Orwells that ends well
When will the time ever be right for Labor to do the right, I mean, the left thing?
It was a time of the preacher
In the year of O-one
Now the lesson is over
And the killin's begun
—Willie Nelson
It’s a little amusing that some of the people who have chastised me for demanding more of Anthony Albanese—that he make a clear statement that separates us from the excesses of the Trump malignancy—are happily sharing Mark Carney’s Davos speech on social media. Why they think Carney is a hero for saying these things while Albanese is brilliant for not saying them is strange, but maybe not as confusing or contradictory as it appears. When you think about it.
It is also amusing to see Jim Chalmers telling the media that Carney’s speech caused a lot of chatter amongst his colleagues, like they just saw a really good episode of Mythbusters.
Carney’s speech was most welcome and a useful reminder that we—we middle powers—don’t need to cringe around Trump in the way the Australian Government has been doing. Whether anything changes in our stance remains to be seen but at least we no longer have to put up with Labor stans insisting Albanese is playing a brilliant long game and that there is no other choice than to remain on our knees. We now have proof of concept that that is not the case.
Canadian journalist Stephen Marche put it well when he said that “America has fully entered the logic of the rapist” and that it is clear “you cannot make deals with these people.” At the very least, Albanese’s next big test will be in how he responds to Trump’s invitation to join the more-Orwell-than-Orwell “Board of Peace”. Turning it down in no uncertain terms would indicate some lessons had been learned.
This is me not holding my breath.
To quote Marche again, speaking about Canada’s situation, things are “not going back to normal” and “the threat is only going to increase”. Therefore “that needs to be absolutely front of mind at every institution in this country, and it means that everything, every kind of integration that we have with the United States, including financial and technological sectors and service sectors, need to be deeply reconsidered from the ground.”
This is not a time to be joining “peace boards” formed under the “logic of the rapist”, drawing us every more deeply into an alliance we should be easing ourselves out from under.
Carney’s speech was not without its concerns. He is another of these leaders—like Rudd and Albanese—who has declared climate change an existential threat but who has continued to govern in ways that ensure the uninterrupted operation of fossil fuel industries, as this article spells out. And his speech, as good as it was in important ways, doubled down on that pro-fossil fuel stance.
The site Inside Climate News has a comprehensive account of Canada’s action in this regard and it really is useful and necessary context in understanding what Carney’s alternative vision for global governance—sans the United States—might look like.
In his Davos speech, Carney framed the unraveling of the postwar order as a crisis of legitimacy. He argued that the system long exploited a double standard, one in which powerful countries routinely bent or ignored the rules while weaker nations bore the costs.
“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false,” Carney said.
Many leaders, activists and scholars across the Global South say that diagnosis is not new. For decades, they have argued that the global economic system was built to favor wealthy countries and multinational corporations, while exposing poorer nations to debt, extraction and environmental harm.
What troubles those critics is not Carney’s description of the problem, but his position within it—specifically the continued backing of international economic systems that protect Canadian companies at local communities’ expense.
It’s a shame the Canadian PM didn’t go this extra mile because as climate analyst Ketan Joshi noted on social media, “if you wanted to belittle and disempower Trump, mentioning wind power, dismissing fossil fuels as shitty and outdated and weak, talking about the benefits of climate action etc all work brilliantly.”
From an Australian perspective, what is deeply concerning is that we have never been in a better position to assert a pragmatic but progressive position on all these matters. As you have probably noticed, the most powerful centre-right force in the nation’s history, the coalition between the Liberal Party and the National Party, is melting before our eyes.
Instead of using this unprecedented moment to assert an alternative vision for the country based in the egalitarian ethos at the heart of Labor politics—and thus finally breaking free of the scared, weird little guy vision of nation from the Howard years—Albanese and Labor are rushing to fill the space on the centre right.
The new hate-speech legislation is the perfect illustration and I’d recommended the Anne Twomey piece at The Conversation, and this more detailed piece from Australian Law Network.
The main areas of concern on my reading are as follows:
Section 114A.4(4): Banning organisations without criminal conviction
Section 114A.4(5): Explicit elimination of procedural fairness
Section 114A.4(2): Retrospective application to past conduct
Section 114A.3: Incorporation of inconsistent state definitions
Section 114A.5: ASIO Director-General’s speculative risk assessments
Schedule 1, Part 1: Removal of good faith defences
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
The legislation contains provisions that concentrate immense executive power in the hands of the minister, eliminate procedural safeguards, permit banning without conviction, and create vague definitions that could criminalise legitimate political speech—particularly criticism of Israel and pro-Palestinian advocacy. To get a sense of how vague the legislation is, it is worth watching the wholly unsatisfactory answers given by the Attorney General on 730 earlier this week. The ambiguity surrounding Israel criticism, combined with rejection of protective amendments and the Attorney-General's equivocal stance creates a genuine risk of legitimate political speech being criminalised.
What we are seeing in Australia at the moment is the complete realignment of our political environment. The effect is not chaos but a rapidly emerging authoritarianism spreading like concrete across the political landscape, from the far right to the “sensible centre”. Labor’s role, surely, should be to be a bulwark against such developments, but instead they are enabling it, through everything from playing footsies with Trump to passing this sort of “hate” legislation. The party’s multi-decade acquiescence to market economics and its incremental submission to years of right-wing culture wars has turned them from being the party of the working class and social progress into being the very thing they used to hate.
It’s great to vanquish your opposition, but not if you turn into them, and I dare you tell me with any sort of conviction that is not exactly what is happening.
I think that Albo and others like him see Trump as an aberration, and that we will go back to the way things were after the US 2028 elections. The problem is that there is nothing to stop, not even plans to change US legislation, to prevent a similar demagogue from arising.
In short, the US can no longer be trusted to uphold ANY alliance, be it on Military, Political or Trade issues.
"When will the time ever be right for Labor to do the right, I mean, the left thing?" Sadly, Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies. It will never happen while Albo is PM. Chalmers might surprise us - at least his thinking was developed in the present century, unlike both Albo and Trump.