The writer is in Australia.
TRAVELLING thousands of miles along the Queensland coast on the Bruce ‘Highway’ is never pleasurable. The road is a goat track on a good day. Governments charged with its upkeep have long promised better times, but never deliver. There are few votes up that way, certainly not for Labor governments.
My most recent trip on this road was burdened by personal loss. Not only that, the recent Queensland floods rendered the journey an exercise in deep pot-hole dodging and substantial wheel damage. Worse still, Australia is currently in the throes of an election campaign. This meant thousands of beaming politician-faces on billboards lining the Highway all the way back to civilisation.
2025 is proving to be a Bruce Highway of an election campaign, with likely very dreary outcomes. As with the Highway, the best descriptors include such words as long and tedious, dismal, full of holes, dodgy, endlessly disappointing, and with no happy ending within reach.
The election is being fought between the Labor Government led by Anthony Albanese and the Liberal-National Coalition led by Peter Dutton. Not household names internationally.
Australians, at least those with their thinking caps on, will not need reminding that elections here are meaningless affairs, representative democracy-wise. They are contested by two undeserving branches of the UniParty that together struggle to get two thirds of the primary vote. They bury important issues. They reduce policy debate to the lowest common denominator. In doing so, they bring the major parties even closer to one another than they normally are. And the legacy media steers the conversation ever towards the UniParty.
On reflection, Oz elections are much worse than simply meaningless. They are occasions of electoral sin.
The May 3 2025 election is a shameless auction, even worse than most. It has the usual ingredients. Non-problems consuming attention and dollars. Real problems – such as the deep household recession, the ghastly fruits of mass immigration, the crashing of our energy economy, fiscal incontinence on a grand scale, rampant and largely unchecked anti-Semitism, ongoing attacks on free speech, endless wokism and Aboriginal ‘welcomes-to-country’ – being parked. Promises that will be broken at will ‘as circumstances change’. Inevitable, unmandated actions forthcoming. More rule by the unelected bureaucrats of the managerial class.
Australians with the inclination and nous to build alternate, winning coalitions of alt-parties with a sense of what we-the-people want from government seem totally unable to do so. The splintered alt-right is more splintered than ever, with yet new micro-parties emerging. They have names like the Libertarian Party, Family First, the Family Party – yes, there are even two ‘family’ parties – People First, One Nation (think Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts), and – yes, this true – Trumpet of Patriots, the closest thing we have to an unapologetic MAGA party; though led by the quirky, outsider, billionaire miner, Clive Palmer, an absolute Covid hero to boot, still destined to remain very, very micro, alas.
So there are no compelling, larger-than-life leaders to excite us, even to distract us, this time around. No Trump, of course. No Orban. No Milei. No Meloni. No Farage (even with all his now-manifest shortcomings). No need to ‘make Australia great again’.
We are fine, apparently. But we aren’t! Professor David Flint in the Spectator Australia argues that we are crying out for new leadership: ‘Not since the fall of Singapore has there been such apprehension about the future of Australia.’
True enough, at least among the awake, if not among the rest. Yet here we are at the precipice, clueless as to how to get politicians to change direction, to step us back from the abyss. Hell, most of the establishment political class is engineering our trip to the abyss. The insouciance among the lap-top class is incredible.
As it now stands here, the polls are favouring the incumbent Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, and his hard-left government. The ‘Albo’ (as he is known, typically without affection) administration has proven to be that increasingly common combination of clueless and dangerous. The Liberal-National Coalition opposition led by ex-copper Peter Dutton, which has offered some glimmers of hope for better policy outcomes but still has not earned the trust of the millions of Australians who still remember the plandemic and its awful deeds, had surged in the polls but now seems becalmed halfway through the campaign. The earlier likelihood of a one-term government – a rarity in Canberra – has faded.
What the ‘club sensible’ centre of the electorate fears more than anything else is the return of Albanese but with minority government status. Because of the concentration of progressive greenies in inner-urban electorates, the Greens and the mostly rich, woke, climate action-obsessed women who are known as ‘the Teals’ are able to win a goodly number of seats. The thought of this lot – think of a bunch of female, climate-botherer Keir Starmers – bargaining with Labor for their preferred ‘vision’ and shopping list of demonic actions is beyond disastrous.
Don’t talk about the UniParty. The two parties ARE distinct. Albanese must be got rid of, for he is dangerous. Forgive the Libs. We know they are weak and will go to water – again – come the fresh whiff of ministerial leather. We know this much:
- They will never leave the Paris Agreement.
- They remain committed to net zero (with a twist of nuclear promised).
- They will never apologise for their freedom-crushing covid policies, or for trashing the economy with a trillion-dollar plandemic spend.
- They won’t ever get rid of subsidised child care.
- They won’t defang the Australian Broadcasting Commission, up there with the BBC in its abominable ways.
- They will continue to allow the flying of the three flags (Australian, Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander) everywhere you look.
- They won’t abolish the office of the eSafety Commissioner.
- They won’t reverse, Trump-like, all the woke gibberish.
This is merely a brief summary, not meant to be comprehensive.
Ah, they say. They will cut immigration! By a little. Maybe. It was a Liberal Prime Minister (John Howard), after all, who initially went big on immigration in the early 2000s. The Libs started the immigrant-led Ponzi economy. With all its entirely predictable fruits. Foreign enclaves and no-go areas. Chinese ownership of Oz ports and other key infrastructure. And a veritable Muslim invasion. (No, we don’t have the rape gangs, yet.)
So much for the Lib-Nat Coalition.
The Catch 22 election is upon us. It is the apotheosis of what the public choice theorists have long argued, viz that power-hungry establishment parties of ‘right’ or ‘left’ simply build coalitions of bribed, vested interests with promises of endless, exponentially increasing booty and access to power, coalitions of sufficient heft to get one of them over the line.
Mark Steyn says that we cannot vote our way out of the Western mess. The 2025 Australian election is living proof of the truth of his claim. Whoever wins here will inherit an unholy mess, and will not have the will to address it.
Whoever wins on May 3, we can expect this from a sullen electorate. A large informal vote. A large number of voters simply not turning up, and copping the $20 (£9.60) fine. (Voting is compulsory down under). A huge pre-poll vote, suggesting that people just want to get their trip to the ballot box over as quickly as possible. Primary votes for the majors in the thirty per cents. Oh, and a tiny vote for the alt-right micros.
Meanwhile, come three years’ time, the Bruce Highway will still be a goat track, as Brisbane gets its un-needed new stadium for the 2032 Olympics.
Distractions? Priorities? Solving non-problems? Fiscal incontinence? You bet.
