He was so close to being PM
Latest polls are pointing to a Labor win this weekend. Some are even pointing to a landslide.
Dutton must be wondering what the hell happened.
Only a few months ago Dutton looked like he was cruising to victory. Labor was on the nose, and the voting public was in the mood for a change.
And then Trump unleashed the crazy.
And like a trainwreck, or a marvel movie, either way, you can’t take your eyes of it.
It’s just so out-of-the-box. So unprecedented. So wild.
And most people only have so many minutes in the day for politics. And so do you spend those minutes picking apart the party-political approaches to reducing the cost-escalation in the NDIS?
Or do you spend it on the American Defence Secretary accidentally copying the editor of a major newspaper into top-secret plans to bomb an enemy nation?
It’s no contest.
And if we’re honest, I don’t think people really draw a distinction between American politics and Australian politics. I reckon more than a few people are going to be surprised that Trump is not on the ballot papers this Saturday.
At any rate, people started watching the crazy unfold, and started to get a little uncomfortable with how it was playing out.
Third biggest single-day fall in the American stock market since WWII does not speak to stability and uncertainty.
The mood for change evaporated.
On top of that, Dutton’s decision to let himself be aligned with Trump in the public’s eye in the early days came back to bite him.
It made sense at the end of last year, when Trump was galvanising a certain flavour of public opinion, and he had the aura of a champion.
Dutton’s polling got a Trump bump.
But it’s now gone horribly pear-shaped.
People are freaking out, and they want to lean against the Trump crazy, not go with it.
In its simplest terms, a vote for Dutton has become a vote for more Trump crazy. (That’s unfair of course, but nothing in politics is fair.)
And now it looks like he’s going to lose.
(Not, I might add, that Labor has done a single damn thing to deserve this victory.)
The exact same story is playing out in Canada. A few months ago, the government’s primary vote had fallen to an all-time low of just 18%. It was going to be a wipe out.
The Conservative Party tried to tap the mood, and went with the slogan “Canada First”.
Then Trump said that he would like to annex Canada, and the Conservative vote has been smashed. Current polling has the government set to win what only a few months ago was a completely unwinnable election.
Wild.
Trump’s win energised conservative parties around the world in its early days. But now it’s doing the opposite.
(Although that could change if Trump puts a lid on the crazy and gets a few wins under his belt.)
But the thing to note here is that global politics, and American politics in particular, is now having a massive influence on domestic politics.
Going forwards, all parties are going to have to campaign with this in mind.
But god knows how they’re going to do that in an era of Trump.
JG.