Australia is catching the Trump disease

For many Australians in these troubled times, international current affairs have become something of a spectator sport.

I am not talking about those whose attention rarely strays beyond their immediate surroundings of work and family. In many ways they are the lucky ones, self-insulated from the misery, disruption and upheavals of the nightly news.

Yet even for those who are interested, there is often a degree of detachment. They express shock, horror, maybe even anger, but they are the emotions of an audience watching a powerful drama. Easy to switch off and return to the ‘real world’.

It’s all happening somewhere else and we are comfortable and safe in our living rooms.

Or are we?

I do not mean the country is about to witness angry crowds taking to the streets of Sydney and Melbourne demanding governments fall with the associated tear gas, water cannon and looting. Australia has not reached that point.

There are other, far more subtle signs of a disturbing trend that is leading to increasing division and alienation in societies around the world – not just in those whose cities are currently wracked with violence.  

It is the abdication of the responsibility of leaders to govern for the greater good of all, rather than for the benefit of a core group of supporters.

This has long been the method of dictators, but it is also being adopted in countries that call themselves democracies — in Erdogan’s Turkey, Duterte’s Philippines and Bolsonaro’s Brazil.

The template is United States President Donald Trump whose virulent and often abusive attacks on political opponents, journalists and academics who dare to question him have become routine.

In the United Kingdom the concerns of 48 per cent of the population who opposed leaving the European Union have been derided and dismissed by supporters of the small and increasingly perilous majority who support it.

Australia is not immune, with the arrogance of the Coalition Government ever more on show since its surprise third consecutive election win earlier this year.

Critics are dismissed as being “part of the Canberra bubble”; Ministers refuse to take responsibility for the failings and even the possibly illegal actions of their staffs; blind eyes are turned and parliamentary questions deflected over police actions against journalists.

Perhaps this is not so surprising as it was an Australian, Lynton Crosby, who formulated the successful election strategy for the UK Conservative Party that it should play to its strengths with the electorate and not try to patch up its weaknesses.

That lesson came straight from Niccolo Machiavelli’s 16^th century playbook when he said that as long as politicians cared for a powerful elite group of supporters they were “free to engage in evil”.

Trump-like slogans such as ‘Make Australia Great’, and ‘Drain the Swamp’ are now regular parts of the conservative Government’s lexicon, as are increasingly virulent attacks on any organisation or group that questions the philosophy of the right, from Get Up to climate activists.   

The politics of division is on the march.