation.
The result is a political party that has moved dramatically to the right, with an array of more moderate MPs no longer in politics and the party left in the hands of Peter Dutton. The Nationals, who have yet to lose a seat despite a small overall swing against them, must be unable to believe their luck: the Liberals have moved closer to them.
So Morrison leaves with a key goal of his centre-right NSW faction achieved: the smashing of NSW Liberal moderates. That will be even more the case when Marise Payne announces — probably sooner rather than later — that she’s retiring.
In politics, your real enemies are always behind you, not across the chamber from you, but Morrison has been happy to inflict a dramatic defeat on his own party as the price for pushing the Liberals to the right and inflicting a savage strike on his factional enemies.
Again, it’d be foolish to think that Morrison doesn’t think something entirely different from the words he gave, and that he doesn’t have something up his sleeve for the greater “good”.
Otherwise, while following the Liberal election loss the propagandists at Sky News have urged the Liberals to shift further to the right, the most feral of those is Rowan Dean who is already looking forward to a 2025 of Peter Dutton in power in Australia and Donald Trump in the United States.
To reiterate what was stated at the end of the post, “Australia will have three years to reinvent itself” if it intends to avoid slipping into the Russification we now all see happening to the United States. Three years less two days, that is.
The clock’s ticking.
p.s. Discourse apparently isn’t allowing the Rowan Dean video in the Kevin Rudd Tweet to work, so you’re going to have to click on any of the links in the embedded Tweet to listen to and/or watch the video.
