Australia isn't America and Dutton isn't Trump
Framing his tactics as "Trumpism" flatters Peter Dutton and hides the strengths of our own political system
It is noticeable that our media is filling up with regular stories framed around the idea that “Trumpism” is finding its way into Australian politics, and I’m coming to the view that, as a form of political analysis, the appraoch does more harm than good. I don’t like it, as someone relevant to this conversation once said in another context.
It’s not that there aren’t obvious parallels between what Trump and Dutton are doing. And it’s not as if there aren’t long term interactions between Australia politicians and their counterparts in the US (and other political operatives): both our major parties have been making a beeline to gatherings like the Australia-America Leadership Dialogue for decades, for instance.
But calling what Dutton is doing “Trumpism” forecloses on a more useful analysis.1
This recent piece in The Saturday Paper is worth a look, for both its strengths and its weaknesses, as an example of why I’m having misgivings about Australian media using this framing.
Despite the headline, the article isn’t really about “Trumpism” at all, except in the most general sense. It is more focussed on how the media is complicit in aiding and abetting Dutton’s campaigns, their “willingness to turn away from, and thereby tacitly enable, rage-farming of exactly the kind Dutton is known for engaging in.”
The strongest point the article makes is this, and it is worth acknowledging:
Before the referendum Dutton had to rely on the threadbare resources of opposition with assistance from friendly media. Now he’s part of a right-wing ecosystem aided by what is being referred to behind the scenes, in progressive ranks, as the “Advance machine”.
Framing it all as Trumpism, though, as an imported phenomenon (most likely an editorial decision rather than one the author made), isn’t exactly right. The article actually concedes that the “Advance machine” is working in Australia with the likes of the IPA and that alone makes the point I am trying to raise: we should be concentrating on the deep roots these techniques and practices have in our own country rather than seeing what is happening as something foreign.
The relevant point isn’t that we are importing “Trumpism”: it is that international organisations like Advance are pushing an open door on the Australian right. That’s what should worry us.
Let’s dig into this a little more.
The media complicity with Dutton that The Saturday Paper highlights is led by News Corp, an international company with its origins in Australia and whose US outlets—particularly Fox News—have done more than any other organisation to invent and promote the political monster Trump has become.
Under such circumstances, it makes as much sense to talk about the US importing “Murdochism” as it does about Australia importing Trumpism. It’s a version of cringe to think otherwise.
Australia, in fact, has a pretty solid history of influencing political practice in other countries, Britain in particular, and we can easily see the longstanding influence of the Crosby-Textor brand of populism on Britain’s conservative governments, just as we can see the influence of the ALP on British Labour. Tony Blair’s “New Labour” learned as much from the Hawke-Keating successes as it ever did from the third-way theorising of academics like Anthony Giddens.
Before there was Trumpism, there was Hansonism, our very own racist movement with its very own ism, a movement, once again, aided and abetted by News Corp. The former member for Oxley took the seat from Labor in 1996 and launched a career that for a while, and allowing for national scale, rivalled Trump’s political success. Sure, she wasn’t elected President, but back then, in a first-past-the-post Republican system, she may well have been.
(The fact that that wasn’t an option, that our political systems are vastly different, is key aspect of my concern about current comparisons with Trump, and I will get to that.)
More significantly than Hanson, there was John Howard, who normalised and capitalised on the forces that drove Hansonism and who was responsible for political campaigns that in many ways make Trump’s approach look lame, everything from children overboard, to the Northern Territory intervention, or even his response to the Cronulla riots.
Howard pulled precisely the same populist levers that we are now calling Trumpism, exploiting class differences and various forms of white resentment, while undermining social and political changes in Australia that tried to acknowledge diversity across race, religion and gender. Before there was “woke” there was “political correctness” and the fact that Dutton adopts the former term over the latter is nothing more than a fashion statement, no more meaningful than saying cookie instead of biscuit, the point being, the Australian right have been pushing this agenda all by themselves since before Trump was hosting television programs.
What really concerns me about the increasing evocation of “Trumpism” as a way of explaining what the Liberals are trying to do in Australia, however, is not that it blinds us not just to our own weaknesses and vulnerabilities, but that it obscures our own political history.
The cultural and social circumstances of the two countries are so vastly different comparisons fail almost immediately, and the strongman, individualist, Deadwood tradition that underpins “Trumpism” has no real historical cognate here.
Australia has a much stronger tradition of social fairness and labour politics to draw on than the US, and the values that underpin these still have efficacy in our political debates, even if, especially since 1996, they are more honoured in the breach than the observance. Still, values are downstream from politics and we have a set of communal values to draw on that, to some extent, inoculate us against “Trumpism”.
We also have a history of democratic innovation of which the community independents—who first emerged in Indi through the candidacy of Cathy McGown—are just the latest iteration.
It never ceases to amaze me how often articles like the one from The Saturday Paper underplay this development in our democracy, along with the well-established innovations on which it was based, including compulsory /preferential voting and an entrenched system of fairness in drawing electoral boundaries that the US comes nowhere near matching.
Any discussion of Dutton’s tactics is weakened, therefore, by a failure to acknowledge the trend towards independents that came to a head (but not to an end) in the 2022 federal election.
Don’t forget, Scott Morrison was another who tried to import “Trumpism”—and there were plenty of articles about that—and he was, thanks largely to the community independents and the local movements they generated, wiped off the political map.
It turned out “Trumpism” didn’t change Australia, no matter what it says on the cover of the book, and evoking it constantly isn’t good analysis. We are better off trying to understand why Morrison failed so spectacularly; why the community independents succeeded so spectacularly; why the Howard legacy is looking shakier than ever; why Pauline Hanson has gone from populist superstar to rightwing carbuncle rather than giving these has-beens—and wannabes like Dutton—the reviving jolt that comes from labelling their antediluvian extremism as “Trumpism”.
As a recent article in Political Studies magazine about the community independents notes: “Behind these headline items is a broader story of democratic renewal driven in large part by local community groups that have self-organised to strengthen electoral representation in almost one-third of Australia’s 151 federal electorates.”
The authors point out that: “The Community Independents Movement (CIM) has not only created spaces of active political participation for a growing number of Australians frustrated with the failure of party politics to represent communities, but it has provided voters with a non-party alternative in the form of a highly skilled, local, independent candidate that is well-supported to win. Collectively, CIM has been able to disrupt and reshape the representative landscape and ongoing practices of Australia’s federal parliament.”
Lest we forget. Or lest we not notice in the first place.
If Trump had never existed, Peter Dutton would still have a deep well of homegrown rightwing populism, hate, and election tactics to draw from. To blur that fact by calling what he is doing “Trumpism” blinds us, not just to our own problems, but to the unique strengths of our system that still might save us from him and the rightwing dystopia he is threatening to inflict.
The expression “Trumpism” is as much a triumph of Trump’s own branding skills as it is a genuine political -ism, and we shouldn’t be giving it more credence than it deserves. An article in the New York Times recently pointed out that Trump’s version of populism has a long history in the US. “It is not hard to find, throughout American history, Trump-like demagogues with loyal followings,” the author writes, and it is useful reminder that if Americans need to be careful not to strip cultural and historical context from their political analysis, we Australian commentators need to be doubly careful about using such decontextualised explainers for our own, very different, political circumstances.
I agree with the hypothesis insofar as Trump simply provides the moniker for a broader global trend toward nativism, authoritarianism and, yes we can apply it in many instances, proto-fascism. One could make a case for calling it Putinism given the widespread adoption of certain themes and specific tactics, its end-goal of preserving a hyper-wealthy feudal oligarchy and suppressing the population.
Notwithstanding, we must remain vigilant here in Australia as this movement is growing in its consciousness and international organisation. It is extremely well-funded by powerful interests and dark money. It flourishes in the manure of a right-wing corporate mainstream and highly manipulable social media. These conditions obviously exist in Australia. Advance capitalised on the organisational opportunity presented by the Voice to Parliament referendum. Were this to start out as a Tea Party-type insurgency and subsequently provide an alternative organisational framework should the LNP falter, the structure is created for ‘the charismatic leader’ (typically an opportunist and charlatan) to emerge within a ready-made network of power and influence. This was not around in the 90’s heyday of Hanson. Not a pleasant prospect, even if it were to remain in eternal opposition on account of its threat to social cohesion and civil society.
You are correct to point out the resilience of the Australian electoral system, features of which provide a bulwark against the structural weakness of the American Republic. Notably, there is an elasticity within the representation system which allows a meaningful role for independents, minor and emergent parties -
a role that evidence shows is becoming more important.
TLDR: Australia has features, structural and cultural that provide some defence to the repulsive politics characterised by Trump. However, there is no room for complacency as this type of proto-fascist nativist movement is well-funded and better organised internationally by the day. Advance needs ongoing scrutinisation as it is the nascent framework for a fascist movement.
Excellent reflection Tim. And a welcome upbeat read after last week :)